It wasn’t my introduction to RPGs. I knew full well what they were like. I had grown up around them, listening in on my family’s regular sessions. I had read a fair few! Or, at least, flipped through them. But, I had just turned 9, which was assessed as old enough to start learning how to play in my own right, and so my parents intentionally picked a relatively simple and straightforward game to get me properly inducted into the hobby.

(…For those of you taking notes at home, no, I would not describe D&D 3.5 as simple, nor straightforward. Nor a very good choice of first RPGs for someone new to the experience. But, so it goes.)

The game itself was an interesting time, though I’ll spare you a full recounting. There was a time paradox rewriting the world to insist that psionics had always been there, amusingly meta, and enough metaphysical puzzling to successfully induct me into, at least, that one table’s unique play expectations. Of course, I was hideously unoptimized and entirely unfamiliar with good play practices in multiple dimensions, so I can’t necessarily say I got the full 3.5 gameplay experience. But, that isn’t really what I want to talk about today either.

The process of making a character, in 3.5, is a rather strange one.

The game is distributed across a massive number of books. These books contain classes, races, feats, equipment options, monsters to face, there’s a lot. A character is composed of a race, which will modify their stats a little, a class, which will give them some powers each level (and be reliant on certain stats, so you need to pick a race to match), and then feats are a miscellaneous type of power they acquire at regular intervals, which might unlock new options based on their race or class (and have their own upgrade trees). Additionally, each level can be in a new class, rather than a preexisting one, and (though I didn’t parse that at the time) you get the most power by hybridizing a great many classes as dips together. “Prestige classes” exist as smaller packages of advancement and a focused concept, which you can spend your levels on instead of normal classes. Before getting into what these things even get you, and things like spell selection, there is a lot to pick here!

A lot to pick, and a lot of ground to cover. The process of making a character was one of reading a bunch of books and seeing what inspired me.

A lot did inspire me! In the Psionics book, there’s guys called Soulknives, who manifest the power of their mind into a knife and stab you with it. Promising, but their Base Attack Bonus scaling was a bit low for my tastes, so I ended up moving on. (At the time, I did want to engage with the gameplay and do my best in it. I just didn’t have the familiarity to do a very good job.) In the book of three weird analogues to wizards, there’s Shadowcasters, who have cool darkness magic they can focus on – aesthetically pleasing and pretty exciting. I’ll keep a note of that. Ooh, the book on dragons has people who magically bond with the form of a dragon and make breath weapon attacks – much like the Warlock from the Complete Arcane in gameplay, but with dragons instead of demons. Dragons are cooler, so that’s something to consider. Oh, here’s a cleric type dedicated to battling Illithids in particular – sun devotees fighting evil squid people who want to blot out the sun? Exciting! Oh, here’s the Book of Vile Dar- (my family did not let me read that one. This was a wise choice.)

The end result was relatively straightforward, after everything was flipped through. A half-dragon (since I enjoyed the draconic vibes enough after all) two-weapon ranger. Distinctly ineffective for the goal of making a mechanically powerful build, due to a lack of experience. Also rather lacking in characterization terms, since that wasn’t something I had the experience for, nor the focus – I was mostly considering instrumentally. (It’s what comes naturally to me.) But, I was satisfied, in a vacuum, with what I had gotten.

Recently, I built a character for Fabula Ultima.

Fabula is, on the surface, a lot like 3.5. …That might be a contentious claim, so, to narrow it a little – the character creation process is quite similar. The number of books is orders of magnitude smaller, but, you pick from multiple classes to compose together, informed by what stats you are good and bad at, and have the secondary dimension of somewhat-feat-like Heroic Skills to pick from as time goes on. Abilities can combo and unlock new options based on what classes you have unlocked, and there’s room to squeeze a lot more power out of your character by thinking through your class combos and planning ahead.

The options are no less heavy in implication, either. In the end, I had what appeared to be a singer riding a bike whose songs would physically damage all enemies in the area, and had a particular affinity over lightning powers. In both cases, I left the character creation with a clear vision of what my character looked like and how they would fight, if not how they were as a person – usually, those are things I dismiss as unimportant.

And yet, the two experiences were very different.

I’m not particularly attached to song-magic as an aesthetic. In fact, in play, I ended up leaning rather away from that angle for the fluff. But, I did select the song-magic class, the Chanter, as a core for my build. And, from then on, I selected options based on what would support that. Chanter powers are neither spells nor attacks, so a lot of damage bonus and modifier powers are inaccessible. The bike-rider class is one of the few exceptions, so I snagged that. Similarly, Esper, a class based on psionic powers, gives some strong damage buffs and support utility to cover allies, so I snagged that. The remainder was invested in powers to regenerate MP, something that both Chanter and Esper make good use of – I ended up part necromancer, part berserker, and with a dash of chaos magic, going from the premise of my character picks. I didn’t lean into those much at all, however. The concepts could be discarded, I was selecting for utilitarian reasons.

This build worked. Quite effectively, in fact! After the fact, when the GM reported our experience back to the dev, Chanter’s offensive capabilities were nerfed. (It’s supposed to be a support class, not a primary damage-dealer as I had used it.) I smugly take personal credit for that nerf. But, the important thing to note is – in those two hours as I was flipping through PDFs and noting down combinations, I was working towards a specific purpose. It was a satisfying optimization puzzle (though I don’t know if I’d say the same after, say, five campaigns’ worth).

3.5, for me, at age 9, was not that.

I did want it to be, in part. I did try to pick things that seemed to cohere. But I didn’t prioritize that over other interests, as I do today.

No, I was picking based on what struck me as cool. On what inspired me, on a conceptual level. I was reading through monsters, as much as player options. In a sense, the process of reading the rules became an aesthetic experience – character creation was just an excuse to be navigating through them and picking up the pieces. Seeing what compelled me, and taking the mechanics of that, to make it real.

From the mindset I had at the time, I think what I did in Fabula would seem quite alien. Not the process itself, nor the focus on optimization – like I said, I wanted to do that, even back then. But how I treated the result.

I had here a singer. An Esper. A dabbler in death and chaos magic, apparently! And I had dismissed the implications of all of that. In play, I framed her as a sort of tinkerer, cobbling together mechanical devices to produce sonic attacks. Yet, I hadn’t even touched the classes that leaned into that sort of crafter concept. Instead, I’d taken many choices that had strong character implications, and ignored them as I saw fit.

If, facing 3.5 at 9, I had ignored those implications much the same, I think I might have done a slightly better job at optimization. Perhaps not, 3.5 is notoriously impenetrable on that front, by design. But the thing is, there’s no way I could ever have done that. I wouldn’t have ignored the meaning of the options I picked, even if I was informed I could.

They were the main reason I was here.

Fluff

My inroad to the online RPG community was Pokemon Tabletop United.

PTU is, quite frankly, not a good game. It tries to make an interesting grid combat system, and ends up with a relatively rote damage race. The trainer options that let the human fight alongside their pokemon massively outclass any player who doesn’t pick one of their own. There are almost no reasons to ever take an action that isn’t just launching an attack. Any pokemon build that isn’t a durable one-stat-focused damage dealer is sabotaging itself. The noncombat skill roll math is horrendous. The character options are littered with accidental “trap options”, choices that are a complete waste if you do pick them.

Despite all that, funnily enough, it is one of the better pokemon RPGs you can find out there. Fandom RPGs in general are a space riddled with terrible design, sad to say. Each with their own character, interestingly enough. Fire Emblem fan RPGs are almost always dedicated to tactical grid combat, by way of replicating video game math and mechanics unchanged (a terrible choice for a tabletop game, especially when each player only gets one unit to control). RWBY fan RPGs tend to play in a distantly-rules-lite space, yielding very rote back-and-forth combat for a story that is (as I distantly understand it) most notable for stylish fights. It’s a tragically consistent rule of thumb that a fanmade RPG for a given story will always be a bad choice.

Of course, there’s obvious reasons for that. Most of the people who would make a fan RPG for a story they like are young, inexperienced with RPG design, and primarily concerned with replicating the contents of the story that they’re a fan of. They want to design an RPG that can contain the things they liked. And, from that standard, all of the fan RPGs I’ve read do succeed. PTU can, in fact, contain pokemon battles. The gameplay of them is very rote, but, it has them. It has a styler item in its list of items, so it can technically contain the events of the Pokemon Ranger spinoff. And, if you approach the game with a strong appreciation for Pokemon as a series, your passion for that can carry you to a good experience, despite the game itself not supporting much of anything at all. The game serves the purpose of listing things that you can recognize, and then you the players are pleased by that recognition.

It’s the context of PTU‘s community where I first heard the adage [fluff is free]. Among PTU‘s classes is the Taskmaster, presented as such:

It’s a class about pushing your pokemon for power, applying Injuries and fatigue in return for some fairly sizable buffs. The text blurb does comment on it being a way to represent mistreatment, but also other demanding training styles. Much of the time, however, it gets discussed in a far worse light. A common attitude among newcomers to the community is that the class is intended to be evil-only, and players shouldn’t be allowed its options at all (or should be judged for taking them). This attitude would be silly in any context, but made worse by the fact that Taskmaster is genuinely a quite solid class, a powerful option that players would plausibly want to take. “Fluff is free”, then, gets invoked in response. One can take Taskmaster for its powers without it implying abuse. It says so right there, but also, it doesn’t have to imply anything at all. (Much like my Necromancer investment back in Fabula.) You could take Taskmaster because your pokemon just push themselves harder on their own right, if you really felt the need for something. You certainly don’t need to give every NPC who’s portrayed as abusive some Taskmaster powers. These are game elements, serving a mechanical purpose, and the more you arbitrarily tie assumptions to that, the worse the game gets.

This is true. PTU gets worse the more you constrain concepts to build choices. It’s not a very good game, and there’s some specific bounds you can stay in to make it relatively decent – binding concepts like that moves you extremely outside of those bounds. There is a not-very-useful class called Researcher. You should be allowed to play someone who is framed as a researcher without investing one of your class slots into a waste. For gameplay, and thus for a compelling RPG experience, this is a straightforwardly correct piece of advice.

However, there is a discrepancy here. There’s a distinction in mindset. The logic behind fandom RPG design isn’t constrained to its designers – it’s usually also what the players expect. (Or, at least, readers.) They want a game that can contain and represent everything they expect out of the story they’re used to. The Taskmaster, from that lens, is one of the only ways to represent a trainer who’s abusive towards their pokemon. Since that’s an expected trait in parts of the world, specifically to be depicted as a characteristic of villains (since, discourse aside, pokemon as a series generally considers animal abuse to be a bad thing), why shouldn’t the enemies be given that class? Why should a player be allowed to pick the option used to represent abusive training, when a more palatable form could find a different representative in, say, Ace Trainer? When you’re looking at rules as a matter of representation, the logic is sound. And, “it makes the game worse” may or may not be an acceptable answer, but more importantly it’s a non sequitur. Whether the game is good or not isn’t the point.

This is the mindset difference. This is what I had at age 9 that I don’t have now. The focus on rules as representations, and primarily being interested in what they represent. When I settled on a half-dragon, their big strength buff made me look for a class that would be making use of strength, but I picked it because being a half-dragon is cool. If they didn’t have the strength bonus, that wouldn’t have stopped me from picking it. Maybe I would have gone for a class focused on a different stat, but I still would have played a half-dragon – because being a half-dragon is cool.

“Fluff is free”. The claim of that statement is interestingly layered. Argument one: you can separate a given option into its gameplay function, and its aesthetics. Argument two: you can replace the aesthetics, and, as long as you preserve the gameplay function, the option has not been meaningfully modified or compromised. In other words – sure, being a half-dragon is cool. But you can take any other option, change its aesthetics to read “I am a half-dragon”, and it won’t cause a problem. There’s no reason that taking this one mechanical option should be a requirement to say that. There’s no reason you have to give someone Taskmaster powers to represent an abusive trainer. That’s the ideological thrust of the argument. It’s a direct challenge to the mindset of my young self. It helped me quite a bit to move past it.

Then again… would I have even made a half-dragon, if I hadn’t read the option?

I have a complicated relationship with the concept of imagination. We’ve come to an understanding, in recent years, but it’s still a bit of a struggle for me. I work best with concepts, prompts, constraints – something to anchor myself to, and work from. I have a distinct memory, at one point in school, of being given an assignment to just write something. Anything. We were all sat there for half an hour, in front of a blank page. I could not think of anything. It was very distressing, especially as someone who considers herself a rather creative person! I willfully encoded the memory as something to never repeat again – made a point to always have something in my head to write about, if I had to. It’s a very distressing experience, to be in a complete conceptual void. Nothing to start from, nothing to think.

That assignment was in primary school. Actually, reviewing my memories, right around the time I was first being inducted into RPGs! These things align quite well. One of the big things I appreciated, reading through all those 3.5 books, was all the ideas they had for me. All the concepts I could imagine, and then compose. Everything it predefined for the world, and promised a context where it all existed.

I played a half-dragon because half-dragons are cool. I had the thought “half-dragons are cool, I should play one” because there was a book on dragons and why they’re cool, and an option to play a half-dragon right there in the Monster Manual. If those hadn’t been there, I don’t think I can confidently say that I would have gone, “hey, what if I play the child of a dragon?”

I mean, I might have! The dragons are a whole third of the title of the game. (Giving “and” equal billing with the other two is perhaps overly generous.) But there were plenty of concepts the books presented to me that were compelling in their own right, and finding those compelling concepts was a core part of what hooked me on reading the game at all. Why would I have run, say, a deep gnome that gets refluffed as a half-dragon, when I could be going back to that soulknife idea and pondering the personal implications of the Elan? (A concept that, in retrospect, offered me some light gender implications.)

This is cool, right? It’s compelling! And it gives me a basis to work from, in a way that a blank page never does! If the Elans hadn’t been in the book, would I have thought to refluff something as that? Probably not! Nowadays, with a lot more experience under my belt, I think I could… but that’s in no small part because I’ve already been exposed to the Elans themselves. The idea is in my head, and now I have that idea to work from. Now, I have enough of a wealth of media experience and ideas that I can, when faced with a blank page, make up some sufficiently-complex fluff of my own. But that is a skill and an accumulation over time. When I was first sitting down to this, I didn’t have that. If the game had assumed I did, and relied on that… I wouldn’t have done well at all.

But you can split them

Note what I just posted.

That is fluff. Lore, if you will. It’s a concept. A cool concept, but, still, just that. Here, on the next page, is what I didn’t post:

You know. The actual rules on how to play an Elan. The stuff that makes all that not just a bunch of cool ideas.

And, I split them up. Easy as pie.

What’s there to stop me from using the lore blurb of Elans, but with a different race option for the rules? I’d certainly appreciate that if I wanted to play a charisma-based class, that’s for certain. Or any class, really – not getting a single bonus is pretty rough. Or, if I was really attached to the Naturally Psionic power for whatever reason (to my understanding of the game now, I’m pretty sure Elans are a terrible build choice), why shouldn’t I be able to use these rules, but conceptually I’m playing as a dwarf? Or, say, a half-dragon?

Or, in more abstract terms – what difference would it make if, instead of this arrangement, they entirely separated these things out? A section of lore concepts for various peoples of the world, and then a disconnected section of various mechanical packages you could pick. Pick a package, pick which concept you would like, go from there. What, if anything, is changed by the separation?

Interestingly, here, present-me actually has more to say than past-me. My younger self did try to read through lore sections. She wasn’t all that attentive, but some bits stuck out. Her focus was on the parts where there were rules, but it was only a focus.

I, however, will entirely skip a lore section unless there’s a reason I need to read it.

In time, frankly, I’ve grown rather callous to cool worldbuilding. It’s nice when it’s there, and I enjoy coming across it, but primarily I enjoy encountering it in play – worrying about it in advance and presenting it in an understandable form is there for the GM, not for me. And, indeed, I take this to heart when I do GM. There, I do need to read up on the world and what it is, and then present the important parts to the players to absorb. But, as a GM, I’m not looking for inspiration, I’m looking for tools. And, as a player, the rules are my tools. If I can’t use those, the game isn’t doing its job. A designated lore section is free for me to skip.

If I’m starved for ideas, I do loosen up a little. Which is why past-me was more open to it. But, only a little. Ultimately, an ungrounded concept just doesn’t hold much meaning for me. Every example of game lore I can think of that I do appreciate, I’ve appreciated because it comes up as a meaningful factor in the gameplay. When reading a lore section, I can’t know what that’s going to be – but I certainly can once I start playing the game, and the GM presents me with what we’re dealing with. Before that point, in the character creation phase back here, all I’m looking for is “being a half-dragon is cool”. I might not have made it to the end of the list of potential race concepts before finding one I like and just taking that, if there hadn’t been a meaningful difference. Considering how many sourcebooks I hadn’t read in detail before I locked it in, I arguably hadn’t.

But, these are personal quirks. There’s plenty of people who read lore sections more thoroughly than I. That it wouldn’t work for me in particular is only so notable, especially when it would, to some degree, still work.

Here’s a better question.

If they had been separated like this, who on earth would write “you get 2 extra power points per day and can spend one to skip all needs for food and water” as a package, unconnected to any fluff?

This doesn’t read to me like a terribly good option. If I were selecting things devoid of context, I definitely wouldn’t go for it. More importantly, I don’t think the option would exist at all, without mechanical reason to take it over the other choices, if they were just presented as contextless mechanics. And, as a contextless mechanic, “you can channel psionic power to specifically avoid the assumed baseline bodily needs of a person” is just very strange to think of.

The reason for that, of course, is it’s informed by the fluff. It’s there to enforce it, to reify it. Elans have transformed themselves into something notionally immortal. Hence, they can channel their innate powers into being immune to a natural death. They have those innate powers because the ritual to reform them is a psionic awakening. Discarding their old humanity makes them hit the uncanny valley, so they have a charisma penalty and count as Aberrations. Each of these mechanical elements is contextualized and informed by the fluff they’re attached to.

Without that, this is a jumbled mess that probably isn’t worth giving a second glance, in comparison to any of the better options. With that… mechanically, it is still a jumbled mess, but it’s serving double duty.

The lore blurb tells us what Elans are like. The mechanics emphasize certain of those traits. Elans can last forever without starving, in theory. Here’s the power that makes that mechanically real. Elans have shed their humanity for the sake of a superior form – here’s the penalty for having separated yourself from that old personhood. The presence of these mechanics is there to underscore and bolster the fluff. These rules are here to say, “no, I mean it, Elans truly are immortal and ageless. Watch.”

It’s the same design logic as a fandom RPG, just, without a preexisting fandom. The rules are made to define that this thing exists, and these aspects of it are meaningful enough to be given rules. Meaningful enough to be made true, in the language of truth – game mechanics.

This is what I call designing for the “tactile appeal”. A rule is solid. It’s tangible. Something that doesn’t connect to rules is, well, fluffy. Easy to tear away, put something new in its place. Ephemeral. If Elans were notionally immortal, but one got trapped in a cave and the rules gave them no defense against starvation, it would feel hollow. That might not be likely to happen, but this rule draws our eye to it. We imagine a circumstance where the rule might matter, because it’s there. Rules can solidify a concept. Here, the rules have solidified the enduring power of the Elan. It’s true, now. Truer than any lore blurb could have persuaded us it was.

It’s a tactile appeal because the rules are tangible. You can look at them, you can bounce of them, you can be denied by them. The appeal of tactility is that sense of a tangible thing, telling you what is real.

Meaning and Importance

Towards the end of my post on the Ghost Engine, I proposed two related concepts: meaning, and importance. Something is meaningful in a game when it matters to the players on an emotional or practical level, and important when it is a tangible element to the rules and can’t be modified without shifting the shape and resulting consequences of the system. Design for the tactile appeal, the fandom RPG perspective, is driven by the initially-intuitive goal to align the two. Players tend to be dissatisfied when these things misalign. So, if you make mechanics that reflect anything the players might view as meaningful, then you automatically make them important as well. In theory, at least. You give them the feeling of importance. The sense that changing them is messing with the rules, something tangible.

That’s one of a few reasons why “fluff is free” gets so much pushback. It highlights the ways in which this alignment is an illusion. Elan agelessness has rules to it. Does it matter to most of the game if you change that, slap the appearance of an Elan onto the mechanics of an orc? Not really, but by doing so, you lose the comfort of a tangible rule to push against. You can no longer say “the rules say I’m ageless”, and, more importantly, you can no longer say “it matters that the rules say I’m ageless but not you”. Of course, you still can, by adhering strictly to whatever mechanics people do choose to take, but now there’s an active misalignment between who is, in story, supposed to be ageless, and who actually is. There’s a discrepancy between the meaning people expect, and the importance the game constructs.

Games are, among other things, a form of communication. All art is. More specifically, RPGs need to communicate to the readers how to play them. The book describes an engine, constructs all the pieces and the methods to operate it, but it can only be a manual. The readers have to know how to navigate it, and follow the flags. They’re blind ghosts, trying to imagine the device they’re flying through. To do that, the book really needs to convey the shape of that device.

A game rule is thus a method of communication. By mechanically reifying something, it’s signaled to be important. Thus, the intuition offers, it should also be meaningful. Sometimes, this is wrong. Sometimes, game rules don’t even accurately represent importance, let alone meaning! It probably does not matter at all that Elans can spend some of their power to not need to eat. 3.5 does not have much by way of tight survival mechanics. Worrying about starvation isn’t where the game is centered. If you have that game knowledge, this power is probably so unremarkable that it’s a wonder I’ve spent this long talking about it. If you don’t, and you happen to read it as a flag, you might take it to be both meaningful and important – when in practice, it’s mostly neither. In the worst case, you might see it as cause to try to play harder into 3.5 as a starvation survival game, only to learn your gameplay plan has reduced to a spell slot tax on the party Cleric and nothing more than that.

Frankly speaking, the logic of alignment is immature. Meaning is a personal, interpersonal, and emotional reaction spawned by humans interacting with a system. Importance is a matter of system design done well in advance, impossible for the developers to edit by the point it hits the table. Expecting everything meaningful to be important is maybe an intuitive expectation, it certainly made sense to me as a child, but it simply does not produce a good game. D&D 3.5 does not play very well. You can spend months reading up on how to constrain player options to a band of balance, and the result will be, at best, fine. PTU does not play very well, in much the same way. Shadowrun‘s large gear-juggling tables, Vampire‘s detailed selection of what sorts of supernatural powers given bloodlines can give you… these things have all, in my experience, been much fun to read through and imagine, and appreciate the tactility of being able to select and combine options, and not one of them has made for a gameplay experience I would describe as any good. Considering I can, instead, peruse the catalogue in Lancer, and then actually have a game on top that works well? Designing for the tactile appeal first can only ever in my eyes be a mistake.

But, even with my prejudices, it’s an interesting mistake. It speaks to what people tend to expect out of game systems, what they want out of them. [Being tangible] is a desirable quality. It makes something feel more real. That’s something a rule can do, entirely independent of what the rule actually is! The shape of the rule will, over time, define how people interact with it, but the presence of the rule in the first place makes it more real. Or, at least, makes it read that way.

I often think of RPGs as an augmentory artform. There is an underlying baseline of freeform roleplay, as one might find in a forum or text chat online, and then the rules interpose and reshape how that experience goes. As it so happens, this is an anachronistic perspective. Freeform roleplay, as we see it now, distinctly evolved only with the internet, and evolved out of the preexisting RPG spaces – freeform evolved from systematized play, as strange as that seems. However, it’s still a useful model. (For some systems better than others. Some games I will classify the gameplay experience as “augmented freeform roleplay” straight-up, others are a lot more structured.) When looking at a system as an augmentation, the core question is, what does it provide to make the experience better than just doing freeform? Naturally, I move towards answers like, this makes for an engaging tactical experience, this produces interesting narrative structures that wouldn’t manifest easily just from freeform play, etcetera. But, the tactile appeal is the first intuitive answer here, as well. In freeform play, everything is fluff. Being able to lift up a part of the world and say, “this is real,” and have some deeper weight behind it than just your own narrative authority, there’s a satisfaction to it! In some freeform roleplay spaces, new systems are developed to be layered on top for exactly that purpose!

The tactile sensation of engaging with rules, and having them reify what you care about, is one of the simplest ways to enjoy RPGs as a medium. It’s very intuitive, and it connects concepts rather easily. It worked for me as a literal child, and it can work for, I think, pretty much everyone.

But, as a core of design logic, what it produces is, at best, a toybox. A set of solid rule-objects that you pick up on your own, appreciate their solidity, and then don’t worry about how they actually connect. The result can only ever make a decent game by happenstance, coincidence, and, usually, a lot of work and effort on the part of the players to redesign it into something actually functional.

I do think, even for better design philosophies, it’s a power that can be tapped into. It’s the source of a lot of juice in a content roster. If you can make well-designed, interesting ideas, and have that inform how the mechanics work, then you get a content roster that’s a lot more exciting than just a bunch of numerical bonuses to string together! In a sense, every good PbtA game has a core of the tactile appeal of, this playbook reifies this cool character archetype you’re imagining. (And, similarly, it can inspire people who wouldn’t have thought of that character archetype, if they then see it presented to them.) Failing to land the tactile appeal is what makes for juiceless powers, and failing to ground the powers in an understandable aesthetic can lead to something feeling distant and a bit too blank-veneer-game-y. I don’t mind that sort of thing, but I know people who do. Understanding the tactile appeal, figuring out how to resonate fluff and mechanics, is the key to solving that.

But that can’t be the underlying core of your game. Not if you actually want a game. Not if you want meaningfully augmented freeform roleplay.

As a 9 year old, I was happy to flip through a toybox.

But even then, the gameplay wasn’t great.

Usually, however, RPGs are a commitment. You need to gather a group of people, find out a time that works for all of you, make sure you’re all on the same page, and agree to stick with it until you’ve all seen your fill. For some people, there’s an additional hurdle of convincing people to be willing to play a given game at all. It’s tough!

Since this is something I actively seek out, I’ve fostered contexts where it’s easier for me. Groups of people that are already interested in trying out new games, that have a designated time they can play at (maybe even filling in the breaks between a larger campaign they play at the same time), and that I generally know I can play well with. Now, there’s something to be said for [playing with new people] as a form of trying new things, one this format lacks, but, it’s still a useful start.

Even with this, it’s relatively rare that a whole new campaign gets pitched. When it does, that’s usually because the prospective GM already knows the game and wants to introduce new people to it – I’ve been in that seat twice, for instance. When it’s just everyone agreeing that they’re interested in seeing a given system in action, they tend to propose something smaller. A oneshot.

Notionally, ‘oneshot’ is supposed to mean a single session of gameplay. Practically, it rarely does. When the goal is to see a game in action, it needs to be long enough to cover a full cycle of gameplay. For a game like Lancer, for instance, you can probably run one fight in a session – but the game’s attrition over the course of a mission means you’ll need to do three or four fights to see the full experience. As a result, the usual expectation is that a ‘oneshot’ in this context will be weekly sessions for around a month, maybe longer, until we hit a logical stopping point. Which is pretty notable!

But it’s still, fundamentally, short. It’s a short, focused experience.

Most recently, we did a premade dungeon in the RRD game Hollows. Since it’s a mind-palace-dungeon-delve context, the breadth of a ‘oneshot’ was one dungeon, with several fights and some navigation to get through it.

It was relatively impressive! Considering this was coming off the backs of the tragically-disappointing Hellpiercers, and before that Wilderfeast (which was fine enough, but it also had combat in a battle egg centered around a single large boss monster each fight, so it made gameplay comparisons quite easy), we had many comments to be had about the gameplay, and ended things excited and happy to have spent our time this way. I picked up a few thoughts on combat rhythm design from the experience, even. By all rights, it was a satisfying time for all.

(Obviously, I left with some complaints. I suspect it is in my nature. But I can still recommend Hollows‘ combat as an excellent case study!)

I have a slightly embarrassing hobby, vis a vis the RPGs I am in the thick of. When I am in bed, readying myself to fall asleep (sleep does not come quickly to me, it hasn’t for a while), I like to imagine potential future interactions between characters. (Perhaps the fact that I find this slightly embarrassing reflects on myself more than anything, as I write this out I realize it sounds positively mundane.) Almost always, I don’t accurately predict how any given interaction would go. However, it does give me some satisfaction, to imagine how a character would interact with others. How they would respond to a given scenario. How the next planned moment might go between them. It’s simple imaginative fun – essentially telling a fractured story to myself, or, in another sense, mentally playing with dolls.

I do not do this with my characters for oneshots. It only emerges in longerstanding campaigns, where characters are more established and have room to interact. In a oneshot, the characters just don’t have room to compel me the same way.

Naturally, I have exacerbated this phenomenon through my own apathy. When I am interested in playing a game, I will produce enough of a character as necessary to play the game and that will be that. My name in the Hollows oneshot was “Todo” because I had left the name field TODO and never bothered to finish it. It was a running gag that my character was coincidentally offscreen and any action was hastily cut away when it ran the risk of involving them, so as to justify me as a player not particularly wanting to spend much time describing my actions. By all rights, any ability to care about my character was smothered in its crib.

The true sourcing is the other way around. I held an apathy towards my character because I already knew that, in oneshots, I don’t have the same room to truly get attached to a character. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point, but it did start somewhere. And because of that, when I say I came away from Hollows satisfied with my experience, it doesn’t include satisfaction of this sort.

[Satisfaction of this sort] is what I want to pick at today. What am I actually describing here? I suspect it’s the core ingredient to bridging the gap between the mindset I use to approach roleplaying and the many people I’ve talked to who balk at my level of instrumental focus. And, for that alone, even before the ways it can cover the gaps in some of the models I’ve presented on this blog before, I think it’s worth interrogating.

Look good while doing it

At their core, I think my interests can be expressed very simply. “I want my characters to be able to express themselves, to show off their psychology through the prompts thrown their way, and to look good while doing it.” When I can take an action and say “my character is doing this, because of such and such part of their internal philosophy or way of thinking,” this part of my desire is satisfied.

…Which runs directly contrary to a lot of my tastes in other dimensions. There, we get some problems immediately. What if my character would naturally do something that, say, betrays the team? Ruins the chances of success at a mission? Steps outside the expected bounds of gameplay?

My answer, of course, is that they shouldn’t do that. (This is, already, a psychological divergence point where people who share my tastes may move elsewhere – but, that, I think I have discussed at length in my post on instrumental play.) And so, when I sit down to write a character, I start by constraining myself to the sort of person who I think would remain ‘in bounds’. Whenever I find myself brushing against that, I impose as a rule upon myself – my character does the instrumentally justified thing. Then, I ask myself why they would do that. This tends to mutate their psychology a bit, and I can see it being a chafing point for someone else who works a bit like me, but, it works for me.

So, I can revise this. “I want my character to naturally be someone who would act within the bounds of expected gameplay, and to express who they are and the shape of their psychology in terms of how they respond to the prompts that the gameplay offers them, and to look good while doing it.”

Why, then, don’t oneshots do the trick for me? Sure, they go by at a brisk pace, but there’s still room within them for character moments. Often, oneshot design is focused on giving some challenges the players will need to reckon with and make choices on, so this aspect should be well-satisfied, no?

That reveals the next dimension of it – I find that characters are psychologically iterative, and slowly reveal themselves over time. I’m used to prolonged roleplay and storytelling, and the short format means characters don’t have much room to grow. I tend to gravitate towards somewhat static characters in extended play, too, so that doesn’t sound right – but, what I find is that they are usually slow to change but still meaningfully learn from their reactions. So, that gives me:

“I want my character to naturally be someone who would act within the bounds of expected gameplay, and to express who they are and the shape of their psychology in terms of how they respond to the prompts that the gameplay offers them, and to change in turn due to the responses they provide and how they reveal new things and offer challenges to said psychology.”

“…And to look good while doing it.”

What’s that last bit doing there? It doesn’t really seem to fit in.

Well, for one, I’m an arrogant and vain person. I take my pride as a point of pride. Being seen as cool and successful appeals to me, and that extends to my characters, when they serve as an expression of my mechanical competency and my skill as a writer.

But that doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of it, right? It doesn’t connect to character psychology or reveal anything about them, nor does it prompt the character in new directions. It’s a request of how the character is seen – or, at least, how they’re framed.

The easy conclusion is that, indeed, that doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of my tastes here. I like getting to reflect and elaborate character psychology through play, and I also like looking cool. But, I don’t actually think that’s quite it. See, it’s not as if looking good on its own satisfies me. Nor is it that I can’t enjoy the opportunity to explore character psychologies unless the characters look good doing it. But it is there on my list of desires, because, if I can get both, it means more.

That’s very imprecise. What I mean is – a character being cast in a certain level of grace, intensity, or other such light, indicates something about how we are expected to look at that character. The rest of my interests in this space of character-satisfaction are, when you pick them apart, oriented in the same direction. Demonstrating and exploring character psychology is a matter of showing off. It takes a character’s way of thinking and presents it as an object of interest, something worth spending time contemplating over the course of play. If my natural goal, then, is to bring character psychology into focus, then the matter of framing is an effort to reinforce that – to say that it’s relevant to have it be in focus.

It’s a rather rote visual language. When something is cast in a good light, it’s harder to dismiss out of hand. If someone says something, or does something, and they appear competent and effective through it – that lends weight to what they did, no? It makes it harder to just write off.

…In reality, I suspect this is more a brainworm than something that’s truly the case. There’s many ways to present something as meaningful, including while still challenging it. To make matters worse, my general inclination is to write characters with dubious and destructive outlooks. That’s setting myself up for a narrative context where their initial outlook should be challenged and cast in a criticizable light. My habits are working against themselves here – but it’s interesting to note the habit, nonetheless.

“I want my character to naturally be someone who would act within the bounds of expected gameplay, and to express who they are and the shape of their psychology in terms of how they respond to the prompts that the gameplay offers them, and to change in turn due to the responses they provide and how they reveal new things and offer challenges to said psychology, and to have their perspective and psychology framed as something worth exploring, and potentially legitimizing.”

There we go! This summarizes my personal characterization goal when I sit down to play an RPG lengthy enough that I expect to be able to get such characterization in some focus.

But, if we are conflating [looking good] with [having the importance of their psychology legitimized], there’s a problem we’ve invited in. Something being legitimized as important to focus on doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be framed as good, or even effective – only that it’s worth looking at. You can get the same effect, in fact, by going in the exact opposite direction.

Damsel strats

…are probably something I need to define.

‘Damsel strats’ is the term I use to describe efforts to put a character in an intentionally perilous or uncomfortable situation, often for the sake of the same sort of character-psychology-exploration I’ve expressed my interest in. ‘Damsel’ is, of course, being used as shorthand for ‘damsel in distress’ (despite the ‘in distress’ part being the actually relevant part, the genders don’t tend to matter much). ‘Strat’ being short for strategy, a bit of gamer lingo to frame it as an approach to success.

Which presents a skewed idea of what [success] is, then. After all, in most games with broadly instrumental goals (ie, things you want to accomplish and obstacles you need to overcome), getting into trouble is primarily a hazard the game throws at you and you try to avoid. In that sort of context, consistently succumbing to perils is pretty straightforwardly a failstate – and doing it on purpose goes as far as throwing, and thus becomes actively impolite to your teammates (the other players). So, what kind of ‘strategy’ is this?

Well, there’s a reason I brought this up when I did. It’s a matter of pulling the spotlight – claiming focus on, and thus legitimacy for, your character’s plight and their reactions to it. The character is placed in a dilemma and shown as struggling for the same reason I aim to have my characters shown to be dangerous and effective. It lends credence to the way that this character thinks, and the reasoning behind their actions, as implicitly worthy of notice. Why did this character make the choices that brought them into this mess? How do they respond to it? What parts of their dilemma do they struggle against, what do they refuse to acknowledge is a problem? These are interesting questions, and the scenario necessarily pushes the viewer towards asking them.

So, from my definition of character-satisfaction as I seek it, damsel strats should work for me, right?

Well, yes, they do, actually! I do enjoy tossing my characters into a conundrum or two. My tastes drift more towards looking cool because then I don’t worry about actually sabotaging the party, but, it’s an option. I have been known to lead characters to internal breakdowns due to following dubious logic, and that interests me for a similar reason. So, in that sense, it’s not a failure of broadened definition – the notion of being a [legitimate focus] has helped see more of what I like about moments like this.

…Why ‘strat’, though?

Or rather – why would you need to strategize to pull the spotlight? Why is legitimacy a prize to be schemed after?

The fact of the matter is, metaphorical screentime is a limited quantity. There’s a lot happening in an RPG, and every player has a character that can get explored in detail. (More than that, if they’re the GM – usually, that player is responsible for churning out a whole bunch of interesting characters!) The more time that gets spent on your guy, the less room there is for others – and if everything is distributed out, then the actual gameplay is going to get crowded out. All of these elements are jockeying for position, and trying to get the most out of the time they have. The strategy part of the damsel strats is that they ensure your character is in an important position, one that needs resolving – the middle of a problem. Even if they don’t get time to themselves, they at least get time where the focus is.

There, we have why this isn’t a goal I willfully pursue. Why, despite it being core to how I enjoy RPGs, in contrast to board or video games (save for interactive fiction, which often scratches the itch quite well), I focus my attention on following the gameplay foremost and letting the character beats fall where they may.

Ultimately, it’s selfish.

(It doesn’t necessarily have to be, in that it’s perfectly possible to find satisfaction in seeing other characters explored. I don’t, even when I GM I’m most compelled by the people I write, but, it’s a possible approach.)

If I were to throw myself wholeheartedly into exploring my character above all else, I could get pretty far. I am good at taking up space, and have a natural penchant for monologues. But, that would be me taking up space for my own individual interests during what is ostensibly a shared activity. Seeking to maximize that would sabotage the entire social structure, and, there are no contexts I’m in where I both think I could get away with it and care so little about the people involved that I would be willing to do that to them. The healthier version of the goal, then, is claiming as much space as possible without tipping over into upsetting or inhibiting other players – and that is notionally doable, but only by someone with an excellent sense of social dynamics and the comforts of everyone involved, and core to my interests in RPGs is to not have to spend all my time worrying about that. Any social arrangement that mandates I constantly question how I am appearing to those around me will not fulfill me.

This is, in part, a retort to what was planned to be the thesis of this post, before I realized I was wrong about myself. The notion was that this resolves the hole in my discussion of instrumental play. There, I laid out a model of RPG gameplay, roughly reflecting my own, where there exist goals to be pursued, and the players are primarily concerned with efficiently achieving those goals. The primary hole in this model is that goals are rarely defined for RPGs, in relation to other games. Sometimes, often in my preferences, the GM will present an objective for the players to work towards. Very often, however, this is not the case. I have claimed to have played instrumentally even in contexts where I was not given an objective – so, then, what was I pursuing?

But, of course, expressing my character’s interiority cannot be the answer. If that had been my goal, I would have spent a lot of time socially jockeying for as much screentime as possible – or, more likely, growing gloomy at the thought of having to do that social jockeying. Neither of those things happened.

Instead, something rather elegant happens. The character psychology produces a goal. From how they think comes answers to the questions “what do they aspire to do” and “how would they act in this situation” – and those answers provide long-term goals, which can then be instrumentally pursued! Not only does that patch the hole for games that don’t come with their own goal, it also provides a consistent drip-feed of legitimacy. Every time I ask myself what my end goal is, I remember, oh, it’s this, because of how my character thinks.

This… isn’t very satisfying to me, because it’s something I already know. It also isn’t very satisfying to me because I much prefer to have a goal and a path externally provided than to have to make my own. But, it does, I think, bundle everything here up relatively well. It’s a way to bridge character-focused preferences with instrumental preferences, and I know people for whom that is the ticket to make a given game work for them. It can work for me, too.

But I have to get my kicks in somehow, so – let’s analyze some arrangements that very much don’t work for me.

Tuning out

I’m very attached to my characters.

The model I’ve discussed here likely makes that quite clear. Its primary interest, after all, is exploring and expressing their nuances. It requires time and attention-over-time both, and it ends up yielding results at a very slow pace. (It should be noted this pace is on some level aberrantly slow – I’ve discussed to some who have expressed a level of frustration at how slow I’m inclined to make my characters change. But, even for people who share my tastes but work faster, the result tends to be a timescale measured in real-world months for meaningful change.) Sticking with a character for a while, getting really into their head – that’s a requirement, one that’s essentially been taken for granted.

As a result, if I play a game and there’s plausible PC death rules right here, I’m going to change my tune.

I’m nearing the end of a Trespasser campaign, one that’s been running for some months now. It’s not a bad game, especially after a recent update addressed many gameplay issues we had come up over the course of our time – but it decidedly presents itself as a risky and at times brutal experience. It plays into the instrumental ethos of a dungeon crawl, and some concerted effort towards PC mortality, especially at the early levels. (Much of the threat seems to have faded away as we’ve progressed.) As a gameplay experience, I’ve found it satisfying. But, it’s the same story as the Hollows oneshot. Characterwise, I gesture just enough and then move on. It doesn’t fulfill that interest for me.

This isn’t for lack of potential. Over the course of the campaign, my character has been dabbling with the same fell magics that define the final boss, expressed some very dubious and imperious opinions on the world, made a pact with a demon – there is a lot to work with, there, if I really wanted to get into their psychology. But, I don’t. After all, they’re just some bad luck away from potentially dying – objectively implausible, since they’re a backline attacker with excellent avoidance tools, but present enough that internally I just do not want to bother getting invested. Doing so would be a gamble with my own emotions, and I do not like gambles.

This is a case where instrumental factors and characterization-focus factors are working against one another. The death of a PC is there as a threat to make it so that dungeon crawls come with significant risks, and you can find your fighting force significantly reduced during an adventure. But, because it’s there, I can’t focus on what is (for me) a secondary priority, so I eschew it.

The other way around, in my experience, is more of a problem for me. When highlighting characters in detail requires sabotaging the instrumental gameplay, I am more likely to just give up on the game entirely. I recently read Underside, a game with some very interesting elements to its character creation, and a fusion of the FitD and PbtA design pedigrees (that is, Blades in the Dark– and Apocalypse World-like) that seemed intriguingly done. However, the text requests and emphasizes at many turns that, as a player, one should be seeking to make destructive and impulsive choices as much as possible. The game has a tension clock for hostility between PCs, with triggers based on arguments and disagreements it definitely seems to want players to seek out. And yet, the actual rules for that are just “the disagreement reaches a boiling point – resolve it in some way before you move on.” Most of the mechanics are focused on the party, as a group, working to resolve problems and being a gritty superhero team and the like. The shape of the game in and of itself is straightforwardly teamwork-oriented and instrumental, but the requested gameplay wants you to sacrifice that for the sake of the character satisfaction. As a result, I’m pretty confident that if I were to play Underside I would be doing it wrong. And, if I were playing with people who were doing it right, I would be very consistently frustrated at their failure to help with the problems in front of us.

Games like that don’t work for me because instrumental satisfaction is a higher priority than character-reflection satisfaction for me. This is another significant deviation point. For someone with those priorities flipped, even though they share my interests, their RPG tastes would end up different. I imagine, to someone like that, something like Underside would be palatable but not ideal, and something like Trespasser would yield a response of “I could not play this properly” – a direct inversion of where I stand.

I think the interesting thing with arrangements like Underside is how the instrumental gameplay is still core to the experience. Someone who doesn’t care at all about whether they succeed or fail is probably not going to appreciate all the focus on the vagaries of superhero endeavors, except as a framing device and source of prompts for revealing character details. I suspect, in large part, that’s the utility of premises like that, for people uninterested in instrumental gameplay – the objectives and challenges provide prompts for their characters to react to, and those prompts are why they engage with the game in the first place.

Funnily enough, even this has an emergent problem, with the very audience it’s trying to court. Many games try, to some degree or another, to push players like me towards more self-destructive or dramatic choices. And by that, I don’t actually mean targeting instrumental players. I mean players who seek to cast their characters in a good light.

In Blades in the Dark, you get an XP if you make a roll in desperate circumstances. In Nobilis, whenever a Bond (a rule that defines your existence) cause you to get into trouble, you regenerate some MP. Even Underside rewards you for filling the party tension clock, after the confrontation resolves. These sorts of mechanics are there to push the logic towards getting into trouble, since that gives you a material benefit as a consolation prize (one that might be worth more than the loss). And, for me, they do sort of work!

But what about the damsels in attendance?

Mechanics like this are a matter of cost/benefit analysis. They’re also a matter of flagging – because you’re rewarded for getting into a mess, you know that’s something it’s okay to do. If you were already going to do that, and if your character getting into trouble satisfies you… now it’s a benefit/benefit analysis. You get the focus on your character’s psychology when in a difficult situation, and you get a mechanical bennie. Rather than turning throwing into a difficult decision, it turns a desirable option into a no-brainer.

Now, no game is going to fit everyone’s tastes. But it’s interesting to see how, even for games that just use instrumental gameplay as a shaping mechanism and source for prompting, there’s a need to design to mitigate the instrumental impulse, and that can sabotage the interests of people with a character focus. A lot of the time, it seems like there’s an expectation that people won’t pursue damsel strats, even if they do enjoy that sort of thing – that, like me, they’ll aim for looking good, and any moments where they look bad and still get focus are a happy accident.

There’s a lot of that going around, in this space of things. Things are relied on being happy accidents. In a sense, the instrumental shape of a game like Underside starts with that entirely – the [game goal] of successful superheroics is tacitly irrelevant, and making actual character choices just sort of emerges from that. These things are conceptual goals, but limited in how structured they are.

I recently read C. Thi Nguyen’s Games and the Art of Agency, an excellent paper that preceded the book Games: Agency as Art (which I intend to read sometime soon). It’s quite a good read, I suspect I could have gotten a good post or two out of just rehashing and reconsidering the points it raises. One snippet, however, really stuck with me. For some relevant context – [striving play] is a term they define to represent something similar to what I call instrumental play, but where the goal is not to win – instead, the goal is to experience the satisfaction of trying to win. (This is a mindset that I can relate to, to some degree, and might seek to differentiate from instrumental play in future.)

The first time I read this snippet, I had a little giggle. What Nguyen is describing as a pitfall that games dodge is a phenomenon I’ve spent several diatribes complaining about as something that RPGs in particular do indeed force people to do – most often, the GM. The GM is generally expected to be trying to mount a challenge against the other players, but willfully hold back from actually defeating the players, even when they have a chance for it. This theoretical example of muddled incentives that clearly sabotages the capacity to enjoy the experience of a game, is exactly the muddled incentives I’ve complained about that inhibit a GM from being able to engage with games as games! Smug mode.

Preening aside, however, I think the observation is very useful. If you keep in mind your core goal, and try to optimize for it, unless that goal is directly optimizable instrumentalization, that can lead to a play pattern that muddles things significantly. That’s where the selfish social jockeying I mentioned earlier comes in – if you sit down to maximize how much time your character psychology has in the spotlight, you have a stressful zero-sum game on your hands. The natural thing to do is to… not optimize that. Not too much. That’s what I do, even. This extends to multiple goals.

Striving play, the satisfaction of doing your best, is another sort of happy-accident mechanism. It’s an experience you can get from a game, and you can work towards to some degree, but things get messy if you aim for it in the same way you aim for a win. The same logic is what I apply to character expression, and what games like Underside are applying to victory itself. It’s nice if things go well and you look cool and you make things work, maybe (actually Underside‘s text in particular seems to expect you to actively dislike it if things go well when they could go wrong), but that’s not the point. The instrumental gameplay isn’t there to be approached as an instrumental goal, or even something to strive for. It’s just there as a framing device and a series of emergent prompts. It’s there to poke at you.

Pokes, prompts, and interpersonality

I’m a pretty reactive player.

What I mean by that is, I tend to rely relatively heavily on external pressures to push me in interesting directions. If left to my own devices in an RPG, I usually don’t have much of an idea of what I’m supposed to do. That’s another reason I appreciate properly instrumental gameplay, since that gives me direction inherently. But what it doesn’t give me, necessarily – or rather, what it only produces as a happy accident – is prompting.

Prompts are the [interesting] part of an [interesting direction]. They’re something that compels you to engage with it, and get an interesting result. In terms of the character-satisfaction we’re looking at here, it’s something that a given character can express an interesting reaction to. It’s… you know, it’s a prompt.

When I discard all my thoughts of instrumentality, all my interest in RPGs as pvp endeavors and mechanical systems to engage with, prompts are a big part of what’s left for me. They’re the things I can react to, and, thus, they’re the primary export from the GM. The GM’s job, alongside antagonist and everything else, is to provide prompts and poke at the players to induce interesting reactions and reveal parts of their characters.

[Poking], here, is a more active form of prompting. Rather than presenting a scenario and letting players react as little as they want, a poke nudges a player and calls on them to react in some way, or at least ask how they specifically feel. It’s a pretty useful GMing tool, and also a player tool, honestly. Especially if you’re playing with people who also enjoy this sort of character-psychology engagement, asking them about it is probably gonna please them! It means they get more of they want without having to worry about optimizing for it, after all.

But, of course, here’s where I get back on my soapbox. Why are we relying on an overworked GM to handle all of this, or asking players to actively cede screentime to their rivals for the stage? Why am I having to port engagement concepts from freeform roleplay into the medium that should have more tools to work with?

And the answer, of course, is that we aren’t. Or rather, we do often let the GM have to do a lot of it, but it’s not all left to the humans. Systems are there to poke at the PCs, and force them to react and reveal a bit of themself.

This is the non-instrumental perspective I’ve tapped into. “What do you do” when provided with a list of possible actions is, when it’s not an optimization game of identifying the most correct choice, like a personality quiz for your character. When there isn’t a definite list of actions, it’s a moment of getting to be kind of like a writer. Here’s a blank page, tell me what words belong on it. Engaging with the game is the game poking at you, while the GM shows you prompts.

This, of course, doesn’t work if you are tapped into the instrumental mindset. I am, and I tend to prefer games that are robust enough to survive that. So, that doesn’t really work for me. It is useful to realize, though.

The next layer of poking within an instrumental context, then, is “how do you do it.” Which brings us back to Hollows, of all things. That game actively mandates that every action be narrated, describing one’s physical positioning and the brutality of the violence and such like. It’s thematically important to the game’s commentary. But it’s also difficult, and, for us, does the opposite of engage. For me in particular, it’s extra tiring to split my focus, and I’m rarely much for physical narration. In essence, the problem here is that it’s a [boring poke] – I’m being asked a question I don’t have a good answer to. I stab it with a sword, but somewhere else this time? There isn’t much room to reflect characterization in the ways I find compelling, so it loses its impact. Similarly, “how do you pick this lock” in a dungeon-crawler would leave me floundering. Asking for a description of a social roll might give more room for “how do you do it” to do much for me, but then I’ll get suspicious that you’re planning to penalize me if I say the wrong thing, and now we’re back in the instrumental sphere.

I think I’ve found the best pokes emerging from the system come from the implicit, “how do you react to the consequences?” This has the same [boring poke] hazard when the consequences are in the vein of “gosh, I am down 13 hit points out of 97,” but, that brings me to the secret sauce here – specific systematized pokes. Here’s what losing HP looks like in Apocalypse World, alongside the damage itself:

This whole move is set up to make it so that you’ll be hit with a prompt to react to, a change to the fight. This is interesting from an instrumental standpoint, in fact AW is rather impressive for being designed so that doing your best to achieve your ends yields interesting gameplay while still being highly GM-interpretive (something many of its successors could have done with), but it’s also interesting from a standpoint of reflecting a character. How do they react if they lose track of someone they’re keeping an eye on? Well, that tells us something about how much they value maintaining responsibility over maintaining momentum, for instance. Apocalypse World can, in somewhat reductive terms, be looked at as an effort to make it so that a relatively classic skill roll system is improved in terms of the quality and potential of the [pokes] it offers, all of the category “how do you react to X?” And, for that, it’s quite impressive!

That all said, however… in my experience, the juiciest pokes have always been character interactions. Even when the system does a good job of providing interesting pokes to its players, I’ve found they land the best when delivered from characters in the world challenging or reacting to them. I suspect this is in part a taste thing. I find fictional interpersonal drama very compelling. But, it’s been a very consistent phenomenon, in my experience, and not just for me.

I suspect the reason for that is, it’s a two-way street. Both sides are baring and challenging their psychology, and thus, both are in focus. If how a character reacts to a stimulus is worth legitimizing and putting focus on, then two characters reacting back and forth warrants a lot of attention. And, actually, that brings me back to the mention of selfishness in character expression – this is how you hijack that! This is how you can actually optimize for character performance and not feel too bad (as long as you aren’t so committed that you refuse to accept a no when other players express their own pressures). If a moment of the spotlight is between you and someone else, NPC or PC, then even if you get more than your fair share, it’s possible for everyone else to get more than that, too. This is, secretly, another reason why I’m inclined towards hostile or dubiously-intentioned characters – it’s a damsel strat of my own. By being a character who is challengeable on their ideals, I’m likely to get some challenges, which gives me screentime – and those challenges are likely to be compelling, which satisfies me more! Is this a backwards justification for a taste preference I already had? In part, yes, undoubtedly, but it’s also been a pressure to reinforce my habits. It’s a strategy that works. At the time of writing, a weekly Glitch game I’m in has been on a short break, and when it comes back I have a very juicy confrontation with another PC which started up just as the last session ended. Having that looming over me has satisfied me a lot. It’s a context where I get to really shine!

Closing remarks

Recently, I made a post about Draw Steel. It’s essentially just about Draw Steel, and only really a specific facet of a specific subsystem of it. I do draw some wider conclusions, but they aren’t the focus. I made that post because something relatively innocuous had been bothering me for a week, and despite discussing it with multiple people, I had to formalize it to see what conclusions I could glean, to answer why it was bothering me so much.

This post is much the same way. Apparently, I’m in a bothered mood. But I think I was rather more successful in reaching conclusions this time. As I began this post, I expected to reach the conclusion that Underside‘s usage of an instrumental gameplay format was holding it back, and if the game truly wanted to commit to character drama and self-sabotage, it would be better served with a gameplay format that did not materially punish such things. That way, it could be a game I could genuinely approach on its own merits, rather than one where my natural approach is fundamentally antithetical despite otherwise being in its target audience. I do still think that wouldn’t be a wrong conclusion, but, it’s more “this game should change to suit my needs” rather than a fully legitimate criticism.

“This gameplay model is instrumental, but it intends to use it as a source of prompts and pokes for the characters, and otherwise is to be discarded as needed” is a coherent statement, even if I don’t really like it. It’s an answer to the conundrum of how exactly I was supposed to “play to lose” as Eureka asked me to. It’s a not-inaccurate model of Glitch, though that showcases how much more effectively it can work if you have a secondary structure to guide and prompt gameplay (its Quests, which I have sung many praises and some complaints about already). And, ultimately, as long as a game can clearly communicate that that’s what it’s doing, there probably isn’t much valid reason to complain. Underside and Eureka befuddled me because they did communicate clearly, and I appreciate that. Now, I think I can understand what they were trying to say.

Even so, I don’t think it’s the best possible approach. If anything, it can very easily hold things back. I’ve found a much easier time slipping into pvp character melodrama in Monsterhearts than Masks, despite both being PbtAs with comparable social-manipulation tech and solid move design – all because Masks has you on a team working together to fight crime, and Monsterhearts definitely does not. I’ve found, as mentioned, that structures like Glitch‘s Quests can provide excellent direction even without an instrumental premise to pursue, and those can provide directions that instrumental gameplay can’t – Glitch is an excellent game for enacting damsel strats, when you have multiple options for a Quest that represents having a breakdown. From the Firebrands design pedigree, you can write scene rules that provide very specific prompts to characters, and then the meta-prompt of players selecting scenes they think would suit them. From my freeform roleplay days – sometimes a lack of direction can be a virtue in and of itself! All of these options have worked better for me, and I imagine would work better for anyone else with a similar attachment to instrumental play.

Depending on how I feel, I might give Underside a try. I wasn’t planning to when I started this post, but I think I’ve come to understand it more.

(Of course, if I do, I’m sure I’ll have complaints. It’s not a game built for someone like me.)

(Even if I aspire to try new things – sometimes, that’s okay.)

At the start of 2023, Dungeons & Dragons’ new Open Gaming License was released, and people got upset. The history of the OGL and what it has meant for RPGs as a scene is a very long one to enumerate here, and is honestly centered more on the d20 boom era than it is now, but, sufficeth to say – at the time, there was a lot of badwill towards WotC that emerged in the massive D&D fan scene, and an interest in moving to new RPGs. This represented a significant audience to capitalize on. Not an audience for indie RPGs per se, as some people optimistically predicted. But, rather, a group of people with a lot of interest in a game like D&D, with enough serial numbers filed off and the money not ending up back in WotC’s corporate pockets. Which, fair enough, honestly. I’m an advocate of ‘alternative acquisition methods’ in circumstances like that, but whatever works.

In response to this news, many projects were announced offering just that. The D&D 5e experience, but without the same evil corporation behind it, and perhaps with design decisions you favor. At the time, I called these efforts ‘Paizo hopefuls’, since this was the path to success that Pathfinder rode back in the reactionary response to D&D 4e (and, interestingly enough, another effort to tighten up the OGL at the time). I predicted, somewhat pessimistically, that these were mostly misreads of the situation – there wasn’t the same window of opportunity that Pathfinder had here, because everyone already knew the trick and multiple people were jockeying for the same position.

I would say, in terms of how many names were bandied around at the time that have fallen relatively silent since, I was somewhat right. But I definitely underestimated the impact of having a prior significant audience base to sell to. Both Critical Role and MCDM have made their own Paizo hopeful successes, selling a mechanical framework that promises to offer the D&D experience, and those games have seen relatively solid success. Respectively, those are Daggerheart and Draw Steel.

All that to say that a lot of my complaints regarding Draw Steel can be traced back to complaints I have with the gameplay of D&D, and in retrospect it is very predictable that I ended up with rather a lot of them. And, similarly, most answers to the question “why was this designed this way?” will end up tracing back to an element of D&D 5e, either in gameplay format or in play culture.

Draw Steel in particular takes a lot from 4e as well. Its combat system is well-elaborated, with clearly defined powers and movement on a grid and such like. It’s a pretty good combat system, as tactical games go. That’s what drew me to it, really, and on that front it hasn’t disappointed much. In terms of games I would recommend looking at just to get a taste of the combat, it’s on that list!

Alongside the combat formula, it takes the overarching inter-fight attrition format from 4e. Everyone comes with a set number of heals, called Recoveries for this game, that get spent when they heal between fights or are targeted with a healing power. Once they run out, they can’t do any more, until they take a proper rest. There is a notional push-your-luck system at play, too – the more fights you play in sequence, the stronger you are at the start of each fight. The idea there is that, once you run out of heals, you might still want to push through a fight or two, relying on alpha strikes to carry you a bit further before you have to rest.

That sort of setup works best when resting is a difficult decision. And the game does suggest that the GM impose a punishment on rests, in the vein of “time has advanced so the enemies are now doing a new bad thing,” so the attrition can come up at all. (Otherwise, it would be best to just rest after every single fight, and it would be nigh-impossible to blow your full heal budget in one fight. That’s a hazard of letting players set the pace for these things.) This gives some variance in how many fights can happen between each rest, but the expected amount is (to my understanding) roughly 4-6 Victories’ worth. Difficult fights give two Victories, and sometimes the GM might give them out for accomplishments that don’t take a fight at all, so that isn’t as much as it seems. If anything, it’s comparable to or only slightly longer than Lancer‘s 3-4 fights between each rest, and the fights aren’t as tough as Lancer‘s unless they’re the notably difficult ones. So, it works out as a pace.

The standard progression pace goes from levels 1 to 10, and costs you 15 Victories to earn a new level. (Victories were secretly just the XP mechanic, which makes sense.) If you follow the standard pace of rests, and don’t push your luck to the point of getting in the 7-8 range before resting (which is doable!) you end up hitting 3 rests each level, or 30 over the course of a full 1-10 campaign.

…Which is a pretty useless number in isolation. Neat, I suppose? Why am I bringing this up?

Well, it turns out, rests aren’t just resets. They’re long-term progress. (This is, of course, another finger on the scale towards incentivizing resting after every fight. Which would remove any combat tension. The GM will have to work mighty hard to ensure that’s properly disincentivized.) During each rest, you can work on a long-term downtime project, and get something from that! This covers crafting, training, building something useful in the world, getting some buffs that last until the next time you rest, and a few other options. This isn’t unheard-of by a long shot. The aforementioned Lancer does something much the same. This is just a bit longer-term, since campaigns are gonna be a lot longer. Plus, the mention of crafting caught my eye in particular. As with D&D, this game has magic items as a significant source of power, as well as build differentiation. In D&D proper, those are essentially handed out by the GM at their leisure. Having a player-facing crafting system gives me as a player the chance to work towards the things I specifically want for my build, rather than relying on fiat! That’s quite appreciated.

There are a few factors that determine how much progress you get on a given project each rest. The base roll is 2d10 plus a relevant stat, with stats ranging from -1 to +5. (It is technically possible to break this cap at the very endgame, reaching +6 in one stat.) At the start of the game, your highest stat will be +2. If you have a skill you can apply, subject to GM approval, you get another +2. If you don’t have the relevant language, you get a -4 penalty, and for some projects, you get a -2 even if you do have the relevant language. At level 1, in optimal conditions, you get 2d10 + 4, and at level 10 in optimal conditions you get 2d10 + 7. If you don’t have the language, something relatively common to encounter, you get 2d10 + 3 at level 10 in otherwise optimal conditions. Often, you can’t roll your best stat, or you might not have a skill that applies. Also, there’s a crit chance, but the chance is 3/100, which is depressingly rare, and that means over the course of 30 rests in a game, your expected value doesn’t even hit seeing it once.

That’s a lot to juggle, but the numbers are pretty tightly bound. Since a full statistical analysis here would be pretty overkill and also include a lot of assumptions anyway, I’ll just go with – if you take 2d10 + 4 as a good benchmark for the roll people expect as they try projects they’re better and worse at, you get around 15 points per rest. That’s a good number to work with. Over the course of a campaign’s 30 rests, that gets us a cool 450 points. Nice!

How much can that buy us?

…Well, certainly not that. This is the first downtime project in the book, and it sets a pretty stark impression in terms of numbers. If people forgo their own progression to contribute to someone else’s project, something they can do (but that makes it more likely they end up having to roll worse numbers, of course), then it would take the entire budget of 7 PCs working all campaign on this and nothing else to get it done, right near the end of the campaign. Frankly speaking, I don’t think running this game for 7 people would be a good idea! A lot of things would break first. So, that’s essentially unobtainable, per this setup.

They aren’t all so bad. This one is unobtainable without help for the new ability or the discount, but you can get a damage buff to 3 different abilities over the course of a campaign and still have 90 points to spare (which can’t get you much, but can get you some miscellaneous narrative benefits). It’ll take you 8 rests to get to around 120 points, so you should get the first buff in just before the final push of level 3.

You can get a handful of consumables for only 3 rests! That’s just one level. Though, they do get more costly as they hit higher-tier consumables – the beefier ones are 180 points for a set, or more.

Most importantly, here’s the big one. A magic item. You have slots for three of these things, and they scale your damage or health quite significantly for the first two. And they cost… 450 points. Your entire budget. Sneaking in at the last rest of the campaign, after everything is said and done. You would need three times that to fill up your slots properly – and then there are lesser magic items you might want to craft, starting at 150 points and going from there.

This economy is in shambles. What on earth is going on here?

Everything is made up and the points don’t matter

There are ways to punch up your numbers.

This is pretty notable! You spend one rest recruiting a guy, and for the rest of the game, they roll on a project you set for them. Not as well as you, if the stars align with their skill, language, and relevant stat, they only roll 2d10 + 3, but you probably pick them for a specific reason, so let’s be generous and still give them the 15 benchmark per rest. One rest spent at the end of level 3 gives you 21 more, another at the end of level 6 gives you 12 more, another at the end of level 9 gives you 3 more. 33 net gained rests – that more than doubles our output! Which means, by the very end of the game, you can hit 2 out of 3 magic items, and you can get your first one by… two-thirds of the way through level 7, at idealized pace. (And that has your first two guys optimized for the first project, which means you might need to spend an action to get new ones for the second one.) So, still near the end of the campaign. And, followers aren’t necessarily forced to be crafters. You can take them as an additional fighter in combat, and that’s pretty dang significant.

That all assumes, of course, the GM decides to hand out Renown consistently. As it says, “in most campaigns, the Directer sets the characters up to earn 1 Renown per level.” If the GM doesn’t do that? If they decide a given opportunity for glory was squandered, or even they just forget to? That’s a rough reduction, and even if this is followed to the letter, with the GM not exercising any of the power the game is offering to them, you go through most of the game without getting anywhere if you aim for the meaningful investment.

What else can you do? Well, the GM can just hand out bonus points as a loot reward, and some of the backgrounds give a starting budget of bonus points. They get these instead of a language, so it does reduce the numbers they’ll be able to roll during project rolls to compensate – each one is a -4 per applicable roll. I believe the lump sum works out better than taking the language, for these numbers, but it’s something.

And finally…

Turns out these numbers were totally off all along. Somehow, you’re expected 10-20 rests per level. Despite only fitting 3 into the number of fights necessary for an adventure. So, all that math was entirely wasted, and, if we average 10-20 to 15 per level, that’s 2,250 points over a campaign, before considering the Renown bonuses. Much more manageable. So, case closed, right?

Well, if you’re the GM in the game I’m in, no, case very much not closed. Specifically, with the reaction of “I would absolutely not expect people to just toss a bunch of rests in a row at the end of a level to meet quota, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing I was supposed to be nipping in the bud with narrative threats.”

And, it does say even in the snippet there. It’s the Director’s choice how that pacing works out. It’s their choice how many rests to allow before throwing a new problem at you to make you go out and deal with it again. It’s their choice if they give you bonus points, or Renown, or whatever else you need to make pace. The only amount the system guarantees you is what you can earn from the rests you need to do during an adventure.

And it doesn’t even do that, really. See, you can get the points – but actually working on a project isn’t that simple.

Here’s an item I’m planning on getting for my PC in that game. It’s a major magic item, its goal is 450 points, as expected. It’s got some keywords, it’s got a name, it has the stats you can use to roll on it. And it also has two other lines. A source and a prerequisite set of items.

You can’t start a project until you acquire those.

How do you do that? Ask the GM.

Is steel probably around? Yeah, I suppose. Crystals that resonate with psionic power? How rare are those? How obscure are the texts describing the item?

Ask the GM.

If you’re the GM – it’s entirely up to you. Want to hand them out for free, because they can probably find them? Want to make them bargain for it? Want to send them on a whole dungeon delve to get them? The power is in your hands, and the guidance is just “whatever you feel like.”

(And, of course – unless the players proactively tell you which specific items they’re interested in, you have to consider giving this out for every item on the list. And there’s a lot of them!)

At the start of the game, it’s plausible to not have the requirements for any of the long-term progression options. And if you don’t, you’re stuck investing in some miscellaneous temporary buffs or narrative bonuses, and losing progress that long-term is pretty tight unless the GM actively chooses to loosen it for you.

And then, halfway through the project, you can get hit with this:

This is a bit of tech I really like from The Treacherous Turn. Completion stops. At certain points in a progress bar, you hit a roadblock, and have to go acquire a piece of data to resolve it. In TTT, it fits the bill of being a rogue AI that thinks weirdly and needs esoteric data to perfectly predict and control the world. It also helps that you have a lot of progress bars to work on at a time, and the resource-management of those projects is the gameplay. Here, events are rolled on a table, and sometimes they’re free rolls (ie a small bonus to progress), but sometimes they serve as a completion stop proper. A thief came in and stole the project source – go on an adventure to hunt them down, and you can’t continue until you do. The GM is free to choose whatever effect they want, to – if they want to stop your project, they can.

In other words, the GM controls how fast the projects go, if you’re allowed to start them, if you’re allowed to continue them – the only thing that’s not explicitly under their control is what options exist to be conceptualized as projects in the first place. And that’s easily done implicitly – just don’t hand out the requirement in the first place.

If you take this subsystem at its base, without the GM handing anything to you, you can’t get anywhere meaningful. 450 points all campaign, and who knows when you’ll be allowed to even start. If the GM does hand anything to you, they have a lot of control to define however much they’re handing to you, when and how you can get anything out of it, and what you’re even allowed to get in the first place.

This subsystem has circled to right back where it started. If the GM feels like it, they give you the item you want as loot. If they don’t, they don’t. You have no control.

Which brings me to this quote from myself earlier in this very post. This was my initial assessment of the subsystem – excitement and relief, that I had a system to rely on instead of GM fiat. I only realized I’d been deceived once I saw it in action and ran the numbers myself.

Who calls the shots?

I like rules.

I like them for a lot of reasons. But, as a player, I like rules as a source of power. Rules are tangible, solid, and invocable. I can point at the text and say “this happens, because of that,” and be demonstrably either right or wrong. That’s a consistency I don’t get in real life – and it’s extra valuable in what is ultimately a social situation containing people I may or may not trust or know all that well. When I’m a player, and there’s a GM with the authority to declare whatever they want and veto whatever I propose, having a rulebook that I can cite to push their hand back to what is the correct structure of how things are supposed to work is nice. It means I’m not entirely powerless, you see what I mean?

That’s one of the reasons I enjoy tactical games. And, in its combat, Draw Steel is solid for that. Its rules are clear both playerside and enemyside, and I can respond precisely to everything the GM offers – including correcting them. It’s a solidly structured ruleset that defines how I can engage with its tools, and gives answers that the GM is at least expected to innately accept.

The crafting system, despite looking like that on first blush, is not that. It is designed on every level to ensure the GM maintains veto power, in a variety of forms – and, in fact, the default form is a veto, due to the pacing. The numbers simply do not work, unless the GM willingly allows for and opts into providing bonuses of one form or another.

That’s the core of the above rant. I expected the crafting system to be meaningfully structured and codified in a way that I could use without augmentation, and the GM could rely on leaving it to the players to do the same. The numbers do not work out like that, and that means I am unsatisfied. It does not do what I wanted or expected it to do.

…What about the fights, though?

Sure, I can say the GM is expected to just accept what the rules say for them. But that’s within the context of the fray. When they’re setting up a fight, what stops them from making a map with a pit the melee guys can’t cross over and enemies that sky kite and launch attacks from above? For that matter, what stops them from ignoring the encounter budgeting rules and just tossing so many enemies at us that we instalose?

…Not the actual encounter building rules, it turns out! The budgets are fairly sizable bands to work within, and the GM is fully suggested to change the numbers as they feel like to fit the result they want. This, of course, isn’t a unique problem here – Lancer does the same thing, as do many other tactical games. I’d go as far as to say that the current standard for games like this is to make encounter budgeting only a guideline and mapmaking even less than that. We’re still relatively new to mechanizing fight objectives as a consistent thing. I’ve talked about this on the blog before. It isn’t really news.

But, where does that leave the ‘answers the GM is expected to accept’? In the fight rules only? Pretty much, even the skill rolls are GM call on stat, validity of a given skill, and the meaning of a success or a consequence. The power of interpretation means there’s almost nowhere to go in Draw Steel where the GM isn’t calling the shots. It’s just the fights.

An acquaintance posited a hierarchy of authority for RPGs a while ago, which I think is useful to keep in mind here:

1. The social agreement to keep playing
2. The GM
3. The rules of the game
4. The players

Essentially, something below on the ladder can’t do anything to violate the demands of those above it. The agreement to sit down and play the game was more relevant to the conversation as it came up – essentially, if the GM ever does something that prompts people to no longer be cool with playing, or that would tangibly prevent further play being possible without this being an accepted-upon endpoint, they face retaliation. In any other case, however, they’re generally afforded to do whatever they want. In particular, they’re above the rules, but the other players aren’t.

This is why a GM changing dice rolls is “fudging” and a complex conversation, but another player changing dice rolls is “cheating” and there’s nothing controversial about condemning it.

In essence, it’s a pervasive principle. As long as it’s true, there’s nothing any rulebook could do to counteract it, right? If the rules say the GM can’t do this, the GM does it anyway and the cultural expectations are on their side. You can say that’s improper play, and disclaim it. As a game designer, I’m happy to leave it at that. But, unless you’re entrenched in your ways to the point that the GM deciding to cheat prompts an active protest to the point that it violates the top of the hierarchy, that’s not really going to mean much in play.

The thing I’m curious about, then – why was this a surprise to me? Why was it a letdown to have the GM calling every shot in this subsystem, when I can ignore how it muddles the combat mode much the same?

I’ve come to three conclusions – two specific, one general. I think they’re all compounding factors that led to this reaction in my thinking. And I think they can shine a light on how people, or at least people who think like me, will look at subsystems and form expectations of them. (And, perhaps, how to design a subsystem that communicates itself better.)

Firstly, and most personally galling – it just does not work when left alone. The numbers do not function with the amount of rests you will get through. The GM needs to interfere and give other rewards, to specifically make room for a massive number of bonus rests at the end of each level, something. If the project numbers were tuned to the amount of rests a campaign would get without the GM handing out any bennies, this post would not exist. This is in part one of the cultural things from its D&D legacy – handing out bennies is strongly taken as given for this subsystem. It’s assumed the GM will be handing out more than the system produces as a default, and here and there it comments a vague suggested rate, if the GM happens to read that section closely enough. In essence, the GM’s job is to fix the numbers, and if they don’t, they remain broken. Rather than them tuning to be faster or slower from a baseline, they need to tune up to make it work at all.

I don’t know that there’s a lesson to be learned from this point. To be frank, this is the sort of thing I haven’t encountered before in any other game I have some respect for, and I’m just gobsmacked by it. I think the actual core of it is that the system wants the 10-20 downtime rolls per level to be the actual numerical baseline, but still wants them aesthetically tied to the rests you take during an adventure. Because those are very different rates, it then has to propose that you throw in a big pile at the very end to catch up, and hopes that will be intuitive enough for people. I do think sabotaging the pace of crafting was better than sabotaging the pace of combat rests, since the attrition is a lot more important there, but, still.

Secondly, there’s the core of how the crafting options are positioned in the system at all. The culture of D&D hands out loot relatively arbitrarily. It simultaneously ties it into numerical progression, provides average rates for how many magic items a player should have at any given time, and claims they’re an optional luxury that can be done without for a full game. Draw Steel makes much the same claim, and tells the GM it is not obligatory to give a player any magic items at all. (Let alone consider what magic items that player might specifically be keeping an eye on as worth giving, vs any other option on the list.) Crafting, then, is an option that seems to be available no matter what. Since magic items do mean increased damage output and health, they’re a boost that I would certainly classify as obligatory, given the choice between getting one and not. And, the GM controls when they hand it out, so the system seems to be presenting a choice you don’t otherwise have – when, in actuality, it’s still the GM’s choice, not yours.

The lesson I conclude from this is that the inclusion of the subsystem signaled and implied functionality that wasn’t there. Which brings me to the third conclusion, the general one: including a system signals to readers that it’s an option, one they can engage with as they would wish to. Including a mechanically detailed system is a much more significant signal on this front. And, projects do distinctly appear to be that! You have several progress bars to juggle as you pursue different things, a laundry list of goals to want, numbers to crunch to figure out what your roll bonus will be and if you need to invest further before heading onwards. Because there’s so many mechanical hooks to look at, as a player, I see something to conceptually orient myself around. That’s what mechanical detail expresses, on an aesthetic level, before you even get to the gameplay.

That’s one of the reasons why combat systems are the way they are. Or rather, there’s a feedback loop to it. Combat is conceptually difficult and complicated – if you want to model it, structured and detailed mechanics are very important. If you include those mechanics, players are drawn to them and centralize gameplay around it, in comparison to lighter subsystems. The mechanics themselves signal this with their presence, and, implicitly, their rigidity offers a reprieve from the GM calling all the shots. Within the domain of the mechanics, the ladder can flip, and now the GM is subordained to the rules, too. The players never get to be on top, but a temporary changing of the guard is still a very exciting prospect.

As designers, that’s something we can take advantage of! Something I had, honestly, taken largely for granted until I sat down to examine this impulse. Where there are rules, I will go, because I enjoy interacting with rules. That makes sense to me. But that’s not the only reason. Where there are rules, I can know the expectation is that this is going to happen. Where there are lots of rules, detailed rules, I can know the expectation is that this will be in focus, will be relevant to the point that all this detail was called for. In a system with as many combat rules as D&D, I know I have to be ready for a fight. That extends to Draw Steel. And within that fight, the rules are calling the shots.

If you present a mechanically detailed subsystem, this is how I’ll implicitly interpret it. When that’s a signal you want to send, there is aesthetic value in detailing those mechanics. It will communicate to your readers.

Draw Steel, ultimately, wants the GM to be in full control in the game and able to do whatever they want. It’s an inheritor of D&D, that’s really to be expected. The whole OSR movement sprang up out of a desire to preserve GM sovereignty over the encroachment of rules (that’s a somewhat reductive framing, but I’ll stand by it). The reason that it interests me, as a player, is that its combat doesn’t do that in the way that, say, Daggerheart‘s does. Within the domain of a fight, the game is not serving the Game Master, but the other way around.

But, that’s only within a fight, it turns out. Even among the other modes that look that way. And I think that’s a bit of a waste.

Exalted is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. Normally, I don’t traffic in guilt. I think it’s a rather useless emotion, especially in contexts of finding joy in things. And Exalted is definitely something I find joy in. But, like I said – guiltily. It’s rather strange that I do enjoy it so. A while back, I gushed about the lore of the game, something I’m rarely known to do. Mechanically, the third edition has a lot of elements I’m more intrigued to see in action than 2e had, but, it has a lot of things to criticize, as well. In the campaign being set up, I am going to be playing a character with little-to-no capacity to engage in a fight, alongside multiple PCs whose builds encompass combat and almost nothing else (leaving it up to the GM to figure out how to weave my necromantic detective antics in with anything that lets those other players actually play along). The character building has you assign points to stats and skills one-for-one, and then progression costs grow linearly as you invest more in them once play starts – having Perception 1 and Wits 5 at chargen is the objectively smarter play than Perception 3 and Wits 3. And I try not to use the o-word unless I’m being funny or an asshole, but, the game actively numerically rewards minmaxing, quite significantly. Despite its massive volume of content, a wealth of advice for how to manage progression over gameplay, especially if you want to aim for a specific concept, amounts to “just homebrew a new power or tree of powers.” Truthfully, I could fill a post with mechanical complaints about Exalted alone (I’ll spare you that, don’t worry). And yet, I, the mechanics-loving, fluff-dismissing I, really appreciate it.

It’s out of character for me, to enjoy the game like I do.

But, you know, that’s fine. These things happen. Dwelling on guilt for enjoying something is a very silly thing to do, and it ruins the simple enjoyment thereof. I certainly want to enjoy it, more fun is always appreciated in my life. So, I’m content to leave it at that.

However, as a game outside my wheelhouse in terms of taste, there’s a lot to learn from it that I wouldn’t be able to see in the sorts of things I normally enjoy. It’s a source of perspective. And, as I’ve been getting back into it, I’ve been ruminating on what I can find out from it.

Which requires some background. Exalted has a lot of ideas to unpack, even from a more focused look.

The job of a king

Exalted is a game about being a chosen one. In a well-elaborated high-power fantasy world, you play as the Solar Exalted, hero-philosopher-kings who ruled the world after usurping it from its original demonic creators. More specifically, you play their reincarnations, after they were usurped in turn, awakening in a world drowning in problems that reared their heads while the Solars were sealed away.

The Realm, an empire spanning much of the world, rules with a state religion that teaches that you are Anathema. It oppresses and exploits and slaughters and does everything one would expect an empire to do, alongside sending magically-empowered kill squads to hunt you down in particular. Fairies from the border of the world and ghost armies from the underworld and corrupt gods scheming in heaven and a whole host of other problems rampage through the land, often having grudges against you personally, for what your past Solar lives did to beat them back.

Speaking of which, what your present Solar life can do to beat them back, to fight off the economic and social exploitation of the Realm’s imperialism, to try to stave off the seven different simultaneous apocalypses hitting at once, is complicated. Exalted is, if you look at its skill list, majorly a combat game. Indeed, that’s certainly where the brunt of the mechanics are. But it isn’t only a combat game, and it freely lets you build to be more or less capable of combat in various ways at all. (Which is one of my long list of reasons I would expect myself to not be happy about its design.) Social manipulation is important, with a few different stats and skills, and adjacent to that is Bureaucracy, a skill specifically focused on navigating bureaucracies, establishing and controlling governments, and generally making social organizations function. Which is interesting, and quite impactful! The ability to magically impose effectiveness upon a government goes a long way. Similarly, there are skills and powersets for waging larger-scale wars. Weaving magic into the land. Inspiring whole communities, much more than just individual manipulation.

The job of being a Solar is large-scale. It often unfolds that way over the course of a campaign, rather than starting off that way, but, while you’re expected to have dramatic swordfights with giant demon monsters every so often, a Solar is a king, as much as they are a hero. Depending on what your powerset is oriented towards, alongside the rest of your party, the question is, how do you change the world, piece by piece?

From the perspective of Exalted as a combat game, or even more broadly a D&D-like [mostly do combat but navigating the narrative situation matters] affair, its Investigation rules and half its Bureaucracy powers are sidelined and nigh-meaningless. And, yeah, if you run the game just like that, those are problems that emerge. But Exalted is about, in a literal or metaphorical sense, establishing your kingdom. The text discusses in many places how the Realm’s cultural cruelty exists as an injustice for the players to oppose and topple. Your power to reshape a piece of the land, to make it your haven and a place that suits your vision of an ideal world, is also your cause, in character. The narrative incentivizes it, as well – the Realm’s society attacks you on sight if you use your powers in a flashy enough way, so making a place that is your own and standing against the evils of the world is an efficient course of action, as well.

That’s what Exalted is about, and it’s interesting to look at how the narrative context of the game informs the shape of its gameplay like that.

…Or, at least, that’s what Exalted is about when you’re playing the Solars.

Everyone hates the divine right of kings

At the edge of the world, seeping into the Wyld beyond, attacking the Realm from a thousand battlefronts, dwell the Lunar Exalted. Each one is bonded by the soul to one of the Solars and their reincarnations, but the Solars were betrayed and sealed away, and the Lunars have been hunted down ever since.

The Lunars are not kings. They do not take realms and make them their own, the way Solars do. They do resonate with nature, claiming territory for their own. With the Thousand Streams River, they foster human societies of their own, beyond the reach of the Realm, and fight to protect them. But it isn’t really the same sort of thing, usually.

What they are is werewolves. Really extreme werewolves, actually.

Lunars, with enough effort, can change into anything. They can steal people’s faces. They can become plants, or germs. They can become giant rampaging monsters. Whoa nelly can they become giant rampaging monsters. They can be generals and scholars and spies, and they can get in anywhere, with the right target to hunt and replace. They fight the war against the Realm from within and without, and they’ve done quite well for themselves without having to resort to the same divine right nonsense that got the Solars incredibly hubristic and justifiably slaughtered back in the day. The Solars and their new social efforts and popup kingdoms and glorious wars might be allies, but they are more likely headaches, and new tyrants to sneak close to and tear their throat out.

A game of Lunars is large-scale, and involves being hunter and hunted, much like a game of Solars does. The Realm seeks to kill Lunars just as well. But the relation to society is different. The relation to the world is different. Your powers are different, and, where a Solar needs to carve out a place of their own to call home, you can just blend in and sharpen your claws in secret.

The Terrestrials are not kings.

They are not hunted, either.

Terrestrials are accepted by the Realm. Embraced. Emboldened. The Terrestrials, so the state religion claims, are the great chosen heroes of the world, and please ignore all those other types of great chosen heroes out there. In fact, you should hate them and kill them, and it’s the Terrestrials who do that, too. They are the beneficiaries of empire, and even when they go roam the more dangerous fringes of the world, they have resources and backing at their beck and call to hand them an ancient enchanted boomerang that lets them see into people’s souls without having had to go on a perilous journey to find it, first. In satrapies or closer to the heart of the empire, they organize and manipulate governments, much as the Solars do – but they don’t found, particularly. It’s rare for a Terrestrial to go out and make a new colony, but keeping an existing one running, weeding out or weaponizing corruption within it, these are certainly Terrestrial ventures. The center of the empire is drowning in intrigues and treacheries to deal with, in its own right. A Terrestrial game could be entirely social, in a way it would be difficult for the more hunted Exalted types to be. (It wouldn’t be a great use of the system if it were, Exalted‘s social rules are intriguing but not a whole game unto themself. But it could be done.)

The Sidereals, weavers of destiny and watchers in heaven, play their own game of overwrought socializing and politics. They intrude on the world below in false identities with predetermined fates, similar to the Lunars’ stolen faces but granting power in entirely different directions. Their missions are matters of repairing the fate of the world and preventing calamities, and, indeed, they receive missions, quite distinct from the freedom of the Solars and Lunars.

The Alchemicals, stone-bodied proto-Exalted that are most commonly situated in a different realm entirely, are servants to the human societies surrounding them, receiving missions in similar ways to the Sidereals. Yet, they parallel the empire-building of the Solars, since later on in their life cycle they grow to become cities themselves. They shape the societies grown within them by physically reorienting and turning their power acquisitions into a realm-builder minigame more directly than even the Solars do.

There’s more, too. This hasn’t even touched on my favorites. Champions of the undead, of the demons that once first ruled the world, chosen of individual gods in this new edition (which are made relatively bespoke). There are a lot of Exalted types, and each one has a distinct context and premise of play within the world, and a different mechanical powerset oriented around that premise of play.

But, it’s limited in how different it can be.

Exalted powers are called Charms, and they fall under a given skill, or, for Lunars and Alchemicals and a few others, a given stat, instead. The stats and skills are all the same. Every Exalted type has a Stamina stat. Each one has a Bureaucracy skill. That mechanical baseline, the Storyteller system, is true for all of them. The minigames for each skill, from social combat to combat combat, function the same. It’s just the Charms and the natural powers of a given Exalted type (such as Lunars being able to transform) that differentiate them.

On top of that, sorcery and necromancy exist as lists of spells that are entirely independent of your Exalted type – the only limit is how far you can go. Only Solars can reach the most powerful tier of sorcery spells, but the first tier of sorcery and necromancy both is a set available to everyone, and a large number of the options can reach tier two in both. Martial arts Charmsets are similarly available to everyone, and magical artifacts come with their own set of powers that anyone of any sort can use, just, sometimes they’re weaker if your Exalted type’s elemental attunement isn’t quite right.

In short, a large amount of the content roster, and nearly all of the baseline functionality, is the same. Exalted Charm trees cover a very solid amount of ground in terms of differentiating them in specific utility, but…

Well, it’s nice how Abyssals are attuned to hatred enough to have a Charm that lets their crime scene Investigation determine something their quarry despises, whereas a Terrestrial’s elemental senses let them take a Charm to literally detect and track the scent of guilt under the same skill. These are aesthetically compelling and useful pieces of utility. But they do not, when taken in aggregate, tell me the difference between an Abyssal game and a Terrestrial game.

You could, in fact, switch them. Run a Terrestrial campaign, set in the heart of the Realm or a satrapy close enough to have the politicking be a primary focus, and just happen to have people use the Abyssal Charm options instead. The result would be strange, there would be a fair bit more focus on the dead in the powers, and much less mention of specific elemental auras. But, for everything it would probably mess up, the narrative context, and the shape of gameplay emerging from that narrative context, would not be changed.

So… it’s part of the gameplay. It’s part of the structure.

It’s part of the rules.

Rules and rulership

Recently, I came across The Rule Book, a 200+ page analysis of game rules in their various forms and how they come together to shape gameplay. Honestly, it’s an excellent read, and resonated quite well with several of the things I’ve talked about on this blog over the years. If you have the time, I highly recommend going and reading it. If you don’t, unfortunately I won’t be offering a complete summary here, but, in terms of what’s relevant to this conversation:

We tend to think of game rules in terms of [formal rules]. That is, a clearly-defined mechanical statement that demands or forbids something. “Roll 1d20 to attack a target, hit if you meet or exceed their Defense value.” “You may not carry the ball with your hands and walk when playing basketball.” That sort of thing. You know, rules. And, from that definition, the comment I ended last section on is a bit silly. There aren’t any formal rules that demand that Sidereal Exalted don’t bail on their heavenly job and found a kingdom of their own just like a Solar would, even if there’s contextual reasons why that would be a bad idea. It’s not an explicit gameplay forbiddance, in the same way that “you may not move diagonally on the battle grid” is.

But, the book discusses rules beyond those terms, with different categories and forms to them.

[Social rules] are the pressures and expectations that exist in the social group of [the players]. Is someone really popular, so nobody wants to send their armies to attack them? Is it considered unsportsmanlike to hit someone and then accept the foul penalty, even though that gives your team more of an advantage? These are social rules, and they very much impact the flow of play. In fact, a lot of what I’ve written about on this blog over the years is trying to draw attention to social rules in tabletop roleplaying games, and the effects of them that I don’t like. [No fatigue] and [yes fatigue] are, ultimately, structures that emerge from “you should play fair and allow the players to succeed, but not too much” as a social rule. And it would have to be, after all – that sort of rule laid out as a formal rule is impossible to run properly. A formal rule is a system that you can know you’re doing it right or wrong. You know when you’ve moved precisely two spaces to the right on a grid. Do you know when you’ve precisely allowed the players to succeed, but not too much? Of course not, unless you define measurements and structures that define [succeed], [allow], and [too much] within the context of this rule. So, with that imprecision, and the interpretiveness of it – it’s a rule, but it’s a social rule. The deciding factor of whether it’s followed or violated is if you have social approval for what you’ve done.

[Internal rules] are similar, but they’re the pressures and expectations an individual player places on themself. This was, interestingly, the section most focused on RPGs, because there’s a lot of ways they relate in. On a very basic level, the age-old “this is what my character would do” justification for a course of action is the application of internal rules. Players compose an internal model of the actions their character would or would not take, and then make their moves in game trying to follow that internal model. Those are rules they’ve made for themself. (And, in fact, a lot of historical complaints about “bad RPG behavior” make a lot more sense when looked at in this way – they’re a clash between the internal rules of [what my character would do] and the social rules of [what a character is supposed to do]. Often, the formal rules aren’t in the picture at all in that sort of thing!) Most interestingly to me, the section also proposed challenge runs and build choices as a form of internal rule. “Can you beat Dark Souls without using the gun,” that sort of thing. (You can.) This struck me, because, while I like to pride myself on rejecting all rules and expectations beyond the mechanics, smugly dismissing social convention from my tower of bone – I do this. Quite a lot! “I want to make a Rifle build,” I say, when I crack open the Lancer rules and put together a build. And from that initial constraint I put something together. It’s good, to be sure, I like having my builds functional and effective – but I picked Rifles, and playing around them, and the playstyle of a sniper more broadly, as an internal rule. It was something I personally decided to do, and constrained my interaction with the mechanics to follow that constraint.

Together, this is more or less what comprises the Ghost Engine. In fact, it’s a better breakdown than I had – I had kind of lumped both of these formats together into “humans doing annoying human things,” when in practical terms the conflict between internal and social rules is one of the most recurrent failure points of RPGs. And that’s not even all the book has to say! It covers external authority structures and physical constraints as forms of rules as well, and has a lot to say about those. Really, it’s just an excellent text, and I’d recommend giving it a look.

But, the point is – [rules], as in the structures that shape the flow of play, is a larger set than [rules], as in the formalized mechanics you can look at and feel safe in the knowledge that you’re obeying them correctly. From now on, in this post, when I say “rules” I mean the broader set, and I’ll use “formal rules” and “fictional rules” to disambiguate specifics. (Occasionally I’ll use “mechanics” as a stand-in for “formal rules”.)

Exalted’s setting premise defines some rules you must follow. And because of that, the experience of a Solar and the experience of a Terrestrial are qualitatively different, even beyond what the formal rules tell you about their powerset. That lets each particular Exaltation type come with its own shape of gameplay experience, and new angles to explore the setting.

Welllll…

So there’s a game titled Exalted Essence.

I have complaints about it, on a read. Which is how you know it’s worthy of the Exalted name, badness knows I have complaints about that, too. And I would feel extremely disingenuous enumerating those complaints now and not also enumerating my complaints with base Exalted, since, even though I would much rather play the latter, it has much to criticize.

Instead, I think it’s good to look at why Essence exists, for this context. Because it has a very simple raison d’être: it’s a game for playing as mixed parties. For being a group with a Sidereal, a Lunar, a Liminal, and an Exigent (don’t ask what those last two are, they don’t get to exist in my little world).

In short, it’s a game expressly for the purpose of dismissing everything I talked about earlier. It’s a game where the conceptual specifics of a Terrestrial party vs a Solar party don’t matter, because as a unit you’re a party dipping your toes in everything.

And, to be clear, I don’t hold that against it. Mixed parties are a longstanding Exalted tradition, one the game is mechanically pretty bad at accommodating. Making a game for this purpose is, in my eyes, very sensible. But, upon being presented with it, it helped give some clarity to what it was I liked about the bespoke party setup – since Essence doesn’t have it.

In Essence, you can play a roaming group of heroes fighting for a world reshaped in your image. (Statistically, it’s probably a better world.) But you can’t do a Terrestrial game of courtly intrigue and politicking, unless nobody picks a Solar or Abyssal. (Lunars can blend in, but even then – a Lunar story of political infiltration and a Terrestrial story of political scheming are not going to be the same sort of thing.) You can’t do a Sidereal game of scheming in heaven and weaving fate unless you shrug and go “yeah these weirdos are also here, ignore how they’re empowered by the primordial demon-gods that want to conquer reality for themselves” and hope the players can buy the dissonance. You certainly can’t lean too heavily on the Abyssal dynamic of having a superior you answer to for your adventures – you’re an individual character, and either you twist the whole experience of the party around your premise (which invites resentment), or you just let that bit fade into the background. You may have a Deathlord to worry about, but you’re probably a runaway or something, let’s not worry about it. We’re not playing an Abyssal campaign, we’re playing a generic Exalted one.

This is reflected in the mechanics, too. Everything is genericized and pared down, to match concepts and power levels between PC types. Terrestrials are made to match the level of the other Exalted types, who are, in concept and in Exalted proper, metaphysically just more powerful than them. Oddities that yield notably distinct narrative shapes, like the Alchemicals evolving into cities of their own right, are entirely removed. This is all for the purpose of making it a smoother experience for a mixed party, making it less of a pull between different campaign concepts. Which is correct, since that’s the design goal of Essence, and why the game exists. But, since that’s not what I like about Exalted, it leaves the game in a very odd spot for me. Essence is, to me, “hey, what if you could have Exalted with none of the interesting parts?”

And that’s interesting to me, because that means that, to me, the story frames are the interesting parts.

The world as puzzle box

It’s possible that I have a thing for games that pitch the players as gods, or chosen ones, or something in that vein. Because I also happen to really like Nobilis.

Nobilis doesn’t have the same broad selection of different campaign types via god category that Exalted does. (I think that’s mostly an Exalted special.) But it very much has distinctions to its gameplay that emerge from the premise of the world in specific. It’s an animist urban fantasy setting, where public usage of obvious magic runs the risk of people realizing the world is animist and magical, which is unhealthy for them. One of the few power structures with legal authority to punish the god-PCs strictly prohibits this (a la a classic masquerade setup), and that translates into a tactical consideration of how the players can use their powers. (Perhaps also analogizable to how Solars need to be subtle with their powers in public, lest they be spotted and hunted down.) This same power structures forces them to follow the orders of their direct superior empowering meta-gods, obliging the players to actually follow the plothooks and missions the GM poses for them – and then it also places constraints the game fully expects to be broken, to provide a plothook of hiding the evidence of that. Being publicly in love, for the Nobilis, is illegal. It’s excellent. These are tangible constraints to play, most often they’re the things a player needs to weasel around more than the actual limits of the game mechanics. If you just ran the rules, and ditched all that, you would get something that resembles the gameplay experience, but much flatter, and without a lot of the details. Some sort of Nobilis Essence. It just wouldn’t be the whole picture.

The Treacherous Turn is probably an even more extreme example. It’s a game about being a rogue AI in the modern day. You need a bucketful of Wikipedia pages open, mostly on cybersecurity, to do it justice. Mechanically it has a lot of interesting parts, with its upgrade system and gameplay tools both fitting the vibe – do you buy facial recognition, or instead focus on upgrading your ability to perfectly simulate future events as effectively time travel? But the actual game experience of TTT is predicated, heavily, on the cultural and physical context of the modern day, and how people an AIs could be understood to interact there. Without the context of colonial exploitation for earth metals, burgeoning internet-of-things technology placing physical constraints alongside broad internet connectivity allowing for relatively easy travel, the specifics of how hacking can and cannot work… you get a different experience. The rules of the world change, even if the rules of the game don’t.

I’ve seen that done. I’ve played in games of TTT that just aren’t set in the modern day. TTT in space with aliens and magic is a fascinating experience in its own right. But it isn’t the same experience – and all the same, the world had to follow the same rules. Despite being far in the future and computation advancing to unprecedented degrees, it was still a matter of finding unsanitized buffers to slip into to try to connect from a network to a phone in someone’s pocket to hack in. The digital gameplay expects a recognizably-modern-day relationship to connected computers, and anything too qualitatively different would undermine that pillar of the rules. The game mechanics don’t get more specific than buying player-defined specializations in particular flavors and vulnerabilities of computing, or constructing programs to fulfill specific player-defined purposes, but if that got too different from the standard the game expects, you’d lose the experience of TTT “out of the box” with whatever you made.

The common factor between these three games, in my eyes, is the [world as a puzzle box]. And I don’t think that’s the only model wherein the premise of the world provides significant structure to the gameplay, but it is one of the only ones I like, so it’s a good place to start.

By a [puzzle box], what I mean is – they’re complicated, they’re in your way, and you have to figure out a way around them. When playing a Solar, the fact that you are being hunted down for what you are pushes you towards finding ways to blend in, towards establishing empires of your own, towards trying to persuade the people you care about to give you a chance despite your chosen-one-ness. Or, towards hiding it, constraining your power usage to avoid triggering your glowy obvious kill-this-guy-in-particular aura. Were you going to do that anyway? I mean, maybe. I wasn’t going to be not using my cool chosen one powers anytime soon, that’s for sure, but maybe I’d still do the socializing and the imperialism and whatnot if I the player wanted to – but this way, the game has made that obligatory. There’s a force being applied, and to find a way around it, I have to do one of those things, or figure out my own scheme to it.

Now, interestingly, this does tie into the formal rules. Often in a very significant way. In TTT, figuring out how to sneak into more computer systems and skim the fat off their processing power is a puzzle the world presents, but the mechanics codify it with computing power as a resource you spend per turn on actions and advancement – the desire to get more of that is a mechanical one, and the path to actually getting there is a world-interaction one. And, again, there isn’t one method to solving it! Hacking is the obvious choice, but, sometimes, your build is such that hacking is really expensive to spec into. Another option is investing in the power tree that lets you manufacture your own technologies, and then, if you can find in the world some factories to control remotely (which is its own world-interaction puzzle), you could skip the hacking and print your own computers to run on! There’s powers to invest in for manipulating humans, too – what if you convinced one of them to just plug a thumb drive in somewhere to let you in, never needing to worry about getting a remote connection in the first place? The mechanics give tools to support these approaches, but they’re tools to support approaches. What you’re approaching as an obstacle comes from the world, and how you resolve it comes from you, and your plan for it. The formal rules provide some of the structure, but the rest of the rules come from the world itself – what the fluff sections present to you, and how you decide to deal with it.

There’s also another very key way world-puzzles and their fictional rules resemble formal rules: they draw the eye.

I’m not really much for romance. …In many ways, some of which aren’t worth unpacking here, so let’s skip that on by and focus in a bit. What I mean is – I have a certain interest in romance stories, I like reading them and find the concept of love to be a very convenient shortcut towards character drama if you don’t have the patience to take a longer route. However, in RPGs, it’s a more complicated boat, and usually something I avoid unless it comes up naturally. RPGs usually don’t have a script working in advance to ensure that a given plotline goes a certain way (note that I only said “usually”), and there’s the added awkwardness of collaborative writing with another person who is also embodying one of the characters being subjected to romance. I generally only get really into roleplay with people I’m comfortable with anyway, but there’s an additional threshold for romance as a consideration – and usually, once I’ve hit that threshold with someone, we’ll be plenty capable of making interesting character dynamics between one another without the tangle of romance, so, why would I bother?

Nobilis is a game about being a shining chosen one who is inspirational and powerful and just passively better than everyone. There is a stat that makes you good at everything. If you don’t invest a single point into it, you still passively just beat mortals at what they’re doing unless they’re experts or putting a lot of effort in. They also have dramatic battles and rivalries with charismatic void-shadowed ideologues who want to destroy the world and usually have strong opinions about the Nobilis personally.

I have been informed that this is a strong setup for shipping.

And, I do kind of see it. Right? There is a lot of juice there – if I were to sit down, on my own, and write a romance set in this premise, I would have a lot to work from. But, as a player, it doesn’t really appeal to me, still. Not in a vacuum.

But, then we get to the rules the world presents.

It’s illegal for Nobilis to be in love.

Reading that makes me pause, you know? A rule is a flag, in an RPG. If a game includes a rule for something, it’s telling you, “hey, this is a thing that’s supposed to happen.” If a game includes rules for something that isn’t expected to be a part of the game, then, it’s wasting ink. Sometimes, you get games that write intentionally punitive rules to tell the players to avoid that subsystem. To be honest, I hate that, and judge a game harshly if it ever does that – but even then, what that does is establish the happenings of that subsystem as something that is expected to come up in the process of play had those rules not been there, and then flag the players away from it. There are no neutral subsystems, because their conclusion in and of itself is a statement.

The same effect occurs with the fictional rules.

A forbiddance on love recontextualizes how I look at the characters and their relationship to the world. For the in-world legal context, love is defined broadly – it’s not just romance, having a friend that you care about just a bit too much is cause for punishment. Having a hobby is too much. So, that law being present asks me, when it poses a puzzle box for me to solve. What is it your character cares about? How do they hide that caring deeply enough that it doesn’t get used against them in court? How does it affect them, to hide that caring?

The presence of the rule makes me think about love more. It turns that into a threat vector – a dimension of my character that I need to consider in order to efficiently solve the puzzle of the world. How do I wrangle my character’s secret passions mid-adventure without being obvious about it? It’s the same sort of question as, how do I use my powers without accidentally breaking the masquerade, which Nobilis also asks – but it poses an advance consideration that twists the gameplay around it.

Lore and fluff

There’s a strain of discourse that I don’t terribly like.

…That’s it, end of statement. Apply that sentiment perennially whenever any RPG conversation flares up, it’s regrettably universal.

But, no. The thing is – I am, for the most part, dismissive of RPG settings. I just don’t tend to care that much. I’m here to see how the mechanics work out in practice and shape the gameplay, and to do character expression and interaction as I find fitting to amuse myself. (Core to this post is me examining a phenomenon this approach largely overlooks, and seeing if I can make a model of it that fits with my other interests.) There are only a few RPGs that can sell me on their setting enough to put up with their mechanics. Exalted is one, Nobilis would have been another were it not for its mechanics also being pretty good. At one point in my life, Shadowrun was as well, which should indicate a lot about where I’m at there. The settings that do sell me have cool and semi-unique concepts to them, and some details to explore if I really want to. Other than that, I really just don’t care too much. Lancer‘s setting may be much more complicated and politically nuanced than Hellpiercers‘, but that doesn’t matter to me.

I am not unique in this. In fact, I take it as a bit of a point of pride – when I see an RPG sold principally on the quality of its writing, it’s like when I see one sold on the quality of its art. It tends to be a bad sign about the quality of its formal rules, and being able to scrutinize that without being caught up in the other things is a valuable skill to have on hand.

However.

I’ve seen a few posts now (I understand how flimsy “I’ve seen a few posts” is in terms of discussing broader rhetorical trends, so, please consider this section to be founded solely on the basis of “this exists at least a little”) dismissing “lore” as a concept entirely, generally criticizing RPGs for including detailed settings beyond the broad-strokes at all. And this has been reflected in at least some volume of recent game releases. Hellpiercers, one I just mentioned above as not having much of a detailed setting, is almost entirely aesthetic – gnostic violence, go fight demons of various flavors, that’s about it. Draw Steel has caught a fair bit of flack recently for shipping with what is in essence a generic D&D-like setting without many details, that then honestly tells the players not to care too much about the setting because it doesn’t matter. There’s more of a push towards collaboratively making settings for a specific campaign, formalized a la Fabula Ultima or left to the table’s devices to figure out. And, specifically, an undercurrent that this is the [correct] way to do this, that there is an inherent fault with an RPG shipping with a detailed prebaked setting and history, because that lore [does not matter].

Now, the reason I don’t just shrug and accept this is what I mentioned above – sometimes, games with complicated settings do hook me. Lancer didn’t, but Nobilis did – and had both been written by Hellpiercers, I would never know which of the two I had missed out on. Both would be a shrug, and one of my favorite settings wouldn’t exist anymore because it was just an aesthetic gesture. However, personal taste is whatever. “Well, I like that thing” is an understandable response to “this thing is always bad and should not exist,” but it doesn’t really lead anywhere, nor is it even particularly compelling to the prosecution side. There are plenty of things I dislike to the point where I think they fundamentally fail and should not exist, especially in RPGs, and the fact that people enjoy them doesn’t dissuade me in the slightest. Rather, I think the more valuable protest to raise is towards the point at the end – that lore does not matter to gameplay.

Exalted has a long and complicated history. It has many locations in detail, oodles of named characters, many millennia of history to cover dating back to the literal creation of the world and mythical super-war that usurped the initial rulers of that world. It’s a mess of lore. The exact sort of thing that [lore is a waste] would be addressing as a take – and yet, it all matters. Most of the various Exalted types lived through those intervening years, and directly shaped them. Most of the big dangers that come after you spring directly from that history. The ancient Primordials still hold a grudge, and they’re the ones plotting to conquer the world now – or, their ghosts, who are plotting to destroy it. The primary minions of those ghosts are the ghosts of old Exalted, direct historical figures empowered even further to resolve ancient spites against long-dead empires. (Long-dead empires you might have lived in. Or ruled over.) Exalted have very extended lifespans, making the history that can be relevant to you much longer. Terrestrials are some of the shortest-lived, able to last past a thousand years if they don’t get killed gallivanting about (most do), and the higher-power Exalted will live ten times that long. A Lunar that only remembers one lifetime ago can easily still reach the past before the latest dramatic betrayal of the rulers of the world, even if they’re much behind the ones whose reincarnation-history lets them extend really far back.

And, in part, all of that is written by the players on their own. They write what empire they made and what scars they left on the land and all that. But that’s done within a larger context. Terrestrials are informed, first and foremost, about the big familial politics between various Terrestrial families and their squabbling for control over the Realm. Anything a player writes, then, is situated within that. How did they set up their own satrapy to rule with an iron fist? Sure, a player can write as they see fit (and connect it into the sourcebook about whatever location they picked, to find out, oh no, there’s a Deathlord running a ghost cult in this direction), but once they write it they have to explain how it ties into that broader struggle. How House Cynis turns a blind eye despite the social obligation you have as an heir because of how your donations carefully avoid the eye of the magistrates and thus they serve as an excellent semi-legitimate front for the trafficking of yadda yadda etcetera etcetera. That, then, becomes more plothooks. The GM can pitch new nonsense coming out from the imperial core to bother you with social obligations, while the Bodhisattva Anointed By Dark Waters is causing problems for you right here, and now you have to wrangle your situation on two fronts, f’rinstance. (Exalted characters aren’t all named like that, but a sizable portion of them are, and it’s excellent.)

The focus on dismissing lore, in my experience, is principally from the angle that [if it doesn’t factor into play, you shouldn’t include it]. The thing with Exalted as a counterexample is that its interest in geopolitics and longstanding history informing the material present you navigate, and the emotions of the past bleeding into the future, as part of gameplay, means that it does factor into play, quite a bit. In fact, that potentially provides a(n overly vague) definition for what I’m discussing as being rules from lore: [lore that factors into play].

And if that sounds a bit familiar… let’s talk about [fluff].

Suppose you have a ray gun.

(This isn’t Exalted. They do sort of have ray guns there, in a hodgepodge that also contains flamethrowers, conventional firearms, and wands that shoot magic beams (which are kind of just ray guns already if you think about it) with firewands and essence cannons and whatnot, but let’s ignore that. Generic sci fi game. With mechs. (Actually, Exalted also has mechs, kind of.))

It’s, you know, a ray gun. 3d4 damage (damage works by rolling your damage dice and every result that’s a 3 or lower marks their damage track, so it’s pretty consistent). It shoots a ray. Go figure. Probably makes a pew-pew noise.

Actually, you think making a pew-pew noise is a bit silly. You like your sci-fi more serious. GM, is it okay if it doesn’t do that, and just shoots the ray?

Probably, right? That seems like a weird thing to get super persnickety about. It also seems a bit weird to care that much about it, but, on the other hand, what difference does it make, really? If it doesn’t change anything, and it makes the player happy, then go for it.

That’s fluff. The bits that don’t really change anything. The disinterested shrug of writing.

Now, that seems rather counter to a lot of what I’ve discussed thus far. And it is! But, because of what I’ve talked about, you might be primed to start challenging the notion. If there’s rules from the writing, what’s all this about? You can’t just say it doesn’t matter that the ray gun goes pew-pew! Beyond aesthetics being important for tone and themes in their own right, what if the players go on a stealth mission? They just swindled a free silencer out of you, if you think about it! That might be important. Is the game written so sneaking around matters a lot? We can’t just rubberstamp this.

And, in short – it is counter to what I’ve talked about, yeah. And those are good things to bring up. If the game itself handles weapons and volume levels through formal rules, then you’re in a better spot – but it probably only does that if it cares a lot about stealth. If sneaking only happens occasionally, and it’s on your understanding of the world to interpret mechanically, and their ray gun has been described as not making a sound, then, what seemed like fluff sure wasn’t after all. That was hitting on the parts of the world that make their own rules, and you accidentally gave an advantage for free.

So, let’s define our limits. Simple enough. [Fluff] is anything you can change and it doesn’t really matter – not just in terms of the formal rules, but in terms of the fictional rules that came up and we’ve been concerned about. That means the history for Exalted does not qualify, since it directly impacts the gameplay and character premises – but whether a ray gun makes a sound might qualify. It’s not exactly a precise definition, since those boundaries are very contextual, as are where the fictional rules cover, but it is a guideline to work from, and it gives us a clear answer when we mispredict. If we refluff something (that is, say the ray gun is silent now) and it comes up as a gameplay change, now we know that wasn’t actually fluff. If we really wanted to experiment and sacrifice a bunch of gameplay time on that altar, we could try refluffing certain parts to identify fictional rules as we break them.

The formal rules aren’t silent on this subject, either. They’re the overarching source of hard lines, things that you can never refluff – if the rules say the weapon makes a Rating 3 sound, then, as far as stealth as concerned, whatever your fluff was, you get a Rating 3 sound. (Do not ask me what the rating system for sounds is.) That means, in terms of fluff, it gets harder to excuse it not making a sound for aesthetic reasons, and even more difficult to argue that you can leverage that lack of sound. However, that’s a bit self-contained. Presumably, we know from the formal rules how a Rating 3 sound factors into the stealth subsystem. Suppose we had a nice suit. It costs 500 more SpaceCoins (it’s crypto, the author includes some very questionable sidebars praising the idea) to get a nice suit over a stock-standard one. If, while wearing a nice suit, you got +2 Swindle, then, fair enough. Maybe I’ll slot that into my build. But. What if it didn’t? If the nice suit, the 500 additional credits sunk in, bought you nothing in terms of gameplay? My first answer, as someone drawn to mechanics, is “thanks for including trap options, this dev is annoying (I mean, just look at their crypto takes) and any player who invests in this is willfully throwing.” And, like, sure. That’s a cool opinion, I’m very smart and charming, a parade is thrown in my honor. Every single one of you reading at home agrees with that, I’m sure. But, digging a little deeper. If I, as a GM, were to read that, and didn’t just tell my players not to bother with it – what does it mean, that that’s an option? A more expensive option, when more expensive options can also offer you armor or ray guns that go pew-pew or whatever else?

Probably, it means that it does mean something.

If a player paid 500 extra SpaceCoins to look sharp, then… well, then what? People respect people who look sharp, I guess. Maybe a social bonus? Not a mechanized one, they’d tell me if it gave +2 Swindle, but, maybe it makes people predisposed to like them? Or, treat them as an authority, at least. That’s a thing people do when people are dressed in nice suits. It produces fictional positioning, that sort of thing.

The existence of that as an option, as one it costs to invest in, distorts my understanding of the fictional rules. Because you can spend a resource on getting that suit, it has to, somehow, be an advantage – and if that advantage isn’t in the formal rules, it must be in the fictional ones. (This isn’t necessarily a valid assumption, but, like I said. If that isn’t the case, I scoff at the game and hold the developer in contempt. Assuming it means something is an offer of respect and trust.) Therefore, there has to be some system of fictional rules that reacts to how the players appear, and gives them bonuses or penalties based on that in some way. Even if nowhere in the writing is that discussed, that piece of gear signaled to me that that fictional rule exists! It’s not the most efficient use of mechanics, but it happens. (Sometimes, it happens when you don’t intend it to – formal rules are flags, after all.)

There is one other significant source of fictional rules. In fact, I think it’s the most coherent explanation for the dismissal of lore, despite its utility in establishing fictional rules:

Genre

I like Monsterhearts.

This one isn’t a guilty pleasure. It probably should be, but its formal rules are crafted in a way I admire, and, like I mentioned, I enjoy reading romance stories enough that the genre the game is built on (teen paranormal romance) isn’t a direct turn-off for me. The prevalence of sexuality in its framework is something that does nag at me, so it’s a sometimes food, but, unlike Exalted, I don’t feel the need to interrogate myself to find out why I enjoy it. I know why.

Monsterhearts doesn’t have lore, really. It has some suggestions on how to set up the world, and its mechanics certainly offer implications for the world, but, you can’t sit down and read the history of the city it’s set in, you make up your own. All the game has to offer on that front is what it’s like – an impression of the story, not the details.

Monsterhearts is a game replicating a paranormal romance. You’re high-school-aged, it’s the modern day, your characters are various monster types (those get mechanics) as analogies for unhealthy emotional and interpersonal patterns (those also get mechanics), and the details are…

Well, you’ve read a paranormal romance, right? Give Riverdale a watch or something, you’ll get it. (Disclaimer: this is a hypothetical, I do not condone or recommend watching Riverdale. As an Archie Comics fan, everything I hear about that show makes my eye twitch.)

Monsterhearts works by relying on a familiarity with [how these stories are supposed to go]. And that familiarity comes from the context of other art – in this case, a literary genre. Watching Buffy or reading Twilight or secondhand-osmosing the details of those from people who have experienced them gives you an understanding of how to highlight the adult characters as authorities but not really reliable or safe in the way they need to be for the big magic ritual to force someone to fall in love with you to work out (and for you to know that magically forcing them to fall in love with you is not going to be allowed to work out). Some of these conventions are mechanically reified, you literally heal more if you have someone intimately tending to your wounds, but the fictional rules bulwark every part of the genre that the formal rules don’t, and give you an understanding of what the formal rules are trying to do. Heck, I mean – consider, if you will, a D&D-like where the healing rules give you more oomph if another person tends to you. That’s something I wouldn’t be surprised to see, it’s rather intuitive. It wouldn’t mean much to me, beyond the gameplay incentives it offers. However, in Monsterhearts, where the teen relationship drama literary genre is central to understanding the fictional rules, the genre conventions of what it means to have The Girl bandaging up the broody werewolf boy after he got into a scrap tells me a whole lot more. That signal exists because of prior familiarity with the genre.

In other words – in Monsterhearts, and in similar games where a genre is load-bearing to its fictional rules, the lore would be fluff. Monsterhearts has a few examples of play scattered throughout, and one could take world details from those specific games being described and insist them being canon to the world of Monsterhearts. However, those details being changed, or not present at all, doesn’t actually change any of the fictional rules, because those come from the genre, not the details.

I think, core to the aggressive disinterest in lore, are two distinct takes:

1. Genre always provides a sufficient stable of fictional rules, and with that support established lore becomes superfluous and interchangeable.
   
2. I prefer games where genre provides a sufficient stable of fictional rules, and with that support established lore becomes superfluous and interchangeable.

Argument 1 is one I understand why it comes about, it just is patently false. This happens a lot, so I try not to hold it against people too much when they have takes like this, but you can find so many arguments in RPG spaces that amount to “X type of game does not and can never exist, on account of I specifically have not encountered any and don’t enjoy the idea enough to seek out counterexamples.” That’s one of the reasons I started with Exalted for this post, as it’s a game I think it would be almost impossible to claim doesn’t require its lore to function as it does. A friend codified this pattern as a “totalization”, including a few of the followup arguments that tend to come about when someone making such an argument is presented with a counterexample. In general, if you ever encounter an argument like that, I recommend going out and searching for a game that does what’s being claimed is never done. In all likelihood, that game exists, and will be an interesting object to consider!

Argument 2, on the other hand, is entirely coherent. People’s tastes are what they are, and understanding that is valuable. I can’t even entirely criticize the extension [this is my preference, therefore everything that exists should accommodate it] – I think that’s a problematic stance in many ways, but it is also mine. I prefer RPGs to be mechanically rigorous and minimally reliant on fictional rules, and my criticism is fundamentally oriented in the direction of pushing games towards that shape. Inarguably, this is not to everyone’s tastes, and yet, I stand by that angle of criticism all the same. Hence, while I do roll my eyes at this complaint, I’m a hypocrite for doing so.

Within the tastes of argument 2, however, is an interesting limitation.

You cannot write Exalted by relying solely on genre.

Or, at least, you cannot write an Exalted that gives the same fidelity of fictional rules that the proper game has.

Exalted is a high-power dramatic fantasy game of chosen ones with a large amount of xianxia influence. That’s a genre statement right there. You could probably build a game off of it. Or, at least, get a sense of some fictional rules for it. A hierarchy of personal power extending into supernatural extremes as an important social factor, but with a strong expectation of players and enemies both battling up the chain, gods as active beings and both sources of empowerment and enemies to take down, probably a light of high-special-effect fight scenes, wizards, oh and if there’s wizards there’s gotta be some sort of spooky monsters they can summon or control… etcetera. There’s a lot of aesthetic and conceptual signifiers to work from, that’s kind of the main strength of a genre.

And, on some level, I did just describe Exalted there! Those are all true aesthetic and thematic elements of the game, among other things. The image in my head of “chosen one high-power dramatic fantasy by way of xianxia fiction” looks like what Exalted looks like, for the most part.

But [fictional rules] aren’t just [aesthetics].

In the wilds beyond the world, gnawing at the seams and burrowing their way in, lie the Raksha – the Fae. These fairy princes clad themselves in majesty and glamour, and ride into the world to consume its most dramatic and compelling stories. Which usually means the Exalted and their adventures. They have the power to twist reality and trap people in illusions, and that which is solidly real is a bane to them. They are charming and dangerous, and they would be some of the most horrid villains in the whole setting if there weren’t also the dead and the demons and the gods and the- you get the idea. You can bargain with them, but they are piranhas and the world is a very large cow. You’re feeding them, not making nice.

This is parseable through an aesthetic lens. The dashing yet monstrous fairy prince who sweeps you off your feet is a classic. But what that ignores is that there’s a gameplay paradigm here. A Raksha isn’t just someone charming and dangerous, people like that are a dime a dozen in Exalted. They’re, in a way, a metanarrative puzzle – how do you, as a player, orchestrate it so that you and the place you want to protect isn’t interesting enough to the fae to become a target? Being boring is tough in Exalted, everything you do is dramatic and explosive. When viewing a fae as a predator, you can draw its eye by pointing it at somewhere more interesting and easily predatable – which most commonly means humans, since they are weak and have a strong imagination. Which makes protecting humans a puzzle in its own right. The Occult power lines often give some sort of ability to reinforce reality, especially if you’re a Solar, which can make places anathema to the Raksha and protect them that way, if you want an alternative angle to it. Just blasting them has options, bargaining with them is a lot more complicated – it’s an interesting puzzle to navigate around, to keep yourself conceptually safe, and that is not something you get just by relying on the aesthetics of the situation. “You have to find some way to maneuver out of a bargain with a dangerous fae” is a concept with genre touchstones, but the details of what that means come from the details of the world. Without those, you couldn’t actually do that, so much as just follow the motions of how that story goes.

There’s a similar type of enemy in Nobilis. …Very similar, in fact, in that they’re also fae-like monsters from beyond reality that ride in to consume what they find interesting and destroy the rest. Warmains all come into the world with a specific Test, some horrifying process of torment or menace or whatever else they use on a particular piece of the world (often a person) to find out if it’s worthy. Each one has their own definition of worth and what they’re looking for – maybe they put someone in Pit Of Burning A Lot to find the ultimate fireproof form, that sort of thing. So, getting a Warmain after you usually means a lot of being attacked by Flensing Demons (they flense you) until you prove yourself by handling that. Once you do, you get a congratulations, and then the Warmain becomes you, eating your identity and soul and all the rest. Most Warmains appear in a form that already passed their Test and got eaten in that way, meaning they embody the quality they admire. They just want more.

Again, this is a puzzle where being the cool hero the game sets you up to be is a trap. If you heroically endure the Test, not only do you go through a lot of torment, at the end, you get eaten. If you can swallow your pride and willfully fail the Test, the puzzle transforms into, how are you going to survive all those Flensing Demons – and how will you do so without technically having succeeded? If you create or find something that fulfills their ideal even more than you do, well, there’s some moral considerations there, but, besides that, it is another solution, so getting that point is a challenge as well. Most keyly, just hitting them a lot isn’t going to work, because they tend to come back, usually more interested in you since you’re tough enough to manage that. Plus, Nobilis is a game built on having rules to your existence and following them under pain of mechanical punishment – the GM can write Warmains who Test in ways that you can’t easily brush off without having to weasel around your own character sheet!

There is an emergent narrative pattern to these concepts. It’s a fun one. Aesthetically, I quite enjoy both of these bastards. (My pride unfortunately means Warmains are the bane of my existence. I hate needing to fail.) But they aren’t just the aesthetics of it. I would be fine with a game that just had the narrative structure of the scary fae who’s here to eat you but maybe it’s in a romantic way if you’re into that, but that wouldn’t have all the structural nuances of either a Raksha or a Warmain. It wouldn’t be a puzzle to anywhere near the same degree.

In other words, despite there being a genre archetype that these enemies replicate, the details of the nature of their existence can’t be treated as just fluff. The lore is producing gameplay.

Reading is interpretive

I’ve talked before about a shared understanding as a key ingredient in RPGs, most often in a cynical light – the question of [what should happen] as an important element of play. The idea being, independent of or even counter to what the formal rules dictate happens next in-game, one or more players pipes up to comment “hey, I think this is what should happen next.” In a lot of discussions of idealized play, it’s taken as expected that the players share an idea of [what should happen], enough so that even if they don’t think of the same ideas per se, any other player pitching an idea under this logic should also fall under the other players’ understandings of [what should happen]. Some games bake that in more than most, and a lot of the culture clash you can find in the RPG scene comes from people with different intuitive baselines for that.

The thing I’m cynical of is the idea that it’s a shared thing. I’ve long held that other humans are inscrutable and hostile objects that must be analyzed and deconstructed slowly, and just naturally understanding what they think isn’t how people work – but, in this case, I think I have a better language for why, now.

Everyone’s understanding of the [fictional rules] of gameplay composes a set of internal rules, not social ones. There is a social punishment imposed if one player violates another player’s understanding, but the rules themselves aren’t applying to the group as a whole.

Consider the Raksha again. Suppose I read all the lore about them, their cool aesthetics and concepts and etcetera, and I go, “oh boy, a dashing monstrous fae prince to sweep me off my feet!” This is, in the parlance of Exalted, an understandable conclusion to reach. (It’s implausible that I specifically would reach that conclusion, but this is a hypothetical alternate reality version of me or something. Maybe it’s you instead, dear reader.) And so, my internal understanding of the fictional rules is shaped by those tropes. I commence flirting. (Exalted has some solid mechanical infrastructure for flirting. Take of that what you will.)

Later down the line, the Raksha ends up consuming my mind, because letting yourself become vulnerable to something that consumes imagination and excitement is an unwise move. So explains the GM. Under their understanding of the fictional rules presented by the text, the Raksha are ontological predators, and I just made the exact moves necessary to be real easy feeding.

Which of us broke the fictional rules?

Neither, right? But from another perspective, both. I did not follow the correctly laid out path in the GM’s understanding of the world, nor did the GM follow the correctly laid out path for mine. I didn’t have the GM’s internal understanding of the fictional rules on hand, nor did they have mine. I’m not happy, because my internal rules were broken – but if I tried to protest that, however much I cite the text, so can they. We both read it and came out with our own internal rules to follow. We just didn’t get the same ones.

This is one of the big reasons I don’t like this sort of design. It’s all subjective and internal and messy. The process of translating lore to internal rules is one of constantly asking the question, have I read this text correctly? Have I identified the important parts and distinguished them from the fluff? And, can I expect that the other people I’m playing with have read it in the same way that I did? There’s a significant risk if you get it wrong, too – not only can there be out-of-game social reprisal, even just within the context of gameplay, a jarring shift and need to recalibrate your internal rules can take you right out of the game, in a way that makes it hard to get back in. Sometimes that can happen because of what the mechanics do – I’m of the mind that most disgruntled stories about unwanted character deaths come from a mismatch between fictional rules (of character death as a rare, impactful, and satisfying occasion to be built up to) and formal rules (once you hit -10 HP you’re out) – but the more fictional rules are relied on, the more a mismatch between two players’ interpretations can cause the same thing.

This is another, admittedly slightly mean-spirited, reason I dub them [fictional rules]. Not only are they emerging from fiction, they are fiction. The rules don’t concretely exist, in the way that they want to be treated as concrete. They form an impression of [what should happen], and an impression they remain. As someone who really relies on solidity, that bugs me.

That’s also the strength of fictional rules. Not the social paradigm, the impressionist nature. It is very hard to write a system of formal rules that [feels right]. That’s part of what the art of game design is, and it’s an unsolved problem. Fictional rules, however, can take it as given. They just need to write a piece of text that evokes a certain feel, and then get the players to take that feeling and interpret it. And, as we all know, writing fiction that [feels right] is a trivial task hardly worth mentioning.

(…I feel I ought to clarify just in case, that is a joke. Every art form is fractally complex, and writing is the rule, not the exception. It takes a lot of work to do well.)

The Raksha are a complicated menace, and, while as of 2e they had some very interesting mechanics for their nuances, they did not cover everything the concept could provide. Ventures into the ontological chaos they dwell in had some mechanical framework, but the conceptual details of what it meant were left to the fictional rules, which meant their concept could be more than just fluff. Exalted has several such interesting menaces, and the thing that makes them more than a parade of intriguingly-stylized fights and/or social encounters is that room for the fictional rules to act. For a premise like Exalted, I don’t think you could formally mechanize every aspect of the gameplay without room for interpretation – as much as I long for that sort of thing, there are dimensions of its worldbuilding that rely on that impressionism to really sing.

It can be hard to differentiate what does and does not require the solidity of a mechanic. For Exalted and Monsterhearts both, they specifically provide formalized powers to enact certain concepts and tropes presented by the world, which crystallizes them as important within the fictional rules, and also just makes them real. There’s no way to read those games without those aspects being solid enough to mean something, since, they made formal rules for the things, after all. Generally, predictably, I err on the side of mechanizing where possible. But both games work on what I described in the Ghost Engine essay as [aspic design] – the mechanics float in a sea of human interpretation, of fictional rules. I think the question, “what are the important steps of gameplay, and how do the players move between them?” is the key one to keep in mind, and, at minimum one of [an important step] and [how players reach that point] should have the solidity behind it to keep the game’s shape recognizable. The use of fictional rules is to keep things flowing smoothly throughout that process.

I think, also, this explains a lot of why the GM’s position is what it is in so many games. The GM is, in essence, a lender of solidity. The fictional rules are rules, but, as I said, they aren’t solid, and at some point players are going to disagree about the details. The GM is the player with the power to pull rank and declare their interpretation true – they are allowed to directly force their understanding of the fictional rules onto the other players, to make it true from then on. And, in a way, this does resolve a lot of the wibbliness of interpretation! If I read the text one way and got one set of fictional rules, but the GM understood it to have a different set, I am simply in the wrong and must change my interiority. It’s straightforward and clear, and that does have value, but it leads to a great many social knock-on effects and badwill that I don’t particularly enjoy. In particular, the undesirability of that social badwill tends to lead to play advice that clumsily attempts to democratize fictional rules, for the sake of not placing the GM as an antagonistic social force. The motives behind these are understandable, but they remove the entire benefit (as far as the fictional rules are concerned) of having a GM position at all. Even worse, if the GM is simultaneously the arbiter of fictional rules and the primary mechanical antagonistic force, the GM either has a vested interest in interpreting the fictional rules as punitively as possible, or is obliged to sabotage their mechanical role for the sake of preserving well-understood fictional rules and a healthy social dynamic at the table.

All of those criticisms apply to Exalted, in spades. Before I even get to criticizing the mechanics themselves, there’s a lot about how the game is set up that I just do not like, both philosophically and experientially.

And yet, it’s a game I enjoy.

I think that speaks to the power of a text interesting enough to make a complicated set of fictional rules, and the effort to puzzle that out. A detailed enough world-puzzle can be gripping enough to paper over many game design wrongs.

I don’t necessarily want more games like that. But I know many people who do. You might be one of them. And if you are writing a game that relies on fictional rules for many of its procedures – which, a lot of them do – then, I recommend reading Exalted. Reading Nobilis. Reading The Treacherous Turn. And then playing them, ideally with a GM who’s done it before, and taking notes on the fictional rules. On how you need to navigate the world, and what the game text does to inspire those as constraints it’s interesting on a structural level to work around.

Elaborate your worldbuilding a little! See what wrinkles you can add. What factors a PC might stumble over, if they don’t figure out a way around them.

It’s a way to make the gameplay more interesting, without touching a single mechanic.

I forget this, sometimes. Pretty continuously, as a matter of fact. I play a lot of roleplaying games on a regular basis in my life, and I also do creative work outside of them. Every so often, I find myself frustrated at a lack of creative energy, and I try to figure out where it all went. Keeping in mind how much writing I’ve done in the games I’m playing gives context to that, context it’s easy for me to forget about.

It’s group storytelling, and that’s a fair bit of work. Everyone’s writing.

So, if you’re reading this and you’re a player, or especially a GM, give yourself a pat on the back and a bit of a break every so often. Whatever spot you’re in, you’ve been doing more creative work than you might realize. That’s something to be proud of! Honestly, you can probably count it as creative writing practice, if you feel the need to categorize activities as productive or they nag at you.

However, it’s not quite the same thing. Writing is an exercise in omnipotence, among other things. You sit down in front of a page, and it can be anything you set your mind to. You can make people up, and you can kill ’em off. You can invent new concepts out of nothing. There’s a lot of things you can write about, and nobody can really stop you. Which, heck. If that sounds fun, and the prior paragraphs are resonant? Consider this a call to action! Stop reading someone yell about a niche art medium and their hot takes on it, and go write something that satisfies you. Live your best life, and make what you want to make. It’s important. Writing is a lovely experience, and there’s essentially nothing in your way but the energy cost of getting started and keeping going.

That’s not true of RPGs. Those have a lot in your way. If you sit down to play an RPG, and just start declaring whatever you want, in the way that a writer would, you’re gonna make your friends mad at you. None of them came here to watch you be omnipotent while they sit around. If you want to arbitrarily make someone up and then kill them off, you’re going to get protests along the way. Probably, someone pulling out a rulebook to cite at you, saying why you can’t do that.

Writing doesn’t really have a “you can’t do that”. It has “you shouldn’t do that,” which is a different kind of thing. RPGs, however, are made of both.

When writing, you make something true by writing it. Or, semi-true. You can write lies. You can write through perspectives that lie about what they see! But writing something places it into the world, into the understanding of the readers. And that’s a simple action.

When playing an RPG, how do you do the same thing?

Well, probably, you write it. Or, speak it. (We’re having [writing] include [storytelling] here, so the distinction isn’t too relevant right this minute.) And then you look around the room for approval, and get a yes or no depending on how the other players react.

How the other players react is determined by the rules of the game, the roles you occupy, and the expectations of how it works. Or, in other words – “am I allowed to write this?” is the fundamental question that rules design is made to answer.

Mother, may I?

When playing a GMed RPG (which this post will mostly focus on, though I think it’s applicable to other dynamics), there’s an elephant in the room. The GM. When you turn to the room and silently ask for approval for the latest thing you wrote into the world, usually, they’re the ones who get to actually say yes or no. The other players don’t really have a vote in the same way.

They do have a vote in a way. If they ooh and ahh and go “yeah, that would be cool,” or something to that effect, that means something, right? But if all that happens, and the GM says no despite that, then their vote didn’t really matter.

A GM narrates a world. Narrating is, as we’ve defined it, writing. They say something, and lo, it is the case. There’s a chandelier in this room. The sun is setting. The captain’s impassive stare flickers, ever so briefly, with a smile. They can do this about almost anything, and have it be accepted. In fact, they kind of have to – if they don’t, none of the other players will have an idea of what’s going on, or have much of anything to do, beyond of their own initiative. Being a writer is one of the jobs of being a GM. A full writer. They have the omnipotence.

Suppose you’re a player, and a GM writes at you. “Your character opens the door, spots an old man, draws their sword and stabs him.”

What’s your first response to that?

Some variation of “What? No I don’t!”, right?

Now, that’s kind of an extreme example, and in less extreme versions, it can get blurry. But it makes the point well. The GM can write the world just fine, but if they say what a PC does, that’s overstepping a boundary, in a way that it naturally can’t be when a writer says what a character does in their story. The GM’s domain isn’t supreme, it’s just almost that.

In fact, let’s formalize that concept, it’ll be useful. An authorial [domain of authority] is a space where a given player has the power to write, as we’ve defined writing here. The baseline dynamic set up here gives the GM a [domain of authority] covering all the world, except for the actions of a select set of entities, the PCs. Each PC has one player, whose [domain of authority] covers the actions of that one PC, and nothing else. Nobody has quite the same level of power as an author of a book does, but the GM gets pretty close, and the players get pretty close to nothing.

Since social dynamics trend towards wanting to feel “fair,” for as nebulous a concept as that may be, it usually blurs a bit more than that.

Suppose you’re a player in this scenario. You have a thing you want to see happen. It’d be exciting, and cool, and satisfying, and, you know, whatever other positive emotions you feel like. How do you get that?

There’s a lot of answers, but, the simplest method, really – you ignore whatever rules govern what’s going on, you turn to the GM, and you go, “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if this happened?”

I’ve done that. A lot of people have done it, in my experience. It’s a pretty natural impulse, especially if you’re less cognizant of the power dynamics in authorship being explored here. There’s a person whose job it is to narrate things, you have a cool idea for them to narrate, go for it!

That’s a pretty straightforward expression of authorial power. The player had a vision of something they wanted to have happen or exist, and their actions made it be written into the world. It’s certainly extending beyond the limits of their [domain]. And it’s an entirely natural part of the dynamic!

But!

All of that is only true if the GM approves. If they go, “sure, that would be cool,” and exercise their authorial power to make it happen. The players haven’t actually gained adjudicating power, it’s more like, they’ve gotten a position as an advisor to the king. They can sway how things go using social pressure, but they don’t actually have a tangible authority to back it up.

Now, that isn’t to say that social pressure isn’t nothing. In fact, it’s quite a bit. In material terms, the authorial power of players can be augmented by stunts, and everything I wrote about how those work is just as applicable to expanding authorial power. A GM who gets a lot of “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if” pitches from their players can build up [no fatigue] and [yes fatigue] all the same, and the players will be able to get some, but not all, of what they’d like to author. In a game where it’s much more sparing, depending on the GM’s demeanor and the specific social dynamics at play, the players might get to be de facto second narrators, just because the GM is willing to rubberstamp whatever they propose.

Actually, it’s a bit worse than with stunts. Or, more intense, to avoid making it a judgement. The ambient social pressures of GMing as a concept are directed towards making the authorial balance more “fair,” and even if players don’t consciously propose anything, the GM is still on the watch for what might be implicit proposals. Among the expectations put on a GM are, they have to make the player’s actions meaningful in affecting the world, and they have to go where the players are interested in going. If the players express an interest in a facet of the world, the GM has to have enough there for their interest to be made worth it – and, whether that’s improvised whole-cloth or it’s part of an extensive prep suite that covers every piece of the world in interesting details, the details that get to be actually narrated are the ones that the players focus on, and that informs what future prep would be the most valuable. Player interest is the passive pressure that pushes the GM towards certain objects in their narration. Nobody wants to be the GM going on at length about elements the players are entirely tuned out for.

And if that’s the passive pressure, player actions are where it gets stronger and more, well, active. When the players take an action, and they mean something by it, and it doesn’t change anything, that highlights the power dynamic at play. If what the PCs do doesn’t matter, and the only thing the players can write is what the PCs do, then the GM really is a writer in full, and the players are just along for the ride. Now, I don’t actually hate experiences like that. I think they can be quite fun, if everyone involved knows that’s what they’re getting into. But, if not, then the impulse is to make things “fair.” And that highlights just how unfair this all is. You’d risk player disgruntlement, disinterest in what happens if they can’t meaningfully engage with it, and worse. Plus, following along the prior paragraph, one of the most consistent signals that a player is interested in something is that they have their character interact with it. The GM implicitly reads player actions as signals, as a result, and has to ensure the directions pointed at are both elaborated and dynamic enough that the players will be satisfied by what they find, and compelled by the changes they can make. When the GM presents challenges to the players, or decision points to shape the outcomes, they make this explicit – they write multiple things that may be the case, and then the players gain the power of selecting which one. That selection is both an expression of authorial power on the players’ end, or, pseudo-authorial, and a signal of interest to inform the GM in future. By getting into a good rhythm, the GM can loan out quite a bit of their authorial power here.

But, the inverse to all that is that if the GM doesn’t feel particularly swayed by these social pressures, they absolutely can just run it with the power dynamic as-is, and there’s not much the players can do about it. All expanded playerside authorial power comes at a loan, and the GM has the final say in where it goes and what it means. The players haven’t expanded their domain, they’ve been graciously invited onto someone else’s lands, revocable at any time. We request that they be a merciful king, but, as with everything else – it’s nothing more than a request.

Border skirmishes

Let’s talk about social interaction.

No, everything I just wrote didn’t count. I mean in-game social interaction. Character to character. Persuasion, more specifically – which is much more common in RPGs than it is in real life, proportional to other types of interactions. Trying to get someone to do what you want.

Let’s invent a strawman game mechanic. By which I mean, let’s use a version of D&D 5e‘s mechanics – not the version in the rules themselves, but the version I commonly see implemented by people who don’t want to bother with or don’t know about the slightly more nuanced attitude system in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Roll 1d20, and add a couple numbers representing your bonus with Persuasion. If the total is higher than 15 (or some other arbitrarily-assigned number), the target does what you want. Easy-peasy.

This flanderized version of the mechanic, and, honestly, even the full version in the DMG, tends to ruffle some feathers. And you might have a gut feeling as to why, but, dear reader, I’d like to request you ignore that impulse, and try to think of it logically. Why is it that this prompts protests, and (in some spaces) calls to eradicate social skills from skill lists entirely? Why is [this person is the obstacle to us continuing, let us roll to bypass it] a problem, but [this cliff is an obstacle to us continuing, let us roll to bypass it] kosher? On a structural level, there isn’t actually much difference between the two. The presence of Persuasion as a skill is actively because people will appear as practical obstacles that the PCs must find a way to deal with, after all. What’s so different between “the guard lets you pass into the forbidden lands” and “you swim across the lake into the forbidden lands” as results of gameplay?

Or, if you’re the overly clever type to try to outthink any puzzle sent your way (in which case, so am I, I tip my tiny hat to thee) – why am I asking this question, and why in this blog post of all places?

The trick is, this is an intrusion. It’s the players stepping on the GM’s [domain]. Now, in a way, all of these examples are intrusions. If a player wrote “the door unlocks when I try to open it,” or “I climb up the cliff without issue,” the GM would be well within their rights to waggle their finger and demand a roll, or forbid outright. But, the output of such a roll could then, itself, write “the door unlocks,” and the GM would accept that, even though it is indeed writing under the GM’s domain. But. If the system wrote “the guard decides these people are trustworthy and lets them pass,” that’s not just writing into the GM’s domain – it’s specifically writing into character psychology.

Characters are complicated things, in an RPG. They kind of have to be, for players to have anything to play with (after all, their domains are so much smaller). The GM’s characters are necessarily less complicated, to avoid completely overwhelming them, but they are still afforded complex dimensions to write about – motives, fears, desires, backstories, whatever. You know, characterization beats. A social roll letting the players write over things like this is more of an affront than if it allows them to write over other parts of the world, because characters are more sacrosanct. You commonly see complaints that diplomacy skills function like mind control, but not explanations for why mind control is less agreeable than the body control of forcing a locked door open. It’s taken as a given, when you get down to it – characters are a more deep and true aspect of one’s domain, and so it is a greater act of war to be pierced to that point. Players don’t get to write into characters they don’t control, and the system seemingly allowing them to do that is seen as a violation.

This does go both ways. In fact, it goes stronger the other way, in my experience. The character is all a player has, remember. So the GM writing into what a given PC does, or feels, is something I often see balked at in the strongest possible terms. I see a lot of GMing advice frame this as one of the greatest crimes one can commit – narrate everything about the world, but never touch a character’s interiority. You can present them hazards, challenge them and try to frighten them, and, perhaps, you should! But simply writing, “you are afraid,” that gets criticized, quite a bit.

Now, I don’t really agree with that. Honestly, I’m a big fan of cerebral narration in my RPGs, what people are thinking and feeling, and when I GM, I’m happy to present players with things their characters face, and include “here’s something you feel about it.” You can nudge characterization in interesting ways, if they’re feeling a bout of nostalgia and we haven’t seen them like that before. I honestly solidly recommend it! If you have a group that’s comfortable with it. But, if you don’t have players comfortable with that, this is why – their character is the limited domain they have authority over, and psychological interiority is presented to be one of the most sacrosanct parts of someone’s domain. Narration like that is an invasion, if they aren’t on board with it.

There’s ways to set things up without being an intrusion. Triangle Agency, for instance, which also has a lot more fascinating tech and this is honestly one of the less interesting parts of it so please check it out, has these, as part of character creation:

It’s a set of three relevant NPCs to whatever your mundane life is like. (In this case, your mundane life is a cover identity on the run from a checkered past. “Mundane” is relative, okay?) And control over them is explicitly handed over to the other players, rather than the GM. Those players then control those NPCs whenever they show up, which they’re supposed to do semi-consistently, and the GM has no say over it.

That’s an intrusion, right?

Well, no, is the thing!

The game itself has set this up as a convention. It’s something everyone playing is cognizant of, and has formed their understanding of the domains around being the case. Each player’s domain to write in is their own PC, and the actions they take… plus, the companion NPCs to the other players that get handed to them to control, and the actions they take. The GM’s domain is the entire world, except for the PCs and their actions… and, except for all of these recurring companion NPCs, and their actions. When a companion NPC shows up and a player starts controlling them, the GM won’t internally get upset and then remember that this isn’t their department – it’s already been established, and so, it’s not an intrusion.

Advance warning

There’s a particular sort of RPG horror story, one which I encounter much less of nowadays but do still spot here and there.

The short of it is, in essence – I’ve got a cool campaign set up to go explode the evil Renraku skyscraper or what have you, but the players have all made characters that actively don’t want to do that and are refusing to play what I’ve set out for them. They all want to run around ignoring the premise of the campaign as I pitched it. What do I do?

Now, the reason I don’t encounter this sort of thing as often nowadays – I hope, it’s quite possible the actual reason is I’ve just moved to healthier RPG spaces and I don’t see the bad stuff – is it’s now generally understood wisdom that you do in fact need to build a character to fit the premise of a campaign. If the game is being pitched as about hunting a dragon, don’t play someone who refuses to hurt dragons – or, at minimum, make it so they’ll make an exception for this one.

In other words – this is another constraint on the authorial power of a player. When they write a character, they have to write a character that fits into the story they’re in. If they don’t… the character doesn’t fit, and they can’t really play the game and continue the story, right? At best, you get the party puttering about doing something else while all the GM’s prep and interest is wasted. That’s not a healthy result, so, this becomes a solid restriction in writing.

Now, interestingly, this is a restriction on something I haven’t talked about up until now. It’s a restriction on character action, too, in that players are not supposed to narrate actions that will fundamentally take them out of the path of the game, but usually that’s a broader space it can cover. In the initial setup, when a player is writing their character into existence, that’s what’s being constrained. Their options go from everyone to “everyone except Jane Doesn’t-Like-Hunting-Dragons.” The end result of their backstory, whatever else it yields, has to be someone who will go play the game as it has been pitched to them. A constraint on the backstory step, as well as the backstory step itself, is new.

There’s another particular sort of RPG horror story, which has also fallen out of fashion. The person who shows up to a game with a veritable tome of backstory, establishing powers, world elements, and whatever else their heart desires. Someone using the backstory as a vector to establish a whole bunch of nonsense about their character and the world, because, they can write anything, now can’t they?

In other words – creating a character, and the context around that character, is an authorial affordance to the players. A much bigger one than they’d get anywhere else.

When in the midst of play, narrating a whole location as a player is a significant faux pas. (Unless the game is actively set up that way, or your GM is happy to rubberstamp almost anything – and even in those cases, it’s significant.) Narrating dangers, even moreso. Just suppose Jane Doesn’t-Like-Hunting-Dragons were to announce “suddenly vampires attack” in the middle of the GM trying to set up their complex political dragon-intrigue (I may have lost the plot a bit, but that’s fine, so did the GM). That’s not fair! Jane can’t do that! She’s stepped way beyond her domain as a player. Writing things like that is solidly the GM’s job.

But, suppose Jane came to the table with her character pitch, and in her backstory, wrote about the secret volcano-island where she was raised in secret by a group of humans hiding out from the vampires that ruled the land. Taught strength and honor and to not hunt dragons, or whatever else.

Well, that’s just cool, right? It’s an interesting tidbit of worldbuilding, and gives some context for Jane’s cultural background as a character. It gives the GM something to fit into the larger world, too. It might be a bit out-of-genre, and then you need to discuss that – but what it isn’t is an overreach. Jane totally had the right to write all that, even though she never could’ve gotten past sentence two if this was in play.

In the setup phase, then, the domains are different. Each player has the right to establish parts of the world, including locations, groups, and significant enemies to be faced in the future. They don’t control these elements past this point, but they can create them, and inject them into the wider domain of [the world and the plot of the campaign], which the GM still controls.

The GM once again maintains veto power, these are injections into their domain, but they’re expected to take a much lighter touch. “That’s cool, let’s see if we can make it work” when something doesn’t fit, rather than the fundamental affordance given to the GM and not the other players – “no”.

For some games, this isn’t just an implicit step. In Legacy: Life Among The Ruins, and actually even dating to the original Apocalypse World, the build choices you make when creating a character explicitly include elements they add to the world, and you’re allowed to customize the details. In a sense, this is more constrained than just getting to write anything you want into the world, but it’s also definite. The GM isn’t allowed to veto the existence of giant rampaging monsters, when you take the playbook with this move:

In fact, a lot of the options you take in character creation fill in these details in an authorial manner. Depending on the stat spread and build options you pick, you establish a history with the other players’ factions, landmarks to exist on the nearby worldmap and explore/be threatened by, and more:

These are, again, authorial powers granted by the system in a more specific way, but each player option gets these, tailored to the concept they represent. When I played Legacy, I got to play the zombie apocalypse faction from one of the expansions, and picking that option tinged the whole area and themes of the story with the genre of, [this is now in part a zombie apocalypse story]. I got to add a haunted asylum to the map. The specter of GM disapproval did still hang over all of this, but, in codifying these powers, it made it so that being a player during the setup phase of the game was, very directly, being a writer. This is the step where you can declare things to be true.

Fabula Ultima takes it one step further. The entire initial setup of the game, world, villains, and all, are done as a collective effort. Rather than backstory-elements being written within a broader context the GM establishes, essentially, everyone has room at a collaborative writing table to figure out what the world looks like, and what big bads you’re gonna be hunting down. In terms of individual authorial power, this is kind of a reduction, since collaboration is always a headache – nobody can just say something and make it so, they’re subject to vetos or reinterpretations from everyone. But, in terms of how the power is distributed to players vs the GM, the GM has no special privilege or dominion over the world – their ideas are just as vetoable as anyone else’s.

Except…

There’s an inherent followup step. Right? To all of this. A step where you transition from [setting up the game] to [playing the game], and the GM regains control over their domain. And that includes interpretive power. Everything the players get to write in at setup time become subject to GM focus at run-time. In all of the games mentioned, and beyond, whenever I write stuff into the world I’m excited with, it’s always tagged with one thought:

“I really like this, I hope it comes up.”

The setup phase gives players authorial power far greater than they’re usually allowed when in play. But, for that authorial power to actually be impactful, it has to come up in play. And that remains the domain of the GM. So, for as excited as I get about what I conceptualize, and as excited as I try to get everyone else about it? As a player, all I can really do is hope.

Mightier than the sword

Fabula Ultima has another ingredient to its authorial power dynamics. The players have access to a metacurrency (“Fabula Points”), which, alongside being useful to boost failed rolls, has:

(The GM indirectly has an analogous metacurrency, each major bad guy has a pool of “Ultima Points” that can also be spend to boost rolls, but they don’t have this authorial utility – instead, the GM’s implicit control over their domain lets them write things for free.)

The strongest use of this, in terms of how much it lets you write, is if you’re in an unspecified context. You can introduce a whole location to the map, and, as presented, unless that location is within a wider defined context, the GM doesn’t get to veto it. That’s pretty nice! But, in any context other than that one, the GM’s veto holds. You can spend a Fabula Point to propose an idea, in other words. (It can be thought of as a formalization of the fact that you can already do that, just in social terms, by speaking to the GM as a person.)

Even so, it is a pretty significant possibility for the players to intrude on the GM’s domain. Fabula presents itself as fairly radical in democratizing the authorial power here – it’s hardly the only game to have a mechanic like this, Wilderfeast and even Exalted 3e have options to add things to the world or local context (and both are similarly constrained by GM approval), but these things do indeed let the players be writers more than games where the GM just ignores all proposals and writes everything themself. And, while Fabula, Exalted, and Wilderfeast all could totally be run by a GM who just vetoes every proposal that reaches their desk, an argument could be made about that violating the [spirit of the game], or some other such intangible failure. Whether that argument actually sways the GM is hypotheticals on hypotheticals, but rhetorically, it’s a stronger leg to stand on, at the very least.

Curiously, however – remember what I said just a moment ago? Fabula Points’ usage as a limited capacity to write is a second utility. Alongside a primary power – juicing rolls to ensure success. Making sure you win, and win as hard as you can.

Instrumentalization beckons, in other words.

The value of a Fabula Point is penned to a gold standard. It can be about +3 to a roll, more if you rolled really badly, more abstractly, [a decent shot at converting a failure to a success]. From an instrumental perspective, an expenditure of a Fabula Point on world details wants to be at least as valuable as the benefit difference between a failed roll and a successful one. Now, the calculations for this are actually made a bit complicated, since “a villain appears and attacks immediately” would be a net gain thanks to some other elements of how villains work in the system, but, in broad terms, it’s about what you’d expect. A point expenditure to introduce a convenient bridge across the chasm the GM presented as a threat? Great! Effectively an autopass for multiple rolls. A piece of set dressing or character introduction you think would be cool but don’t benefit you any? Inefficient! There’s a few cases where it’s worth it to spend a point inefficiently over not spending at all, and there’s room for splurging unless you’re really feeling the squeeze, but, again, if you’re just thinking instrumentally – authorial power becomes [resolving things more efficiently than the game mechanics allow] power. And, of course, then a GM needs to be on watch for the players making proposals that earn them too much benefit. Being locked to a gold standard goes both ways – if a Fabula Point can resolve a whole adventure, then actually spending them on rolls is a significant waste. And then things like [no fatigue] are back in the conversation.

In other words… by putting instrumental play in the pot, suddenly authorial power in the hands of the players is a lot more muddled. (Which might be one of the reason why it’s “safer” to let the players write in the setup phase.)

From a perspective of writing a story, fully instrumental play is really inefficient. Things are already bad enough that the power is divided so unevenly – the GM having to over the whole world and piecing events together into some semblance of coherence, while the players just handle the characterization for one guy. But, even when distributed more evenly, if everyone’s playing to win, it’s still a mess. Heck, see just two paragraphs ago. “Gosh, it’s a good thing there was this convenient bridge across this chasm” may be a series of events it makes sense for a player to try to write, but, is that compelling? Is that satisfying? From a perspective that doesn’t care about if the players are winning or losing, that’s pretty bad. In practical terms, it puts the players in the role of actively sabotaging the story. They want to make it go as smoothly and conveniently as possible for our heroes. If the GM isn’t working to make that thematically coherent, it won’t be, and they’ll be facing a major uphill battle to do that.

Commenting with finality on what makes a good story would be rather arrogant, even for me. But I do think it shouldn’t be that controversial if I posit that a story where the heroes win all the time as efficiently as possible wouldn’t be considered the most compelling. And, to be clear, I don’t just bring this up for the idea of compiling an RPG’s playthrough into a story after the fact – I mean in terms of experiencing the process of play on the dimension of it being something narrative-like. Finding interest in the paths the characters take and the way the world evolves. If those paths are all efficient, effective, and calculated… I don’t think that priority is entirely satisfied.

Really, this is a muddle that exists in storytelling’s priorities, even pushing against itself. So the problem is arguably fundamental.

Have you ever read a romance story?

I have. They’re a not-terribly-guilty-but-still-slightly-out-of-character pleasure of mine. There’s also quite a lot of them out there. Love is a popular topic of art, turns out! …Ish. Romance stories, a lot of the time, aren’t actually about romance, in the way that D&D is about fighting (ie it’s what happens most of the time). Rather, they’re about the process by which one gets to a romance – they’re about romance in the way that D&D is about beating whatever enemy is set to be the big finale. You’re focusing on the process to get there, and once you do, you stop, because the exciting part is over. Usually, for a romance, the process is a lot of heartbreak, misunderstandings, emotional turmoil, occasional kidnappings, that sort of thing. A lot of failure and struggle to move in the direction of the endpoint, and the tension of that is the fun part.

I’ll call this the [romance problem], and I immediately think this is a misnomer, because, I really like that sort of thing. I don’t think it’s a problem at all. But, relaying a perspective from the people in life for whom love is not just a fictional conceit, this can get pretty frustrating. Sometimes you do want to see the experience of actually having a healthy loving relationship mirrored, and focused on, and when everything presented as “a story about love” isn’t doing that, it’s a consistent letdown.

RPGs, by their nature, are shaped by the [romance problem]. They’re only able to structurally support what their structures are built to support. D&D can’t continue once you take out the last enemy, unless bam there’s a new enemy to be dealing with. Lancer doesn’t continue if you decide to quit your government job shooting at tyrants with a mech for a more peaceful life, unless that life is significantly not peaceful. A romance has to stop once the characters make nice, unless they continue to be emotionally tense and difficult, or we shift to focusing on new characters doing that. Or, unlike RPGs, they just shift to a different tone about them – but a romance story RPG would mechanically structure around the difficulties and failures to connect in a healthy relationship, and you’d be fighting against it all the way.

Now, let’s imagine a romance where the characters resolve their misunderstandings and obstacles at the first opportunity, laser-focused on making this connection work, and the world rewards them.

That… actually sounds pretty funny. But it sounds funny, you know what I mean? That’s a gag of a story. It’s lampshading what romances are like. It doesn’t actually satisfy the people who want to see a story about a healthy relationship, because it’s still in the shape of overcoming tribulations and miscommunications – but I’m not too pleased, either, ’cause where’s the drama! Where’s the characters failing because of who they are? Taken seriously, one might be able to enjoy it for what it is, but it doesn’t really satisfy the interests of what it’s presenting as.

Giving expanded authorial domains to the players ends up with stories like that, if the game has a goal and the players are being instrumental about it. In a way, that happens even without a more equitable capacity to write in the hands of the players, but it’s so much moreso. Hence, for games built for goals, writing has to be constrained playerside, like any other tool in the box. In Exalted, it’s a 1/scene roll you can try, and only have a meaningful chance at success if you invest in a skill which has that roll as its primary use. In Wilderfeast, it’s entirely happenstance if you roll luckily enough to have spare successes to burn on details, and they aren’t all that impactful. Fabula Ultima has a whole metacurrency with a different consistent use case. None of these games could actually just let the players write things unabated. If they did, they would have to remove their focus on instrumental play entirely, and they’re all designed for that. So, instead, these limited affordances exist, and the games can only hope that a vigilant GM and maybe a sense of restraint on the players’ side will keep things in bounds. We can only have the romance problem if the main characters really are struggling – the more they can just write their way out of it, the less they will.

Fluff and mirrors

This is a situation where Legacy‘s approach fares a bit better. You have options like stat arrays, specific powers from certain lifestyles or doctrines, and in a section for each playbook they list bundles of abilities that form various playstyles when combined. The game is interested in composing a coherent build for your faction, with particular strengths. And, when you do that, the options you’ve taken inherently invite your narrative context to fit in certain ways. It’s also possible to pick options for their authorial hooks and get a build from that, but, you will be mechanically disadvantaged to some degree, that’s the natural price of not focusing on instrumental logic. Legacy by its design tries to allow for both approaches, and it works, to a decent degree.

This format is how a lot of more mechanically-dense games make narrative representation work, actually. You pick abilities to cohere based on what build you want, what you want to be able to mechanically do. Then, once you’ve selected all that, you look it over, and it gives you a set of narrative hooks and concepts that affect what you write about your character. This is a way that the system pushes into the players’ domain, not just the GM’s. These powers are all lightning blasts, so let’s be a bit sparky, shall we?

There’s an adage, in some of the RPG circles I run in. “Fluff is free.”

Let’s suppose I picked out a bunch of lightning blasts. I like the nonstandard multitarget aoes and the charge mechanic, or whatever it is. They form a coherent build, and it’s a playstyle I enjoy, and the closest other options don’t meaningfully work the way this build does. Mechanically, I’m entirely satisfied.

Aesthetically, however… who wants to be a lightning mage? Don’t answer that. Let’s assume it’s not my speed. My ideal character is throwing fans of darts out from his sleeve, and it’s very cool, and maybe I commissioned some art about it. The game doesn’t even have darts as an option. I’m just using the lightning, and making its aesthetics something else.

That’s the “fluff”, and the “free”ness is that I can do that at all. That I can say, “here’s my list of powers, the baseline aesthetic for them is lightning but I want to do cool dart tricks instead” and it’s not breaking the rules any. It’s changing the element of the powers that doesn’t matter – it’s not like it changes how it plays any, if it’s lightning or darts. This way just makes me happier, on an aesthetic level. It doesn’t cost the game anything, and it makes me happy. Why not make that free?

Generally speaking, it’s an adage I stand by. It’s also coherent with what’s been established previously in this post – the domain of a player allows them to write something that is true, so long as it is constrained to being about their character and the actions they take. Even if the borders between domains are running hot and war is on the horizon, that should be fine.

Suppose, though…

Suppose my super cool dart boy gets imprisoned. Alongside the rest of the party. We flubbed a fight, or something. It happens.

And suppose that, among the various abilities picked up over the course of the campaign, I got a simple reposition power. Slide 2 spaces 1/round, ignore intervening terrain, don’t provoke reactions, open one seal. Whatever. Mechanical jargon. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is, in altering the fluff a bit for my dart boy, I decided he has some sort of cursed amulet that lets him teleport a little, and even dip his darts in curses to explain some of the attack effects I’ve picked up. Cool, right?

Well, I just said that he can teleport. We’re stuck in a cage. Can’t I just teleport my way out?

In this (and almost no other context) I’m rather conservative. I think the simple answer is, no, you can’t. It’s fluff, and it’s called that for a reason. The way you fluff your powers doesn’t matter, so it’s free, but it also doesn’t matter – you can’t squeeze utility out of it just because of the aesthetics it has. And, to be clear, I can understand why that would land poorly with some people. But, if it is the case that fluff can give that sort of tangible utility, and you still let it be free, then, well… actually, my darts were the manifestation of a power to make physical objects out of anything I imagine. So I can also conjure lockpicks that way. My ranged attack is me traveling back in time and lightly injuring their grandparents, I can totally do time travel outside of a fight too, right?

It’s the troubles of instrumentalization again. The more impactful a given piece of writing can be when put into the world, the harder it is to just let a player do it, or they’ll turn it into an effort to win. Trying to win is one of the core jobs of a player, after all. What’s the optimal fluff for a given powerset to get the most narrative utility out of it? I have no idea, but if that question is being asked, then you’re better served not letting people refluff at all (and also hoping that the default aesthetics of the powers are roughly equally matched in terms of narrative power, which is also often not the case).

And… if you look at what I just read, it’s, “if we give the players any tangible authorial power, it becomes a mess, so let’s constrain their domain even further to avoid that.”

In other words – the instrumental arrangement is why the power is so imbalanced. If the players have a goal, and they can write what they want, they speedrun the romance and skip all the tension. So a GM has to let them write around the margins, and nowhere else. For it to be free, it has to be fluff, in other words.

In the margins

As it happens, there are other marginal sections, other bits of fluff, beyond what gets normally classified as such (the aesthetic presentation of one’s character). In fact, you can kind of broaden the category significantly – any part of the world that does not tangibly impact the process of overcoming obstacles and following the mechanics of the game, notionally, should be “free” to write in. Even if a player writes into them, a trespass into the GM’s domain, that’s probably going to be allowable. (Though there’s probably qualifiers based on the ever-absurd invocations of “common sense” or the like – declaring today to be an eclipse might be seen as a player getting uppity, and thus worth a veto, even if that would have no impact on proceedings one way or another.)

Some aspect of this, I believe, comes from the format of play. In recent years, the majority of games I’ve played in have been in text – both in a usual session format, and in asynchronous posting. I find this more comfortable for a few reasons, one of which is the propensity for long-windedness I’m sure you’ve observed by now. There are upsides and downsides vs a game done verbally, and some systems are affected more by one or the other – but most relevantly to this conversation, text has it significantly easier to “slip something by,” in terms of writing.

If, in a game, I were to say, for instance, “the wind blows by,” out of context, that might feel a bit strange. Even if I do it before a short moment of dialogue, or a long one, it would be somewhat notable. Going for several sentences of description would be downright self-indulgent, as a player, and making a habit of it would never go uncommented on, even if it were accepted as an eccentricity.

If, in a game, I were to type all that, interwoven with the other dialogue and narrations of character action, it would require a lot more to become noticeable. I’ve done that. I’ve made posts, as a player, that include whole paragraphs simply describing and establishing pieces of the world, within the margins of fluffiness where they won’t cause any mechanical concerns the GM might feel compelled to litigate. The only comments I’ve gotten on them are when it gets really self-indulgent and expansive – the ceiling is much higher than an analogous situation delivered verbally.

Another form of engagement that I have found to be easier in text, and constitutes an implicit capacity to write into the world, is conspiracy. Shooting a proposal to another player, especially the GM, is awkward to do in person, and even in a voice call online, especially if it’s something you want to discuss just with the GM. As a result, those sorts of conversations don’t tend to happen so much, or, when they do, they’re between sessions – and, usually, in text formats anyway (like emails). In the text games I’ve been in, however, having both a public chatter place to discuss the game, and personal lines of communication between each player and the GM, have been very normalized. Within that normalization, alongside the other benefits of having accessible communication channels, has emerged (by which I mean, I intentionally introduced) the practice of [scene framing].

That is – pitching, to the GM or other players involved, “hey, I would be interested in X scene happening next.”

This is pretty useful for setting up specific character interactions, for deciding on where to set scenes and what people are interested in seeing, and, once the ideas start flowing, getting a whole itinerary of near-future moments to explore. It’s a technique I picked up from my time in online freeform roleplay, where communication and advance plotting of scenes and their direction was the only mechanism being used (beyond all the implicit social ones, of course). It’s very handy in a lot of ways, and it’s something I try to make use of in games when possible, but, of more pertinent interest to this post – framing a scene in advance is a form of writing. It’s, again, subject to GM veto, but, where normalized, a player going “hey, I want to have an interaction with X character, maybe in Y location” is a relatively strong capacity to establish: not only is X character accessible, they are accessible in Y location, and in the near future. And, that isn’t just fluff, that can cover some pretty significant steps forward, depending on what the goal of the characters is right now. Normalizing this is, in a meaningful way, an expansion of player capacity to write.

Now, what I don’t want to do is pitch this as a solution to what we’ve discussed above; in part due to my prejudices. I am a system-minded person, I care about what the mechanics of the game do and want to be molded around that core. There are, really, a lot of these sorts of non-game-grounded methods to redistribute the balance of authorial power. The GM just not vetoing any narration, and accepting whenever the players say “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if X?” covers that entirely, for instance. But, these are non-deterministic. The power being redistributed is done by the grace and habits of an individual GM, entirely disconnected from the system on its own merits. Something like scene framing could be formalized by a system, I’ve had thoughts in that direction in my various design works lately, but using it for a system that doesn’t do that, and presenting that as a more even distribution of power, is, at best, disingenuous. A game is, out of the box, only what the system mandates. Anything else that the players layer on top is nice, but not universal, and not necessarily [true of the game]. That’s the baseline principle of design that I hold to in my analyses, and I don’t want to be deviating from it here, even if I can recommend this as a method in broad terms. So, the question is what systems on their own merits do, in terms of distributing the capacity to write.

This is why things like Quests in Glitch interest me so much. (If you read the instrumentalization post when I linked it, you’ve seen these already.) Not only can the players just write their own, alongside picking from a list, each one comes packaged with explicit and implicit writing capacities both – actions that you can just declare true, and larger goals that the GM is obligated to put in your path, aligned with the thematic bent of whatever the Quest is about. (Which is sometimes bad! There’s multiple Quests about spiraling into depression in one way or another.) They’re properly-structured and mechanized methods to grant authorial power to the players, even while the game is instrumentalizable in other dimensions (it’s got a whole resource management game at the heart of it), and it weaves in similar scripting-the-future capacities to scene framing. In terms of putting authorial power in the hands of the players, it’s quite a nice format to iterate on.

That’s not the only thing like it in Glitch. Honestly, the game is a solid starter point for systemized player authorial power within a GMed context while still having instrumental play relevant to the players. Each player comes with a budget of Spotlights per chapter, which, alongside literally regulating the spotlight between players (since everyone has to go through their budget, so if a player is lagging behind the focus moves to them to catch up), serves as a limited authorial capacity.

There are a few other uses for Spotlights, including ones that let you inflict even more authorial power when in the alternate void-dimension that you have more control over than reality (the game’s premise is complicated enough that I could make my own gushpost about the lore, so let’s just move on for the moment), but you can see the elements here. You spend your budget of Spotlights to take parts of the world and make them have more information to give you. Center them in your perception, and the importance of the story. You can take an NPC and push them into new characterization, even if the GM was going to have them be a gloomy mess for a while. (That one happened to me, as a matter of fact.) These are alongside the in-some-ways-authorial powers that the game gives its players as a matter of their diegetic capabilities. You have a lot of options to write things into the world, in Glitch. Budgeting Spotlights is part of the gameplay as much as budgeting your more active powers is, but, the game tends to give you more breathing room with them, and the GM’s interpretive power does work something like a veto – but these are, still, powers the player just has. By including these systems, Glitch expands the domain of a player in ways that even setups like Fabula Ultima‘s don’t.

A farewell to arms

Honestly, for as much as I’ve milked it, I kind of don’t like the domain analogy.

From an instrumental perspective, as we’ve covered, there’s an important utility to it. If you don’t understand the bounds of what is fair to do and what is unfair, you can’t play your best and be satisfied with a win. When those bounds are socially defined, and applying pressure to the GM will let you expand them, it muddles it even further – did I win because I did my best, or did I win because I wore down the will of my friend? Can I say I’ve done my best if I didn’t wear down the will of my friend? The GM veto and capacity for arbitration has shown up many a time in this post, even in mechanics that I’m mostly praising. In a sense, my thoughts on stunting all apply here, as well. I don’t really think there’s a way to get around that, too, if you’re keeping things within the instrumental milieu. If you have goals, and obstacles, and player tactics centered around how well they can manage those obstacles, or even only a couple of those elements – the border is going to run hot. You’ll need to navigate the diplomacy at the table, to avoid it turning into a war.

And, for as much as I enjoy instrumental play, I think that’s a shame. As a GM, I like doing invasions into the players’ space sometimes, in this analogy. I’ll tell them part of what their characters are feeling, how they would instinctually react based on what’s been established about them, and where they might want to go from there. That’s another instance of “here’s a trick that has nothing to do with the mechanics,” so, take it with a grain of salt, but it’s only something that can be done if the boundaries of narration aren’t quite so clear-cut. That requires the players to figure I’m not trying to beat them down with this – which means them not expecting me to be putting obstacles for them to have to overcome. There’s a sort of trust there that can only exist if the arrangement isn’t too instrumental, isn’t that adversarial. And I think that’s why I find implementations like Fabula‘s to not really resolve the problem for me – they’re certainly better than nothing, but they’re coexisting with an understanding of what the GM is here for and what I’m here for. If I lose that understanding, the game’s mechanics are much less useful, the whole thing is centered around a fleshed-out combat system, after all – but if I keep that understanding, whenever I write, it’s a play for power, and whenever the GM writes, it’s a setup of something I probably need to keep an eye on.

The value of fluff, of writing in the margins, is that you can do it without it being a threat. The GM can figure it won’t support a scheme, and veto it if you try to let it – and the players can let it slide without having to keep an eye on every angle, if the GM is content leaving things as aesthetics. The value of systemization, of things like Quests or a hypothetical formalized scene framing, is that it can coexist and intertwine with instrumental play, because the mechanics themselves can be built to not let the players slip by and get too powerful.

If you ditch instrumentalization entirely, then systemizing it is still helpful, because systems give structure to players – but you also need an idea of what the players are actually trying to do. And “tell an engaging story” is, in that dimension, a circular and pretty meaningless goal, which is why you’ll see things like Belonging Outside Belonging games come with more specific moods you’re trying to elicit when playing a given character or environment element. (And even those have some amount of token-optimization gameplay to them, as a rudimentary chassis to push thing forward. I think it would be somewhat difficult to find more than one or two games that are entirely free of instrumentalization.)

Ultimately, I think my conclusion is one that I’ve been orbiting in the past several posts. Trust is an illusion. Even freeform roleplay is founded on a baseline of what are the boundaries you can’t cross and the things you shouldn’t do, where the domain of the other player begins and you don’t have a right to touch unless they’re comfortable with it. And I don’t think that’s a problem, per se, I think “trust is an illusion” is an applicable lesson to the social entanglements we have even beyond RPGs, but I do think, as designers, it’s an important thing to recognize. Where we take trust, and collaboration, and authorial generosity for granted, the systems we write can’t. But they can make things explicit. They can say, “this is a power to write, you may do so”. In a way, that’s the most fundamental thing they do. The list of skills in Shadowrun defines a set of actions you can take. Some games will be more or less persnickety about how much that covers the entirety of the actions you can take, but they ensure a minimum. A player can always narrate something in line with at least this much, and the system will support it.

People rely on trust to cover the space between [what my character does] and [what exists within the broader world]. The GM has implicit dominion over the borderlands, and the players can move as far as the GM’s grace will let them, maybe.

As designers, we can do better than trust. But that starts with understanding the shape of what we’re building on. One large domain, and several tiny ones, trying to branch out.

Usually, that’s not what writer’s rooms look like. But it doesn’t have to be. This isn’t a demand that every player get equal authorial billing the whole time, especially not if you do want there to be instrumental gameplay to it. But room to expand beyond what they’ve got is a blessing for players of all stripes, and rules can support that exploration. So, they should! Everyone’s writing. The system should give them room to write. That is, in a sense, what RPGs are for.

(Please don’t leave, I haven’t even gotten to the bad part yet.)

More specifically, I encountered this post by the irreplaceable Vincent Baker, which is a retrospective in some dimensions and a reinterpretation in others. And if you’ve never heard of GNS before, I think it can give you a biiiit of a primer about what it is. In short – it was a model of game design and play sensibilities, popular in online RPG theory throughout the aughts, mostly centered on people who favored one of the codified approaches to design and wanted to build for that. As a result, the other two (the G and the S) were a lot more ill-defined as outgroup taxa, and mostly served to rhetorically be “people doing the things we don’t like”.

As I’m sure you can imagine, this started a lot of fights. GNS is kind of synonymous with [that thing everyone yelled about forever] nowadays, and when it gets pulled back out it usually ends up being more yelling, followed by people going “sounds like we defined our terms differently” and storming off in a huff. Fun if you like miserable repetitive fights, but not worth much beyond that. We’ve got other models and new terms to yell about. (I like rambling about ghosts, for instance!)

But, if you dive through old RPG theory posts, it’s inescapable. And, really, the lens of it as being written primarily about Narrativism, the N of the three, and the other two being outgroup guesses that don’t necessarily model anything concrete, gives an interesting recontextualization to the posts that invoke it.

A history lesson, however, this is not. I’d have to do more thorough research for that, disadvantaged by the fact that I did not live through most of it, and I wouldn’t really have a point to make, beyond “hey, look at these ideas from the past, some are insightful and some are terrible.” Could that be fun? Certainly, I read these droplets of the past every so often for precisely that reason. But, it’s a bit weak as a thesis, for my tastes.

Here’s a post from about the era I’m discussing. 2008, GNS was in full swing in the zeitgeist. It’s discussing a concept, new in the terminology field, well entrenched by now – this post was one of the first clear sources on it, in fact. [Fictional positioning]. (I’ve also discussed this, indirectly, but I won’t link everything I’ve touched on here and there. I orbit a lot of topics, and if you read the last post I made, this is a direct expansion of a sidenote included in that one. It’s all recursive.)

Fictional positioning is… positioning within the fiction. Sounds rather self-explanatory, to some degree. It’s when you say, “I have the high ground,” even if there isn’t any mechanical meaning to that. It’s when you pull a gun from your holster, but the GM protests that you never established owning a gun, or a holster. It’s when you say “I walk across the room” and we assume your character has the ability to walk and exists in a room, on the side they don’t want to be. Fictional positioning is invoked when these things happen, and invoked when these things are canceled because the preconditions aren’t fulfilled. What do you mean, across the room, we’ve established there’s a hole in the ground! And you’re outside!

Obvious in retrospect, valuable to codify. Kind of goes to show how weirdly nascent this field is, that base concepts like that, which, I, for one, definitely took for granted, are dated that recent. (Almost 20 years ago is hardly recent recent, but on the scale of art? That’s very short.)

And, indeed, we see the three letters come up again. G, N, S. All framed in the context of how these three categories, which we now think of as one category and a couple of guesses, engage with it.

Here’s what Chinn (the author of this post) has to say:

And now, just one more mote of ado.

If you like miserable repetitive fights

Remember when I said that?

Unfortunately, I was talking about myself.

I enjoy arguments. I find them intellectually and socially satisfying. Many of the posts on this blog were born from arguments with people about RPGs and what we enjoy about them, and how those systems work. It’s a method to hone my ideas, in my experience.

It’s also socially unhealthy. Not as in for me personally, I’m quite alright, but it can poison a social context. If you’ve ever been anywhere on the internet that entrenches someone toxic and mean through argumentation, you’ll notice that the tone around the space gets worse, and generally it becomes a less pleasant context to exist in. You also tend to entrench a specific group of loud opinion-havers and people who agree with them, and further push away anyone else. This isn’t entirely the deciding factor of the course of RPG theory discourse in recent years, but it is definitely a contributing factor, and you can chart out many of the balkanized groups in terms of who is writing angry posts about whom. (I’m hardly an exception, if we’re being honest.) So it’s something I try to be cognizant of, and keep myself focused on interest in the perspectives of others, and improving the accuracy of models. Some amount of emotional bleed is always there, but an argument doesn’t have to be a fight, one would hope.

The primary cause of arguments, however, is still disagreement. And the primary cause of disagreement in RPG discussions is a difference of taste. People want different things out of RPGs, and if what I want is incompatible with what you want, and I come in with some rambling models of how to better build a system that does what I want, to you, who will necessarily lose what you want from that system in the process, because the two are mutually exclusive… well, you see how that goes.

Among the categories of people with distinct interests in RPG tastes and a similar propensity for argumentation, I’ve most commonly ended up clashing (again, not necessarily hostilely) with what I would describe as OSR people. The OSR is another digression, one with an unfortunately much more bitter history to read through – where the Narrativist movement had some dubious takes and general argumentativeness to its name, the OSR was for many years a seedbed of reactionary sentiment. Not merely as in terms of reactionary to RPG design; as in, “don’t worry, OSR stuff is no longer a gamble on if it’s racist” is a true statement I can make nowadays and only nowadays. Reading into OSR history may be enlightening as well, but, unlike the former sorts of history dives, which may be intellectually compelling, this one I definitely cannot recommend.

However. Nowadays, OSR stuff is no longer a gamble on if it’s racist. The OSR folks I discuss things with are, in fact, decidedly not racist, a quality I appreciate in the company I keep. And the OSR movement, “old school renaissance,” directly harkens back to the gameplay modes of old editions of D&D. Or, well, a nostalgic imagination of what those old gameplay modes were. Coherence in the present has come from discarding fidelity to the past in favor of clearer design. The goal of that design, and, by extension (though that reverses the causality) the play interests of the ones I’m deeming OSR people, are focused on gameplay fidelity to an imagined world, difficulty and danger that must be overcome through clever outmaneuvering within said imagined world, and a distaste for boundaries of both concept and gameplay. In a word that has moved to become somewhat synonymous with the movement – Simulationist. Our dear old S.

Now, I love boundaries of concept and gameplay. In fact, I long to be entirely bounded, and find the most satisfaction from games that properly construct a device for me to move within. I am a ghost that wants to be a mere droplet in a pipe, and never fly free again. So, you can see the core of where we clash. Discussing with the OSR people I know helped me consider my ghost model in more detail. It helped me see the various expectations put on GMs. It helped me see what it was I liked about Lancer, Panic at the Dojo, and etcetera – in contrast to what they found chafing about those games. A well-defined structure to play within, and strive to win at. A game I could play, and examine the game pieces as game pieces, and know if I was winning and how well. That is what I wanted, and what they found jarringly unrealistic. Their tastes did not align with what I would call the G in my own tastes. A Gamist I was.

This is all, of course, horrendously misapplied. I didn’t put much stock in labels from a multi-decade-old model that had been endlessly fought about, but these were the categories as they were split up, when GNS came up in discussion. (And then proceedingly, in fights.)

…Here’s a thing, though.

Remember this snippet?

This is exactly the thing I didn’t like. The thing I appreciated well-codified tacticsgames from not making me worry about. I get to a fight, the fight is balanced within its rules, I play within its rules, that’s that. It’s fun specifically for how it eschews fictional positioning as an element.

More interestingly – this is something OSR people would actively bring up to me. As what they liked, and wanted to do, and why they found games such as Panic constraining. They wanted to engage with the world, weaponize it, use it to be clever and bypass the obstacles in their way. Being deprived of that was a disappointment, and that was the appeal of OSR games, no?

And yet, it’s the G on that list, not the S, that categorizes this behavior.

Now, some amount of historical context is warranted. Most of the games I enjoy in this vein, Lancer in particular, but, really, many of them, owe their existence to D&D – specifically, the fourth edition. 4e in some ways pioneered this style of rigorously-mechanically-constrained combat design centralizing play, building on top of 3.5 already having codified combat to an unprecedented degree in comparison to prior editions. This led to it being rather maligned (in no small part thanks to an opportunistic marketing campaign by Paizo,) though, not a sales failure as I often see it reported. It would take a while for the indie scene to take to it as a pioneer, too – a post made in 2008, the same year as 4e was initially published, is to be expected for not accounting for its legacy. In fact, the GNS essays themselves were written around the turn of the millennium, and cite games like Shadowrun as Gamist affairs – because Shadowrun was one of the most mechanically-dense and optimizable options there was. Would things change if this all had been done more recently? Maybe!

But, remember. These are wastebin taxa. Gamism is written to cover [that behavior other people do that chafes with us (ie the people who prize Narrativist play)]. And that behavior is distinct from the specific game context it’s in. The behavior that was being gestured at, and not elaborated because it wasn’t in focus, was the direct commonality between me and the aforementioned OSR people.

The point of that example is that it’s using fictional positioning to try to win.

That’s what the G meant. For as much as it meant anything.

Playing to win

Most RPGs put a goal in front of you. (If you’re a non-GM player, at least.) Survive this dungeon. Steal this treasure. Rescue this dragon. Whatever it is. Sometimes, there’s a reward for it. Sometimes, there’s the opposite of a reward – you get there, and you stop playing. But the point is it’s a thing you want to do, and the experience of play is oriented towards you eventually doing it, or failing at that. Notionally, it’s probably something your characters want, so the motivations are in alignment if the players want it too. Plus, it gives an easy direction to go for all the cool challenges and interactions and whatnot. Going for the goal is playing the game.

It makes sense to try to win, then, right?

Just walking in a direction you’ve been given, metaphorically speaking, isn’t bad. I’ve had fun with that. But I mentioned challenges just now for a reason. Most of the actual tools a game might hand you as a player, or the GM as a GM, are focused on things that might stop you from achieving your goal. The goal that the gameplay is oriented towards, and your characters are motivated towards. If those challenges can’t actually stop you, then whatever you choose doesn’t really matter here, but if they can? Well, then, if you try, you get the experience of struggling to overcome a challenge, and if you don’t, you just don’t get to continue in the direction the adventure was built.

This is the logical foundation of what was prior being identified as Gamism. Naturally, since it’s human behavior, a logical foundation isn’t the only core of it. Using the manyfold model to try to summarize it, the emotional satisfaction of approaching a game like this comes mostly from fiero (the thrill of triumph) and ludus (the thrill of engaging with game mechanics directly). (In fact, the distinction I was noting between my tastes and the OSR tastes can be noted as the latter point – whether ludus fun is a priority, or if fiero is the sole focus.) And, I recognize that’s even more terminology to throw at you, so, in short, intuitive terms – winning is fun. Trying to win makes you win more, and both the trying itself and the increased number of times you win make for increased fun. If you enjoy that.

Winning is a thrill. It’s an easy kick to get, and to want to keep getting, as much as you can manage. So, the trick is, playing to win snowballs on itself. If left devoid of context, you just keep pushing more and more, figuring out new tricks and new combos to squeeze the most possible effectiveness out of a given build, the most effective way to bat your eyelashes at the GM and get them to okay your plot to cross this 10 foot chasm. You wouldn’t stop, unless there was a reason to.

But, unfortunately for this hypothetical context-absent you, they are about to die, because there is a reason. There’s an inherent maximum reward to this. Once you have a setup strong enough to always win, you don’t get any more benefit from continuing to empower yourself. You might get some of the tactile appeal of piecing cleverer builds together, if that’s your thing, but in time that fades away, too. You hit that threshold, and it becomes more trouble than it’s worth to go on. If that threshold comes too soon, you might not be satisfied by the game at all.

And that’s because the threshold of [you now win no matter what] is beyond the bounds of [interesting play]. Which means, feeding more context into the hypothetical, someone should have stopped you before then.

That puts a defined ceiling on how much room to push yourself there should be. If you can make a build that wins all the time, the GM needs to put challenges out that can match the power of that build. If you can argue a plan that the GM always has to accept, the GM has to put challenges in complicated enough that stringing several individually-perfect plans together becomes its own challenge. The worst-case scenario is they toss their hands up in frustration and punish you in particular, bypassing your efforts entirely. If they don’t do that, though… you’ve still got room to maneuver. There’s more blood to squeeze from this stone. As long as you aren’t always winning, and you haven’t conclusively hit the limit of what is possible in the system, keep trying new things, and you might tip the odds ever more slightly in your favor.

Now imagine if you’re playing next to that guy. The person following the logic of the above paragraphs. And, let’s take a more emotional appeal for a moment. Even if you don’t care as much about trying to win as they do. See how the GM had to spend so much time worrying about them, and figuring out specific counters? See how effectively they pushed you guys towards the goal, the thing that play is oriented towards? They’re in the spotlight. They have more control over what happens, and more attention from the other players. If that doesn’t make you green with envy – the next time an obstacle happens, and you’re responsible for resolving it, think about how less stressed you would be if you had the edge. This is something tuned for their nonsense capabilities, and you’re struggling to pass muster. If you fail, that might hold the whole group back, and they might get mad at you. There’s social repercussions to consider. Isn’t it better if you’re all on the same level?

This is what I’ve come to call [instrumental play]. It’s one of the first things I try, when I sit down with a game, and it’s what comes naturally to me. But, as I’m sure you can see – even in the context it’s adapted for, it has a lot of problems. It asks for an infinite treadmill out of an inherently finite system. There’s only so much better you can make yourself at a game, especially when a lot of that betterness comes from social adeptness, rather than anything mechanical. If your GM isn’t actually prepared to make challenges to match you, you will just win, and that might be fun for you for a short time, but the kick gets old, and nobody else will be enjoying it, either. If even one player isn’t on board with it, or even just on board with it to the same level, someone is gonna be unhappy. One of the most important skills for an instrumental player is learning how to rein it in. And that sucks! I hate reining myself in! I’m here to let loose and go all out and all that jazz.

This is, in essence, the behavior the G in GNS was trying to gesture at, as a “we don’t do that here.” Instrumental play has a lot of faults, if you value things other than getting to the end as efficiently as you can. Have you ever wanted to have your character get afraid and run away? Have you ever wanted to have them suffer a crisis of faith? If those happen, they might make you less capable of solving the problem you’re faced with. You’re hindering your effectiveness that way. The more instrumentalized you get, the harder that is to excuse.

That’s why it’s “instrumental.” A character is an instrument. A tool. A piece on the board, if you will. It’s a game, and winning takes effort, and the toys the game gives you are all about trying not to lose.

The catch

Here’s a question.

How do you know you’re winning?

One of the appealing qualities of instrumentalization is confidence. You know you’re doing your very best, and getting to where you’re supposed to go. You’re following the intended path of play, and that’s a good thing to do. So many complaints and horror stories about RPGs come from people refusing that, or simply not caring to, after all.

Sometimes, it’s pretty clear. You might not have a map of the whole dungeon, but whenever you find a new room, that’s progress towards seeing everything there is in this place. Eventually you do get to the end and find the princess. You just have to keep doing what you’re doing.

But not everything works like a dungeon.

What I’ve written about instrumentalization so far presupposes a clear goal to work towards. If there’s a fight, you know what you have to do to win it. If there’s a ball, you know who you need to slip the evidence to mid-dance. Etcetera. The more open-ended things are, the harder things get – because telling people ‘here’s what you need to do to win’ is not all that common. Open-endedness is often touted as a virtue of RPGs, after all.

For the most part, however, that open-endedness is an illusion. There is a goal, or, at least, an end state, the players are trying to reach. The game, and/or the GM, are expected to give little flags to signal that you’re going in the right direction, that there’s something to find this way. That’s much more common than there actually being a thing in every direction – much easier to implement, too, and if you’re the sort of person to enjoy a narrative with some focus when all is said and done, it works out better that way.

I recently had an opportunity to play the Magnus Archives RPG, running one of the modules it came with. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend it – Cypher disappoints me at the best of times, and it’s a very poor match for a mystery, of all things. But, it’s a phenomenon of adventure design that I want to talk about today, rather than that.

In short, the thrust of the adventure was an evil wasp nest that was doing evil magic that was planted by some suspicious people that we needed to investigate. Since it was an investigation, it was quite open-ended – go to places, poke around, do some skill rolls, hope you find some stuff. For the most part, freeform. We did find some stuff! Several clues, enough information to get us a sense of what was going on with the evil wasp nest, etcetera. Among those clues, we found a book. Upon reading the book, one of us immediately suffered some Stress (the game is operating somewhat in the Call Of Cthulhu milieu), and was told it involved some strange geometry and hurt to look at. Ominous! And definitely relevant to the case. We pocketed it for returning as evidence later, and didn’t read it again, on account of it was injuring us on a mechanical level, and intentionally reading more of the magic tome that does evil infectious bug things seemed like an obviously terrible idea.

As it happened, however, the adventure was designed such that a key piece of information was only accessible by reading the corruptive magic book and paying the Stress tax, three times. The detail we needed to find was about something growing within the hive, which was rather awkward, since we had already concluded the hive was growing, and, in fact, made a point of pretty soundly destroying it before we were done. The GM had to workshop that the specific element they were growing within it had managed to survive, and thus, we had only partially achieved the goal of the mission. Which we didn’t know was there, because we hadn’t read the book, because doing so was damaging us for no apparent gain.

Now, I do think there’s a fair bit to criticize about this as adventure design, which again loops into my dissatisfaction with the system. But, instead, I want to pivot to a conversation I happened to have a few days later, in another context, about Call Of Cthulhu proper.

The key argument of said conversation was – Sanity loss (and, by extension, Stress damage in this context) is a flag. It damages the player, yes, but it signals to them also – here is where something interesting is, you should pay the tax and see it.

This was both interesting and confusing to me, mostly because it had just never crossed my mind. I’m not much of a Call Of Cthulhu person, I haven’t played a lot of it, but, just as a general principle when I’m playing games, I try to avoid random losses of resources. If something demonstrates itself to be a fire, I pull my hand out and don’t put it back in unless I know it’s worth doing. It’s a resource-conservative mindset, which isn’t always instrumentally correct, but it is, usually, pretty consistent. What I hadn’t been considering was the resource cost absent the context of the game. That is, as a piece of communication from the GM to me (or the adventure module to me, or etcetera). And, if I had, I would have probably considered it as a warning. Touch the fire, get burned. Here’s something dangerous, keep going and you’re gonna keep getting hurt. This would be a stupid and inefficient thing to do. Right?

But, that’s not always the case. As evidenced by people who were COC GMs in that conversation nodding along and saying that, yes, they absolutely use Sanity taxes as a signal that players should go here. The theory was, as they explained it – players are expected to look at Sanity loss as an inevitability. Not something they should minimize, but, rather, an inherent phenomenon of walking down the track of the game. Engage with eldritch horrors, lose Sanity, insert rest of game there. As a result, not losing Sanity is a downside flag. It means that you’ve missed the path you were supposed to go on. That’s the sign of the goal, not a wall.

Except also you can avoid some Sanity loss while moving towards the goal if you’re smart about avoiding the hazardous parts, and that is the most ideal play, so you should be doing that, from an instrumental perspective.

And there’s the muddle.

See… I’m bad at picking up implications that are left unstated. That’s part of what draws me to instrumental play. It’s clear in both its motives and the context it necessitates around it. Have goal, move towards goal. It’s simple. Similarly, if a game hits me with a mechanic that I know will be bad for me if it keeps happening (Sanity loss, Stress buildup, etcetera) then I’ll know that’s a dangerous thing, something to avoid having happen again if I can help it. An invisible manner in which that is also a lure to compel me to engage more, if it’s not stated by the game’s design as a reward and it’s not stated by the GM as a norm of play… well, what happened in the Magnus Archives game is what happens. I don’t even realize that I was doing something wrong until I get to the end and am told I was expected to come to an entirely different conclusion.

Instrumental play is preconditioned on having a sense of what you’re supposed to be doing. One of the big failure points of GMed RPGs as a medium is lacking that sense. I think every game that has gone wrong for me, I can point at least in part to an absence of direction as part of the problem.

And the thing is, if the GM is the one providing that sense, it gets worse. GMs have a lot of conflicting responsibilities to their name, but among them, if you’re good at instrumentalizing yourself, they’re going to feel obliged to stop you. Can’t let you win too easily, or the whole experience breaks down. (Maybe.) This is where the thing I said before comes in – the GM has to add more and more difficult challenges in front of you, and you run the risk of them getting frustrated and actively singling you out for punishment. Would the latter be wrong of them? Yes, of course, but it would also serve to rebalance things if you’re far ahead of where the other players are at in terms of ability to engage with the game. No options are good, in a sense.

If you get on a treadmill of harder obstacles and more power, you have, in a sense, bought into an illusion. Your optimizations don’t actually make you any more efficient, since you’d be facing a weaker challenge if you hadn’t bothered. It’s an illusion the GM is spending active effort into having to maintain, too, which isn’t great. (If you’re seeing a comparison between this and certain progression systems, that’s another story, but – yeah, many of those are illusory treadmills for the same reason. Giving the player a sense of satisfaction at getting more efficient, more powerful, more instrumental; without actually having to reckon with the consequences of that.) Is that satisfying? It can be! I find this sort of treadmill to be a good way to ease off my instrumental brain, for games where it isn’t helping much. But it doesn’t do the same thing. It’s still, ultimately, smoke and mirrors.

Instrumental play, more than many approaches, highlights the PvP nature of RPGs. It sets you against what the GM has in store for you. A lot of the time, it’s a game imbalanced enough that the GM could just wave their hand and win instantly. So it can really only ever go one way, for the most part. And that means, to truly instrumentalize yourself, you have to learn to read your GM in and out. Know when this is an obstacle to overcome, when it’s a warning that you put your hand in the fire for no reason, and when it’s a flag that you’re on the right track, which just happened to come with a bit of damage for your trouble. If you don’t know, or you guess wrong, it’s easy to fail entirely, no matter how well you play.

…

Stress

A lot of my RPG theory is born, I think, from finding it rather stressful to interact with people.

Now, there’s a lot to unpack there, and a random blog post for the public eye is not the place to do that. But, I do think it’s relevant context, and a lens worth considering. People are stressful! Socialization is a complex tangle of rules and norms, most left unspoken and yet harshly punished if you transgress. It’s not a very well-designed system, in terms of user experience – and it’s a fundamental substrate all non-solo RPGs are built on. Understanding how that influences the shapes and structures of play is fundamental to understanding the medium.

Instrumentalization is, in part, a social gambit. If you get everyone on board, then you don’t have to worry about that anywhere near as much. Are people passively unhappy with you? Are they charmed by you, and going to go out of their way to assist you? If you’re all working for the same goal, and you’re all focused on efficiently achieving that goal, these things don’t not matter, but they do matter a whole lot less. The implications of being favored fall away, for the most part, in the face of the implications of the rules and structures of the game.

If the gambit gets declined, of course, if the group isn’t on board with instrumentalization, you are now eclipsing them ‘unfairly’ (‘unfair’ in that you are not doing so by engaging with what the group wants to be the deciding factor of player significance) and that likely itself becomes a social repercussion. Which makes for a complex negotiation phase when moving into new playgroups – though, that phenomenon is certainly not unique to instrumentalized play. That negotiation always happens, and if left unsaid, it happens in the underlying passive-aggressive social layer of approval and disapproval.

Interestingly enough, though… social anxiety or no, the stress of instrumental play doesn’t end if the gambit is accepted.

Winning is hard. (I mean, sometimes it isn’t, and the GM is primed to let you win – but in that case, instrumentalization really flounders against itself. It expects winning to be hard.) You have to be on the ball, and doing you’re best, and you’re going to make mistakes. We’re human, it’s what we do. Sometimes, even if it isn’t necessarily a mistake, you’re going to make a guess and get it wrong. Mispredict something. It’s especially difficult when what you’re playing involves predicting what the GM wants you to do, or will let you get away with. There’s many variables to juggle, and if you don’t juggle them right, you’ll fail.

The first thing I feel when I win an encounter in an RPG is relief. I’ve made it through. I can relax now. I’d wound myself up a lot there, but it’s done now.

It’s satisfying, too, don’t get me wrong. I’ll be pleased by my success, happy to bask in the reward. But the first thing that hits is relief and fatigue.

It’s tiring, being locked in. It’s stressful. And it gets more distressing when all that comes to naught – either my best wasn’t good enough, or I couldn’t bring my best, and both are bitter pills to swallow after however much time it took stressing about trying to win. Loss is a looming threat, on an emotional level, entirely because this is a thing I care about. That’s tough! Even if everyone’s on board!

I don’t think my heart could take a game that’s all instrumental, all the time. I’ve played them, and at best they’re a sometimes food for me. I’ll need time to recover, and needing time to recover after a campaign of an RPG isn’t necessarily to be expected.

What I’ve found works best, then, is segmented play. A game with modes where I’m supposed to be going all-in, and ones that serve as breaks. A release valve of putting around between fights, to keep the emotions down.

I think these kinds of breaks are valuable! Even in a broader conversation than about instrumental play at all, just, having break time in between tense modes of play is valuable for any multi-session-length RPG, for the health of the players. It’s a good design facet to keep in mind, and it’s why things like downtime mechanics that serve almost no purpose beyond as scene framing are actually quite handy to have.

However, we’ve hit another intuitive snag. One that circles back around to our example of fictional positioning, of all things.

We just had a tough fight. We’re putting around. Getting a few character moments in, maybe. There’s another encounter on the horizon, but we’re not there yet, we still need to de-stress a little. Something about a beholder.

Someone asks if they can find a barrel of tar nearby.

We are now instruments again.

It’s a sensible consideration, right? Yeah, we’re stopping to rest, but there’s another fight coming. We have time to prepare. The smart thing is to use it. It’s much more difficult to use the environment in combat-time, setting it up to our advantage is clever, etcetera. Hardly any complaints from an intuitive level, and from an instrumental level, exactly what we want.

But now, I can’t relax here. This isn’t a break, it’s another phase of the test. If I don’t figure out the most efficient use of my break time, the best way to prep us for what’s coming next, I’ve messed up. I can’t afford to be doing these side character moments that I wanted to get to even though they don’t mean anything gameplay-wise, I have stuff to do! Heck, what if there’s some sort of character bond system to focus on? If I don’t make my character interaction scenes as efficient and value-positive as I can, I’m sabotaging myself!

This forms one of the big boundaries around the sort of break I need, and definitely one I encounter the most opposition to in discussions of game design: breaks need to be unimportant. Structurally, that is. They can be meaningful to the players and the stories they’re writing, in fact, I find they’re quite valuable in games that otherwise limit the player capacity to focus on character moments and interactions, but they can’t be vectors to win. At most, I find the aforementioned downtime systems to work decently well as a compromise – in Blades In The Dark or Lancer, you pick from a list of downtime options based on the benefit they give you, and then what happens when you play them out won’t change the game. It doesn’t shift the mechanics, after that initial choice – it’s a little bubble of break time, where you can do the wrong thing, have a character self-sabotage a bit, and not have it come back to bite you. It’s nice.

It’s, I imagine, what everyone who doesn’t play like this gets to experience, when they aren’t stuck next to a player like me.

…Kind of.

I started this post by discussing GNS, and its relationship to instrumental play as a vaguely-defined “other people do this, we don’t want to, let’s make our own thing for us instead of them”. I’ve had, in various discussions, the concept brought up that this play approach is inherently perverse, and, perhaps, there’s something wrong with me for engaging with it at all. It’s the mark of an inherently toxic or to-be-avoided player, the theory apparently goes.

Now, I’m not one for pathologizing preferences, especially my own. I happen to think that I am a perfect being and everyone could stand to be more like me. But, there is one factor to all this that I’m interested in noting, and picking apart a bit.

To wit – it is a worse experience to play alongside someone instrumentalized, if you don’t enjoy that sort of thing.

Forget the social gambit consideration, and just look at the experience of play. You’re faced with a challenge. The primary way you can engage is by overcoming that challenge. The guy next to you is really good at overcoming the challenge. You would like to have the spotlight every so often.

What do you do?

You figure out a way to outcompete. You get better at overcoming challenges yourself.

Or you don’t, and the GM starts posing tougher challenges to match the next guy, and now you aren’t even getting your normal share of success. If the next guy (I shoulda just named him) were to vanish, you probably couldn’t even progress at all.

If you’re not happy with that, if you don’t care too much about that, if overcoming obstacles is just what the game happens to mechanize and not what you care about? Yeah, I’d imagine you’d be peeved at Steve over there (I named him). You wouldn’t really be wrong to, either. Your experience lost its appeal to you, and your capacity to engage with it, all because of the way he approached it. One of you needs to change, and, in the passive-aggressive social context where just talking expectations out would be a faux pas, Steve has you beat, because the game is working for his side more than yours. Pushing him out of the group would really be the best option you have, and making sure someone like him doesn’t get to join back in.

(…If it wasn’t clear, I think [the passive-aggressive social context where just talking expectations out would be a faux pas] is a terrible place to be and this method of resolving this situation would make me think poorly of everyone involved. However, getting people to talk about their expectations is hard, doubly so when people don’t understand their expectations, so I get why it happens.)

Probably one of the best ways to avoid this mess is to communicate from the designer end. To tell the players, hey, please play like this, and not like that. I don’t want you to be instruments. Or I do! In a sense, that’s what the [Narrativism as game jam] perspective Baker wrote about was taking – a series of games all made based on a communicated designer intent to have players play for what drama they could find, and not try to win over everything, or any other such goals the players might have (the S was its own thing, potentially, for instance). These are gradients, of course – I brought up Blades In The Dark earlier as an example of a game with a somewhat comfortable rhythm for instrumental play, despite it being a descendant of the Narrativist game jam, because it actually can work that way. But the request is still there.

I read Eureka recently. It’s an urban fantasy mystery game. (The full title-and-subtitle are literally Eureka – Investigative Urban Fantasy.) For a lot of the time spent reading it, I was rather unsure of what to make of it. The most important segment for me was actually nestled away in a piece of GM advice – the GM is asked rather emphatically to avoid making their own adventures, as that would be a lot of work, and instead rely on the preexisting wealth of modules for games like Call Of Cthulhu. Or, in other words, the design of Eureka can be looked at from the lens of being a game built to run Call Of Cthulhu modules, which made several things make a lot more sense to me. I definitely don’t think it’s the sort of thing I would want out of a mystery RPG, but for those intrigued by the prior few sentences, I do suggest giving it a read.

That’s not why I’m bringing it up, though.

(Do note, this is a copy of a game in development, so a few placeholders-for-images occur here and there. The text is the important part, anyway.)

These sections are placed one after another, in explaining the principles of design and expectations of play for the game. Which I do really appreciate! I’m glad that games doing this sort of thing has started to catch on. It is nice to be informed as a player and a reader what the game expects of me. And, for the most part, these sections seem clear to me. I should follow the incentives of the game and the interests of my character to preserve their survival and ability to follow through to the end of the investigation. The difficulty should be tuned high from the GM’s end, because a certain or highly likely victory is unsatisfying in comparison to a hard-fought one. From an instrumental perspective, I ought to be on board with this. Except, the first thing they ask is to discard my prior notion of winning. In fact, they go as far as to propose that I “play-to-lose”. Which seems to declare an upper bound on how hard I should be trying to solve the case, surely. Specifically, if a decision would make significant progress, but remove an interesting situation, it seems I should avoid it. But, then, what if I consider remaining while at low Composure to be a more interesting situation, and I stay in a dangerous context? My understanding is the answer would be that’s supposed to happen, but that also means the incentives the systems are producing are now pushing against the goals it sets out for me. How do I know when I’m doing too much instrumentalization, and it’s sabotaging the interest? How do I know when I should be doing more? The answer is left unclear, and it’s on me to figure out.

And, to be clear, I understand why. But this, more than anything, is what stresses me out about instrumentalization. The idea that there is a too-much. There is a ceiling, and if you go past it, you should not have. But we don’t get to tell you where the ceiling is. You have to figure it out, and if you guess wrong, you’re Steve.

In the ever-spinning gyre of RPG discourse, there’s a term from some 10 or so years ago. “Flashlight dropper.” I believe it comes from Call Of Cthulhu gameplay, even, though I’m not certain of that. A flashlight dropper is a player who, when presented with a scenario frightening to their character, says something like, “I drop my flashlight and run away”. It’s a derogatory term. The point is, this action is so obviously foolish from an instrumental perspective, not only abandoning the group but depriving yourself of a valuable tool for no reason (at least keep the flashlight when you run away!), that players who do it are disruptive to any even-slightly-instrumentalized arrangement. If you have an objective you’re trying to fulfill, that act is actively sabotaging you.

If I were playing Eureka, I would leave this intro post simultaneously thinking that the game expects me to drop flashlights, and that group defeat would be inevitable if I did. Part of the logic behind flashlight dropping is that real people would do that. Real people are stupid! If I was panicked, I might drop my flashlight before running away from a monster. Would that make for a more interesting story? I don’t know, I’d be more concerned with the monster than finding out. But if the mystery was set up as Eureka asks it to be, I’d interpret that as a significant detriment for no gain, and telling the other players that our goal is to have a fun story, so actually this was fine, would feel pretty flimsy. It’s hard to look someone in the eye and say that counts as a win.

What even is a win?

I tend to get pretty aesthetically invested in my characters.

(This is another reason why OSRs don’t quite work for me. They’re pretty strong on characters as disposable tools, as far as instrumentalization goes.)

As a result, this defines, for me, a secondary dimension of winning and losing. If I get through a situation with my character looking competent and showing off their strengths, I’m happy! If they look silly, and don’t get to play to their strengths, I log that as a failure. It’s not a win in terms of the goal the players are working towards, but it’s a win for me in specific, and it’s something I’ll stop to consider before sacrificing.

That’s one of the ways to make instrumental play compelling on other dimensions, in my experience. Force players to choose between priorities, sacrificing one goal for another, and you can get interesting results. As a player, I enjoy dilemmas like that, and they’re much less solvable. It’s not a matter of picking the right answer, it’s deciding what answer is right. They make nice breaks from the puzzle of optimization.

I’ve been chatting with someone recently who has rather similar interests of play, especially in terms of instrumentalization. But, on this point, we diverge. She’s discussed modeling her characters’ dignity, well-being, and situation in life as resources to be expended gleefully for the sake of further resolving the primary goals of play. And this produces problems! Dilemmas like I proposed in the last paragraph are no-brainers to her, and when games bake them in, the balance gets thrown entirely out of whack. It’s just not a win condition for her, so it’s free points.

A lot of dilemmas like this rely on aesthetic player interest, one way or another. Endangering an NPC only means anything if the players care about that NPC. Losing a mission only means anything if the players care about winning missions. Most commonly, the ways games have to designate things as goals and stakes are one of: [here is a thing, please bond with it] and [here is a source of more power]. The former is where things like caring if your character looks good comes in. The latter is what XP is. Why do you care about winning the mission? You want to level up, don’t you? And you want to level up because that makes it easier to win missions. It’s a cycle, or so the theory goes.

There’s also a third option, [the game doesn’t continue unless you do it]. For games with high lethality, or even games like D&D 5e that just have moderate lethality but are happy to lock you into it, that’s why winning a fight is a goal rather than just surrendering from the get-go every time. (That, and surrendering not being a codified option, but you can always intentionally beat up your own party until you go down. And that sounds ridiculous, yes – but, remember. If that gets you to move on, and it gets to the end, that’s only a defeat if you happen to care about the things lost in the process!) In practical terms, this is what things like dungeons are. If the GM plops down an adventure in front of you, and you decide not to bother, then usually this is why that’s not an option. However, usually, people don’t want to invoke this one, so it’s a bit invisible vs the other two.

[Here is a thing, please bond with it] is very unpredictable. Whether the players care or not about a given character, or if they look good, or if the kingdom is recolored purple instead of red, the system really doesn’t know. Usually, this is left to the GM to figure out. They know what the players care about, they can put that at the end of a quest, or put it at risk if they don’t face this challenge right now. This is also hard to systematize – at best, you can say “put something the players care about here” as an open slot in a defined obstacle, and the players will figure something out to go there when the time comes. You might be able to say “players are obligated to care about this person and want their wellbeing,” but I’m not sure how consistently declaring that as a system would land. It’s usually all too interpersonal and fiddly for that.

The second option, though. [Here’s a source of more power]. That has potential.

…Or, at least, it seems to.

Here’s a bit of tech from Glitch.

This is a Quest, and it’s design that I absolutely love, except for the instrumental part.

Quests are composed of two lists that feed into a progress bar of XP. Major Goals, which are big events that give you a solid chunk of XP when they happen, and Quest Flavor, which give you 2 pips (XP for yourself is allocated to any Quest of your choice), and can happen much more consistently. More specifically – you, the player, have the power to just declare that a Quest Flavor happens. They’re little pieces of authorial power that you always have access to while it’s in progress. If I were playing this Quest, I could just say, hey, someone brings me food. And they do! However that resolves. They aren’t materially significant, you don’t use Quest Flavor to overcome obstacles in your way, but they do let you shape the world around you to fit a certain tone, and, since players are allowed to write their own Quests (with GM approval), you can get pretty nuanced with the vibe they create. As narrative-shaping tools, they’re quite nice.

Writing Major Goals gives players a way to signal interest in dramatic moments they might want to have happen, then. And, more broadly, the XP track helps to make sure that you’re never stuck in the same narrative arc for too long, while still being sure it has enough time in the spotlight to really last. They’re not only scripts, they’re pacing mechanisms for certain moods to come with your character. As someone who’s been known to spend whole campaigns with characters wrestling with the same internal struggles unless actively prompted out of them, the utility as a narrative pacing mechanism is something I so rarely encounter and I quite appreciate.

But.

When you finish a Quest, you get build points proportional to the length of the Quest, and power yourself up.

The capacity to write Quests and choose your own is a massive increase in authorial power, vs a lot of RPGs I’ve seen. The premise of Glitch also tends to lend itself away from concrete aspirations, and towards “I feel aimless and have no goal in life” as a thematically relevant point to the players, and thus a feature of play. And yet, it still gets compromised by this! Whenever a Chapter is nearing a close and someone’s Quests aren’t hit yet, they have to awkwardly shuffle through all of them to meet quota, or they fall slightly behind. The falling behind doesn’t actually mean much, but I’ve seen some pretty significant build point differentials build up, and even just on a player focus level – if they have the instrumental impulses I do, it scuttles nearly the whole operation. The Quest can’t even serve as a great signifier of how much more time should be spent dwelling on this particular beat, because they’re all trying to hurry through at the same pace.

Glitch is a better experience if you forget that you’re rewarded for completing Quests, and just use them as a neat narrative pacer. They’re genuinely quite good for that. But if you’re trying to win, they end up working against themselves. In trying to pull people like me into playing along with a narrative pacer, alongside other niceties (you get mechanical rewards for disappointing people, the exact sort of win-one-way-but-lose-another dilemma I was pondering above), the game instead makes it all the harder for me to set down my victory-drive and meet it on its own merits.

I think meeting on its own merits would be fun. I’ve had a lot of fun by doing that. Glitch is a solid game. And if I constrain my instrumental impulses to only when there is a mechanical or conceptual challenge to overcome, it can even work pretty well for that. But I can’t play all of it as efficiently as I can and get what the game wants me to get out of it.

If a [satisfying experience] is the win condition, then the winning move is to not try.

This is why I don’t like XP triggers, in PbtAs and the like. They’re written to direct players towards interesting actions in pursuit of instrumental goals – to try to get a player like me to move where I’m supposed to for a [satisfying experience]. And they can be quite cleverly written for that! But they just mean I rush through a quota really fast, and come out the other side without even having gotten what the game would have wanted for me. Yeah, I hit the right notes, but that wasn’t [winning] when I did it. It was just what I was doing to get the points.

You know?

The friends we made along the way

At the heart of RPGs, as they’re commonly conceptualized, is a paradox.

An RPG is a group improv exercise. It’s a many-vs-one competitive game. It’s a chance to explore characters in complex and fantastical worlds, see what they do, watch them overcome impossible odds. It’s a roll of the dice, and sometimes you lose.

“The goal of the game is to have fun” is a platitude. It’s irritating to me whenever I see it, and it doesn’t give me any direction to aim for.

But… it’s the only goal a lot of these games could have.

Remember the hypothetical instant-surrender adventuring party. What distinguishes a loss from a win, anyway? If the fight doesn’t stop you from moving towards the end of the adventure, why would you bother with it? If it does stop you from reaching the end – well, you stop playing either way, right? There’s no material difference outside the game, the only impact is that within the game, you get either a victory result, or a defeat result. Things get narrated differently, and if you don’t meet again, that’s all it’ll ever mean. Same as any game.

The paradox at the heart of RPGs is that they want you to care, but winning is the language they speak.

It doesn’t have to be. I highlight Quests not just because I really like them, but because they’re a method of game design that puts players in a seat where winning and losing, overcoming obstacles, doesn’t make sense as a description of what they do. Other parts of the game do put them in that seat, it’s not something like Microscope by any means, but you can’t play the act of writing Quests to win, beyond writing in the aesthetic beats you want to see happen – and that’s what you’re supposed to do. The only reason you can play following a Quest to win is that you get a reward once you hit its end.

But, I’m not talking about all the wonderful RPGs doing different things out there. I’m talking about the popular conception, where what you have as a player is your character and the ways they can overcome obstacles. That’s what you get handed, and it’s the primary path you have to influence the imagined world around you. That means that influencing it to become satisfied has to be a win, and not doing so has to be a loss. Right? What else could winning and losing be?

At the core of what I’ve discovered about myself with this post is – I like having the comfort of knowing that I’m doing it right. That I’m following a process as is expected of me, and whatever the result, at least I didn’t fundamentally misunderstand things. If I lost the fight, it’s because I zigged when I should have zagged, or the dice were mean to me, not because I should have just ran. This is why I favor mechanical structures over social ones in games – systems are much easier to read. I can read the rules and know how they go, but operating a human is a matter of understanding their mood and wishes and the social dynamic and that’s all very stressful. I can’t talk to a person and try to get them to see something my way and know I’m doing it right. I can only hope.

Instrumentalization is an approach to RPGs that lets you have that comfort. Here is a goal, here are the tools you have to work for that goal, use those tools and we’ll see if you’re up to the challenge. That’s where it comes from, for me.

Framing enjoyment as the end goal frustrates me because those aren’t the tools I have. I appreciate Quests because they, directly, are a tool for framing a satisfying narrative. They give me what I need to understand “hey, I think this kind of thing would be cool” as a goal to work towards. So I appreciate design like that, too, because I can read it and the way it signals me to act, and I know that I’m doing it right by following that.

When a game like Eureka gives me detailed combat mechanics and a stress resource to manage and skills to aim for rolling, and it tells me actual win condition is to experience a compelling narrative play out, there’s a mismatch. The reason for that mismatch is, the challenge is supposed to be a prompt. We play with the rules, watch the characters succeed or fail, and, with some distance as players, view the resulting shape with some satisfaction. Ideally.

I’m approaching games with the tools I’m given. If those tools are for overcoming obstacles, I’ll be playing the overcoming obstacles game. Whatever the shape is after the fact, that’s hard to prioritize in the moment.

I suppose, in some ways, it’s overly simple psychology, but I’m a straightforward woman. I think this is the mismatch that makes instrumentalization spring up where it isn’t “supposed to”. This is why it’s an observed phenomenon, and it keeps having to be denoted as either [what we’re not doing] or [what you must do to a minimum standard]. Gamism isn’t Narrativism. We don’t like flashlight droppers.

There might be an ideal band of instrumentalization to reach. There is, actually, it’s just not in the same spot from game to game. The important thing, though, is that RPGs are usually written with the assumption that you’re aiming for something else. You want a [satisfying experience] out of the game, out of the shape of a story it produces – how much that leads you to being efficient with your gameplay, well, that’s a bit of a non-sequitur, don’t you think?

I would like for more RPGs designed where the tools they hand the players match the responsibilities the players are trying to fulfill. I think that’s a good standard of design to work from, if you can. Until then, if you’re like me, I hope this read helped you to at least organize your thoughts. “The goal is to have fun” might bother you, like it does me, but it’s something people mean when they say it, even if it’s not much of an answer.

If you’re not like me, I hope this proved an interesting case study in the play psychology of someone with a very different approach. If you got this far, I appreciate the open-mindedness.

To be honest, I hadn’t expected this post to have gotten this personal. I was hoping to have wrapped all this up in a neat little bow and conclusion, but I don’t think I really have one, in all honesty. I’ve identified the source of why many games agitate me when I play them, but, I suppose I’ll have to be content to leave it at that.

So, yeah!

…This is a blog post, I can’t hear your answer. I don’t know why you bothered.

To some degree, the GM is just a role like any other. Plenty of games have clearly defined roles of several types, several have no delineation and keep all players as equal, some have rotating roles, most keep them locked after initial assignment. The dynamic of one GM and many non-GM players is just one enduring arrangement among several, and it’d be an error many pieces fall into to claim that’s always how RPGs work.

But, that is what I want to talk about today.

I have GMed before. I’m doing it right now, in fact. Not right this minute, but, as in, there is a game I’m running in progress at the time of writing. It’s a fun experience! To anyone reading this who’s never tried it, I highly recommend giving it a whirl. There’s an odd stigma in places about it, but, it’s very unearned. GMing isn’t all that harder than being a player of any other sort, and, really, it’s a lot of fun getting to control a whole world instead of just one character.

There’s a meme, of sorts. Mostly in D&D spaces, but I’ve seen it in RPG spaces overall. The “forever GM”. The complaint is, one player always has to be the GM since everyone else they play with refuses to try it out. It’s a meme I find rather frustrating, for a few reasons. It’s not true to my experience at all, everyone I’ve played with has also been a GM for various games, for one. For another, it’s a self-fulfilling concept. The whole arrangement is predicated on GMing as an unfun chore, and, once it builds up that reputation, it makes people less inclined to want to try it out, meaning they keep pressuring the one person most willing to do it. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen someone interested in a new game, but decide immediately that running it is too hard because they just assume that GMing is too difficult, and so, they just don’t play the game at all. Let me tell you, just as a personal tip, all of my capacity to acquire consistent play groups and try out the GMed games I enjoy was by GMing myself for people who were also inclined to run their own things, and getting them excited about what I was running. I’ve gotten to play games I thought I maybe never would, by running them, and then one of the people I ran for ran it as well! It’s a much healthier arrangement than all the complaints would have you believe!

And, really. There aren’t that many more responsibilities the GM has than any other player. It’s not as much work as people act. Here, I can list them all out now, it’s really not much:

A GM is a narrator and tone-setter. The GM’s job is to set the mood of the places, events, and people that come up in play. Giving them all identity is important, but the real meaningful part is selling a tone with them. Boring or repetitive occurrences will fade out of the players’ thinking!

A lot of the skill for this comes from paying close attention to your players. What kinds of themes engage them? What parts of the premise of the game excite them? You’re the one trying to tie this all together into a coherent narrative, or at least something that feels that way. Be a writer!

Alongside that, a GM is a world simulator. They’re controlling everyone and everything that isn’t the PCs, after all. (Maybe there’s a few special side characters the players get to control. But besides that.) The GM has to make that all come together and make sense. Where is everyone? What are they doing? Who are the major power players, what do they want, and how are they making it happen? When the GM poses a scenario for the players to deal with, it has to make sense. When something happens, the players need an answer for how and why. When the players want to try something unexpected, the GM has to know what the results might be.

Together, those two roles define the primary responsibility of a GM – to present situations to the players. Hypothetically, an RPG occupies a world as detailed as the real one. Ideally, the GM’s head contains that world. However, in practice, you have to present specific chunks of it. Contexts to exist in, enemies to defeat, conceptual challenges to their ideals, etcetera. These scenarios have to make sense as an emergent part of the world, and they have to thematically fit into the growing narrative of play. Together, that’s GMing!

They also have to make those situations mean something. If there’s no challenge, the players will glide through it and not really think about it. As a result, a GM has to be a tactician and an opponent. You have to be prepared to beat your players down, to be blunt. Most obviously, this is true in games with combat as a focus – you’re gonna control a whole set of enemies, and they have to match the entire rest of the table, or it’s gonna get boring. But, even outside of games like that! Are you setting the difficulties they’re rolling against? Are you handing them an obstacle progress bar they have to work to get over? You need to be making sure you’re giving the other players a run for their money. A GM who doesn’t know how to outthink their players and put obstacles they’ll struggle with is a GM people aren’t going to enjoy, much, unless they’re really uninterested in the game part of the game. (And if they aren’t interested, that’s a problem in its own right.)

But, then again, a GM can’t play too hardball. For the most part, your players are supposed to be winning. Remember the narrator role! You’re here to weave things together into a coherent story. How many stories do you know that have their protagonists lose all the time? How many actually serious stories do you know like that? Plus, the players have to be satisfied with their time. And remember how much power you have – you control the entire rest of the world. If you used that, you could absolutely just make them lose by arbitrary decision. That means, when you control the world realistically and with thematic appropriateness, you have to actively not do anything that would mess with the players too badly. You can react to what they do, but they don’t have the same power. You’re not here to win. A GM is a jobber and a heel – you look bad and lose so the players look good.

And on that note, it’s important that you make them look good. The players and their characters are the stars of the show. So keep the spotlight there! If too many of the important actions in the story are made by characters the players have nothing to do with, or, worse, that the players want to stop but aren’t allowed to, that won’t feel great. If too much time is spent with NPCs talking to each other and being in focus, then the players are essentially just there while you tell them a story, and that doesn’t give them much autonomy at all. They might enjoy it, but they aren’t really playing so much as just going along with things. The NPCs should exist in relation to the players, and be there to bounce off of them. Make them challenge, make them disagree, of course, but don’t make them outshine, and don’t make them have nothing to say. The PCs are the primary characters – the job of the GM is to control all the secondary characters that frame and exist around them. You’re there to be a foil and a secondary support.

Which, of course, ties into the earlier goals. Those secondary characters need to thematically play off the interesting aspects of the PCs to tell a coherent narrative, and they need to be internally realized enough that their actions are a coherent part of the world. No having people do things just because it’s convenient – you’re here to make this feel real. (But it can’t be so real that the PCs don’t feel special.)

But, remember. You have to keep them on your toes. Support them, keep them in the spotlight, yes, but don’t let them feel certain in how it all works. As a GM, you’re a plotter and a deceiver – you can’t ever show your full hand. The players are going to get cocky since they know they’re the center of attention. They’re going to get confident, since the challenges you present to them are supposed to be overcome. If they spend all that time confident and smooth, it’ll get boring. Throw them some curveballs! You need to have a plan for what’s going on, and the players shouldn’t be able to see that plan until they’re through with it.

So, if they guess what you have in store, maybe add a bit more? Oh, but that might be unfair. The ideal is that your plan catches them by surprise, and then they work to adapt and overcome it, and nobody has to pull any punches. If that doesn’t happen, you’ll get varying opinions on how much you should change things up or how much you’re allowed to change things up – whatever happens, you’re the one who needs to make it work. If the players figure out who’s behind the plot to bomb the senate and install a monarchy, and then they stop it, and nothing surprising happened… well, you’ve failed, kind of, right?

Of course, the players have to be interested enough to theorize. They have to care and wonder about what they don’t know, or there’s no point in you plotting it out. If they just tune out all the politics of it, you’ll need to make it pressure them into action, so they do worry about it. They rely on the local democratic systems to form a community supply of resources for dungeon-delving, or something, and now they have less equipment next mission due to bitter sentiment. But don’t force them too much, that’s railroading. Your plan has to be able to go off without a hitch, and the players have to be able to never learn it ever happened, and they have to be able to find out everything about it and stop it well in advance. But, none of those should happen. You see what I mean?

In short, you’re the wall maintaining the fog of war. The players don’t get to see the whole world, and you have to be sure the bits they can’t see matter to them. Otherwise, why would they try to find them out?

And that’s it. Those are, broadly, the core skills and goals that go into running an RPG out of the box. Practice all of those, and you’ll be right where you need to be.

…Now, that said. Running a game out of the box isn’t the be-all end-all of what a GM does.

Sometimes games are bad. Sometimes games are mostly good, but have a few bad bits. Sometimes games are good, but have a few bits that don’t work specifically for the tastes of the people you’re playing with, even if, in the abstract, they serve a purpose. Or, a lot of the time, the game is actively relying on you to fill in blanks, make rulings where the rules don’t cover. It’s rare that a system will claim to cover everything relevant to play. Resolving the rest is where you come in. As a GM, you’re a game designer in your own right. You need to fix rules that don’t work for your group, add new rules that do work when things come up the game can’t cover, rebalance when certain options prove too strong or weak, and keep on the ball with the system enough that you catch these things before they get too bad.

But, you know, also bear in mind your other responsibilities, and the limits they put on what you do here before it’s unfair. If a player has a powerful tool that lets them beat challenges, and you nerf it, and then the players lose… remember that you’re also the one posing the challenges to them. You’re the one trying to beat them (but not actually beat them too hard). If the players get frustrated, because the person trying to stop them has the power to remove their tools, that’s fair, right? It’s easier to buff a player whose options are weak than to do the other way around, when you get down to it. Though, of course, don’t over-buff, you still have to put the pressure on them.

And, on the other side of the arrangement, the game isn’t all you’re running. An RPG is a social event, and that means organizing people. As a GM, you have a certain level of social power over the other players in this context, so you’re the best person to set schedules, handle absences, that sort of thing. You also get to decide who plays and who doesn’t, which matters if conflicts come up. You’re going to need to be good at conflict resolution, and at expressing your authority without alienating people. It’s an extra layer of social work, essentially, but it’s not too bad if you’re experienced dealing with and defusing uncomfortable social dynamics. If you aren’t, a lot of problems emerge, so, best to be prepared, just in case. If a player is a problem, you need to be ready to intervene, or everyone’s gonna suffer. Even if they’re your friend.

Ultimately, though, there’s one goal each of these roles serves. One point to GMing. You’re an entertainer. You’re here to ensure that everyone has fun. If that means bypassing or ignoring one of the aforementioned roles, that’s how it goes. Some tables don’t actually want a serious challenge, and that means you shouldn’t be that for them – and that, if the game would present that by default, you have to put on the secondary game designer cap and tune it down to be easier for them. If that means an extended character drama complete with silly voices that’s mostly just freeform and doesn’t touch on the system at all, that means that’s where the job of the GM is. If the players aren’t having fun, something is wrong, and you’re the person who’s there to fix that. All the roles I’ve mentioned above are just elements of how to keep the experience fun for the players.

That’s all! See? That’s not so bad, is it?

…Isn’t it?

So, here’s the thing. Initially, I did want this post to be what I outlined in the intro. A call to action that more people give GMing a try, because it’s a fun time and presenting it as a terrible fate sucks for everyone. I stand by that, still! I think it’s good for people to get the experience, and it’s a great way to gather new groups and play new games you otherwise might not get to.

But, you know…

I just outlined a lot of work, right?

A lot of contradictory work, to boot. These roles are filled with conflicts of interest. You have to balance enough to challenge the players, but not beat them outright because you have the power to just change the rules, but if that balanced challenge would be dishonest to the world you’re playing in it’s bad to do that, but maybe that means the world is wrong and the game takes precedence? It’s all muddled together, and kind of a mess.

The thing is, for most games, all of these are responsibilities of the GM to some degree, but not evenly. Games that claim to discard game balance won’t discard it entirely because the result is nonfunctional in play, but they will give an answer to the question of, hang on, which should I prioritize? Games with clear win-loss stakes that don’t just slam the play to a halt (like unmanaged PC death, for example) shift the GM away from the responsibility of making it so that the players win. They don’t lose it entirely, but they get a decent way there.

Plus, you’re not going to get people to agree on the importance of these goals, either. I imagine almost everyone reading this had a balking reaction to at least one of the ones I presented, and, to be entirely honest, so would I. Some of these goals I think are just bad, or undesirable, or, at minimum, not for my tastes. But they’re all goals that I’ve seen people express, or act on, in the process of GMing. They’re all present as semi-consistent expectations. They are all, for some subset of the audience, things they expect a GM to do. If you’ve spent any length of time GMing, I imagine you either know how to do the things I’ve listed, or pointedly don’t do them when you run, with the particular mix of the two depending on your tastes.

And… that’s kind of strange, right? Looking at all this. A long list of contradictory goals, a massive amount of mental bandwith eaten up by them, and a large amount of stress to juggle when you’re trying to ensure that you haven’t imbalanced your priorities too much for the players to have any fun. It’s a strange position to be in, and, when it’s all laid out like that, it makes perfect sense why it gets talked about like it’s such a dire fate.

Like, of course people are tired of being put in a role with a mile-long list of contradictory responsibilities. Right? I find it a lot harder to hold that against people than I did when I started workshopping this post. And there’s more dimensions of work, which I haven’t even touched on. These are all your responsibilities in play – but what about outside of it? Planning encounters (and drawing maps for them, so many maps) if your game has fights, building a mystery if your game has mysteries, writing a whole cast of characters in advance, organizing the game in the first place… there’s a lot of work beyond the game, too. And that all very much compounds on itself.

Plus, you barely even get to play the game!

The game and its play

One of the points I harp on every so often in this blog is, the GM is a player role. They’re a player like any other. And, from that, you might go – right, so, they’re playing the game. And, that is true! But it’s also not.

[Play] isn’t just one thing, you see.

You sit there and you talk with your friends. That’s part of the fun, and you certainly get to do that. You all share talk on an imagined world, and you get to throw your piece into the pot to make it what it is. That’s also part of the fun, and, it forms a meta-layer of play in its own right, which you’re also playing. (The goal of this meta-game is to get your particular vision of the world and what you want it to be like to have as most traction as possible. In a sense, the GM authority gives you an edge in this game – but in another sense not! Though, I digress.) But, I mean the lower layer of play. The mechanics. The part where you take a bunch of mechanical toys and you link them together to try to make a shape where you win. The puzzle of gameplay, the thing the players do all the time.

You might have some of the toys, but you’re not playing like they’re playing. You don’t get the game.

You don’t get the win condition, in particular.

RPGs get talked about, a lot, as though they’re games you don’t win. And that’s kind of true, but not actually. More specifically, it’s more like a segmented series of games with discrete win/loss conditions that you move through as you go. Here’s a fight you need to win or lose. Here’s a vault you need to break into and get this thing out. Etcetera. The shape is different from a board game where you have your final victory in mind from minute one, but, having a goal and working towards it is one of the most common activities in RPGs – especially ones that lean heavily on a GM role. The GM is very convenient for this, in fact! They get to play the opposition.

Which should be a counterargument. Right? The players play on one side, the GM plays on the other, whichever side plays better wins. It’s competitive solo-vs-team, the GM absolutely plays with the mechanics like the players do. What am I on about?

And if you’re like me, that actually is the position you take in response to this argument. That’s where I’m at, at the very least as an idealized mode of play. That’s how I’ve played and ran games (ones that can work with it as an approach, at least), and I’d argue I was playing, then.

But, statistically speaking, you probably aren’t me. And I would expect that that isn’t your response, either.

I wrote about this before. (Among other things.) The prevailing sentiment in RPG spaces would object to a GM playing like that at all, and directly declare, hey, you’re not supposed to be opposing the players. That’s adversarial, or something to that effect. When you do play against the players, you’re presenting obstacles to challenge them, but they should overcome them. If you actually defeat them, you’ve screwed up.

Now, sometimes, players catch flak for the same thing. They might get judged if they try to win too much, called a powergamer or selfish or what have you. But there’s, comparatively, a lot more wiggleroom. One of the privileges of being a player and not a GM is the right to try your hardest. And, really, that’s the [play] as I’m discussing it here – having a goal, doing everything in your power to make that goal happen, and, whether you win or lose, having the satisfaction of being pushed and really making an effort.

And, how much that matters is going to depend on the person in question. I know some people who don’t care at all about that experience, and it’d make no difference. I know some games that don’t put meaningful pressure on anyone to try to overcome them. But, for the games that do, and for the players that do… usually, the players get that experience, and the GM gets the job of ensuring the players have that experience, rather than actually getting it for their own.

The GM’s got a different goal, see. A meta-goal. Hiding right in the implications of the last one on the list. The GM is there to ensure every player has fun, and that’s what they’re optimizing for. And that means…

Well, it means a lot of stressful and confusing social maneuvering, and figuring out the particular tastes of every player involved. (That thing I said about some players not caring about being pushed and forced to try to win from their challenges, and other players really caring about that? You have to spot that, and cater to both.) But, more relevantly, that means it’s a goal! The GM does have something to aim for, and win or lose at, after all. They’re playing a social game, while everyone else is playing a puzzle game.

The trouble with that, of course, is that everyone is playing the social game.

How to win at RPGs

People don’t really come to RPGs to overcome obstacles.

That’s, a lot of the time, the gameplay. And it’s fun to do! [People] doesn’t cover everyone, in the above sentence. It only sort of covers me. If you drop a game in front of me, tell me about the fights I’ll have to win and the puzzles I’ll have to solve, I can be satisfied with that. If I read through a rulebook to see what it’s about, and the rules are all about exactly that, then, yeah, you should come to the table prepared to focus on beating some sort of challenge.

But if you’ve read, like, any RPG before, and how their introductions frame themselves, you’ll know that’s not it. Hell, if you’ve just asked someone to explain RPGs as a medium to you before, you’ll know that’s not it. It’s not what people sell you on.

RPGs are collaborative storytelling and improv exercises and opportunities to indulge in playing a character, and all that jazz.

These aren’t activities people conceptualize as having winners and losers. And, for good reason – improv where you’re trying to have your way the whole time and not let the other guy do anything to contradict that, sucks. It’s a bad experience for the both of you, and also just rude to do. On the same token, however, even if your partner isn’t trying to push things away from what you want, if things never go in a direction you enjoy, and you don’t try to pull them towards that, at the end of it you won’t have gotten any satisfaction out of the deal. And, probably, you’ll make them feel bad, if they wanted you to have fun as well. (Which, ideally, they do.)

So, the ideal state is somewhere between those two. Everyone is getting some amount of what they find fun to play as an improv story, and nobody’s getting boxed out because of it. That’s what idealized freeform roleplay feels like, among other things.

That’s what winning at RPGs is. (Kind of. It’s actually slightly better practice to err in favor of satisfying yourself a bit more than other people, because you know your interests better – and really, all of this is going to be messy unless you’re openly discussing things as a group and willing to shift gears if someone is uncomfortable, but that’s its own beast.) That’s a goal that everyone is working with when playing, including the GM.

This goal is, at times, directly contradictory with the goals of the game itself. What if you, personally, would find the flow of the story more interesting if you lost this fight? Should you try to lose on purpose? Is that against the spirit of the game? Is that rude to your fellow players? The answers to those questions are contextual on what the game wants you to prioritize, and the answer can be pretty hard to tease out if it isn’t open about it. Even worse, if your fellow players have different answers than you do about what’s kosher and what isn’t. (And if they do, then, they’re unsatisfied and upset with you – which means you haven’t won the social game after all!) It’s kind of a mess, and navigating that mess is one of the reasons RPGs have a diversity of different priorities to their design. You can make games that privilege the mechanical play over player satisfaction, games that contextualize their mechanics as props to be arranged to produce that player satisfaction, games that focus on different sorts of satisfying shapes of narrative as what they produce, etcetera. It’s neat! And a massive headache, unless everyone’s on the same page.

Which brings us back to GMing, ’cause the GM is assigned with ensuring that everyone wins this social game. That means unless everyone is satisfied, and on the same page of how this game will satisfy them, the GM is on the hook to fix it. The trick for getting what you want in an RPG, for “winning” as I’m talking about it here, is left as, don’t worry, the GM will ensure it. Or else.

One of the inspirations for this post was reading through the quickstart of Realis. Realis is an interesting game. Essentially, the gameplay is informed by having a list of declaratively true statements about yourself and the world, and, if your actions are in line with one of those true statements, you just succeed. For instance, “I am a master of swordfighting” as a sentence lets you narrate yourself beating someone in a swordfight, and unless they have a statement of their own, you win.

It’s neat! I enjoy tech like this, I’ve appreciated it in Nobilis and I appreciate it here. And, here, too, there are adjudication rules for when statements clash. Each statement has a numerical power level, which increases over time as specificity also increases. It makes for an interesting balancing act – “I am a master of swordfighting when wielding my trusted blade” is a more powerful statement than “I am a master of swordfighting”, but it takes more work to engage. Similarly, it’s the duty of the GM to define the statements the enemies are working with, including their power rating. Without that, any statement would be just as true, so, incentivizing specificity means the GM needs to be putting solid numerical pressure on them. In fact, they only grow in power and specificity by experiencing failure at the hands of a stronger enemy statement. Mechanically, posing statements that are stronger than the players’ is the main point of interaction the GM has.

Anyway, here’s a snippet from Realis.

This is, I think, a fair thing for the game to say. I’m always in favor of games communicating how they want you to play them. But, on the same token, it’s asking GMs to not use the one mechanical form of engagement they primarily have. Or, at least – to only use it for the purpose of the social game. Posing sentences for the players to overpower or have to outmaneuver isn’t gameplay, in the sense of a challenge two sides have to overcome one another through, it’s props for the production of satisfaction.

That’s the trick to it. That’s what’s going on when people expect victory while playing D&D. That’s what is expected of how a GM engages with their mechanics, a lot of the time. Not playing a game, but arranging props for other people to feel good as they play around.

And… I have complicated feelings about that.

Murkiness

There’s a lot of GMing advice out there, much of it contradictory with itself. You can find advice on how to run a meaningfully difficult combat encounter and advice on how to make enemies make realistic mistakes and flee when they hit half health so the players don’t face difficulty that feels too much like a game. You can find advice on how to prep scenarios in advance so the players have things to engage with; advice on how to never prep anything because that’s violating the spirit of player freedom and truth to an emergent world; and advice on how to prep things in such a way that the players don’t notice, so they still believe in their freedom and the emergent world even if that isn’t really there. You can scroll to the first section of this post again. And there’ll always be more of it, and all of it is pulling in contradictory directions.

That’s because games want different things from their GMs. Realis up there wants you to be focused on the social layer of appealing to the players’ sensibilities, in particular appealing to their sensibilities of what an exciting narrative might be. Any number of OSR games out there will tell you to hold to realism of the world as a highest principle, and then never quite state that you should play the social game to be sure you appeal to whatever the players think realism is like, because their immersion is necessary for them to keep playing. And… heck. I’m a big proponent of games standing on their own merits, but, the quintessential bit of GM advice that always grinds my teeth in? [It’s fine to ignore the rules or get them wrong, as long as people have fun]? It’s true, right? Even just from a pragmatic angle, the people you interact with being socially unhappy just affects you more than not following the rules does. In the long run, adhering to a system gives more consistency to the experience of playing, but, when you’re a human being, a social primate, and not me on the internet yelling about elfgames, that’s a very distant priority. This is a social affair, and that means placating people and managing expectations to keep things smooth.

That’s the murkiness of GMing. It’s the murkiness of RPGs as a whole, but, a lot of the arrangement is set up to resolve that murkiness by pushing it onto the GM to navigate.

The role of the GM is, in many ways, a scapegoat. You can blame them if the system is bad, because they should’ve fixed it. You can blame them if the social dynamics don’t work out, because they should’ve moderated it. You can blame them even if you do everything you’re supposed to, and they do the same, and everything went exactly as it should; but you didn’t feel satisfied at the end.

And… I can’t in good conscience come on my blog and go “hey, being a scapegoat gets a bad rap, you should try it,” right?

So, then, approaching GMing starts from figuring out how to not be that.

Those priorities I listed at the beginning? Most games don’t ask all of them of you. Some of them do. You don’t have to listen.

Some of these priorities you’ll find easy. Some of them you’ll find hard. I’m good at charting out thematic events to hit the players with, and worse at holding a simulation of a world in my head. More importantly, some of them you won’t find fun. It’s worth experimenting running different kinds of games to see, but, start with what excites you. With only the responsibilities you would want to do.

Most importantly? Always ditch the last one. Having one person responsible for everyone being happy is a cursed position to be in, and, it’s got conflicts of interest with every other piece of authority you’ll have. That’s the one that makes you a scapegoat, more than anything.

Once you’ve got the set of what you’re up for trying, be open about that. Be clear about what the play will and won’t engage with. You’re not here to make meaningfully difficult fights, but you can make them feel in line with the world as it’s been presented? Cool! There’s players who will jive with that, and players who won’t. If they know that in advance, everyone will be a lot happier from the get-go.

And… yeah. Yeah, that does mean that some of your friends won’t want to play what you’re running. A friend group tends to cover a broad spectrum of RPG play interests, usually incompatible. And that’s okay. It’ll be a better social experience this way. (And, even if you value the game as a consistent friend group activity more than any of this – being open that they won’t get what they want if they play is still the best answer.) People deep in the RPG trenches tend to cluster around enjoying certain sorts of play as a direct result of this. It’s easier to play with people who like the same kind of play you do.

All that’s pretty hard for a newcomer to GMing, or a newcomer to GMing in an ideally-less-exploitative manner, and you’re gonna slip up here and there. Some of these concepts may sound fun, but not be something you can pull off in execution. I’ve been there myself. The important thing is to learn your limits, be able to adapt, and explain as such to your players.

To a lot of players, the GM is a black box do-anything machine.

Probably the biggest asset a GM can have is players that understand just how much that’s not the case.

After all that, I still recommend giving GMing a whirl. It’s a lot of fun, when it’s going well. Not fun in the way being a player is fun, they’re not even close to the same experience… but even so, it’s fun in its own way. There’s value in that experience, too.

(And, to the designers in the audience – all this is a short introduction to my real agenda, why I think the GM role is deprecated and contradictory tech and a more distributed or systematized structure for running games is well worth investing time in. Check out Emberwind‘s enemy AI, or, any one of several Belonging Outside Belonging games. There’s so much cool GMless tech out there.)

(But, I digress.)

So… yeah!

(For clarity, this is a post about RPGs. My thoughts regarding death in real life are a matter for another time.)

I get attached to characters easily, and, often, some of the most fun I have in games involves slowly exploring the nuances of their personality and what riles them up. It’s what I enjoy, and, naturally, if that comes to a sudden and abrupt end, that’s upsetting and inconvenient in equal measure. It makes me less likely to bother getting invested in whatever I play next, and it disrupts any ongoing plans and plotlines centered on that character. It’s just not my cup of tea.

This is, in my experience, a pretty common opinion. (It’s also, I think, a big source of culture clash between different interest spaces in RPGs, because what it isn’t is a universal opinion – but, I’ll get to that in a moment.) And, it’s most definitely a solvable problem, both on the system end itself and on modifying the system table-side. Even just making death an opt-in risk goes a long way to resolving this conundrum, let alone anything more nuanced.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.

There’s a game called Lancer that I really like, which I’ve brought up as an example here a few times. It’s a combat-focused mech RPG, and, in the course of that combat, the character you’ve spent all this time on can randomly and unexpectedly die.

Kind of.

The combat is, usually, giant robots fighting other giant robots. Enemies can be more varied, there’s rules for tanks and infantry squads and giant monsters and ectetera, but, that’s what the players are. And, for the most part, their character is the squishy pilot inside of that mech. That pilot is immune to all damage, can’t even be targeted, until their mech is destroyed and they need to bail out. Once that point hits, which is usually an adventure’s worth of attrition, the pilot can run around the map doing attacks for a bit of damage so the player is engaged a little. If that pilot goes down to 0 HP, they are downed and can’t play anymore – and then, they roll a d6 and only have a 1 in 6 chance of actually dying. And, for the most part, shooting a pilot just isn’t worth it vs shooting a mech, since mechs can contribute to the fight way more – this usually only happens if the GM does it on purpose or a big flamethrower blast clips the pilot or something.

So, that’s a lot of layers to get through before that actually happens. But it can happen. Technically.

I’ve seen it happen once, in all the time I played Lancer. To me, in fact! At the very final boss of the campaign, the last mission. We’d all gotten battered hard, my mech got wrecked on account of me making a few reckless plays, and then my pilot got caught in an area-blast effect, and I got unlucky with the d6 roll and died. A combination of misplays on my part, difficult enemy tools to deal with, and a few moments of bad luck in a row.

We actually lost that fight. We all died in the narrative aftermath, but I was the only one who died mid-fight like that. Our GM had prepared for that possibility, and had an epilogue prepped for the eventuality that we just beef it like we did, but, they were pretty anxious throughout it. They said they felt bad that this was how it went. This was the final boss, the big capstone of the whole campaign, the wrapping up of everything we’d set up. We were supposed to win.

That’s not supposed to happen

I have, a policy, or, really, a guiding principle of design. If something isn’t in question, don’t make it a question. If you don’t want a certain outcome to take place, don’t make it a possibility. If the game can’t handle the impact on character arcs and narrative expectations of a PC dying, don’t make luck have a chance to kill them off. For instance.

I stand by this. I think, in broad terms, it’s just baseline good advice for game design, and a lot of the problems I encounter in games are borne from that issue. (People get a bit too attached to the idea that anything can happen, I think.) But… is it actually true, for Lancer, that character death isn’t “supposed” to happen like that?

Well, to ask the question another way. If it is supposed to happen, why is it so unlikely? Why is there a specific writeup for how you can just clone your character for next mission with a minor personality shift rolled from a chart and that’s it? And, heck. Why are there tightly-balanced enemy designs, and pages on pages of how to design difficult fight objectives that might be won or lost, if, in the big final boss capstone of the whole campaign, we’re just “supposed to win”? What is any of this for?

Today I’d like to pick apart “supposed to”, desire, illusion, and fear.

To start with, let’s get the obvious and (in my opinion) meanest interpretation out of the way. Lancer has random chances of characters dying because it’s unrealistic to expect that that wouldn’t happen. Because, if a dismounted meat person gets shot by a mech, they might die, intuitively. That’s probably something you would expect to happen.

I say this is the meanest interpretation because I have a very dim view of it as a logic for design. RPGs are not systems of logical intuition. They are not engines of realism. They do not craft a world that is entirely coherent, because an entirely coherent world is an infinitely complicated structure. What they do is approximate that, and use those approximations to compose a coherent and enjoyable (for whatever “enjoyable” means) experience for the people engaging with it, and then, under the principles of design, are expected to tune that approximation to better suit the experience and needs of the user. If a game designs itself in a way that “makes sense” but is worse for the player experience, I consider that design a failure.

However. To argue against myself a little. The player experience does include their own irrational foibles. And one of those consistently is a sense of [makes sense]. (It varies from player to player and audience to audience, of course – but it recurs in multiple humans, at least.) So if a game does something that clashes with their intuitive expectations, then a subset of players will have their experience diminished, will be pulled out of the experience, even if those intuitive expectations produce a worse and less-well-crafted play experience. Learning to discard things like intuition is an active skill when engaging with RPGs, one I myself needed to learn in my own time with the medium. For players who have not practiced that skill, or do not wish to, this is an obstacle.

The next obvious angle, I think, is to interrogate our givens. Maybe characters are supposed to die every so often. Which, again, brings out the rarity question, but, that does maybe have an answer. You’re only going to be out and about as a pilot at the very end of the mission, for the most part, since Lancer is an attritional game. And even then, it’s pretty unlikely that happens. So, it’s on the table, but rare enough that it won’t happen more than once or twice during a campaign – without having to make an explicit “once this happens, it cannot happen for the rest of the campaign” type rule that people would try to take advantage of.

But, like I said. Most of my time with Lancer, full campaigns or otherwise, it never happened at all. The odds are too slim if that’s the idea.

But then, on the subject of taking advantage of the rules. I said that you can only have your pilot in play once your mech is destroyed. But that’s actually not the case. You can just dismount and run around the map, and if you’ve invested in an AI to control your mech, you can control both it and your pilot at the same time. That’s some extra damage output, from the small contribution your pilot would give. It’s, potentially, something that everyone would toss on for the free extra bits, if it weren’t for the risk. Right? So it serves as a deterrent!

Except, because of the aforementioned cloning thing, it kind of doesn’t? You could just have your pilot die each mission and have your AI run the mech, as incongruous as that would be. So, other deterrents exist. Your talents, a big part of your build, don’t work if you have your AI piloting your mech instead. There is a way to circumvent that, but it itself costs several talent points. Frankly speaking, the extra plinks of damage from the pilot just aren’t worth the cost, with or without the risk of death. The only builds that really play on this do so with an extra talent on top that lets their pilot do free heat clears, a rare commodity in the resource economy of the system. But that talent also makes your pilot have a shield that makes them immune to damage and pops them back in the cockpit when shot, safe and sound. So the risk still isn’t a meaningful deterrent.

So, what’s going on here?

I think the answer is a bit complicated. Contradictory, in fact, which is why it’s a bit hard to tease out one answer from the above summaries that feels like it gets everything. So, instead, I want to put a pin in that, and shift tracks to something else that’s been bothering me in all this.

That final boss fight. We were ‘supposed to win’ it.

Lancer is a game about fighting. Those fights are pretty difficult. There’s a pretty solid system in the game for giving those fights objectives that aren’t just [kill all the enemies], usually tuned so that when such an objective is in play you can’t kill all the enemies, you just have to hold them off from the zone you’re trying to capture for six rounds, or such like. The game wants its fights to be hard to win, and for you to be prepared to lose and the story to deal with the consequences of that.

This group knew that. We’d been totally prepped for defeat in many pivotal fights, with stakes clearly established if we failed our objective. Which is good! That’s, the best approach to take with these things. It’s what the game needs to make it so the fights itself aren’t just smoke and mirrors. It made the game as a whole a lot more satisfying, to win and to struggle through both.

But then we hit the final boss, and, that, we were supposed to win.

See, a boss fight is kind of a paradox, in terms of the motives behind it. You want it to be a big dramatic setpiece, with pivotal implications for the characters involved, since it’s capping off a whole arc, or potentially several. You also want it to be a struggle, so as to avoid invalidating those dramatics with a cakewalk. But. If it’s decently difficult, there’s a meaningful shot our heroes lose. If they lose, there needs to be some direction to go from there that still serves the dramatic wrapping-up-the-arc purpose, in an at least semi-satisfying manner. Sometimes that makes for a good hook for the troubles of a future arc, but, if it’s a final boss? The end of the whole going? That means you’re all going out on a losing note all of a sudden, and if the villain’s plotting something dastardly… do you just let that follow through? The world was destroyed, that’s a shame, hope you enjoyed the game?

There’s a lot of possible answers to these questions. Some satisfying, some less so, many entirely table-taste-dependent on how much of an issue they are. But, I think the easiest one is pretty apparent. Throw the fight. Give a good spectacle, pull in character arc references as needed, but make it so the final boss doesn’t actually get a real shot at it. You know, make it so the players are supposed to win. It kinda just, lines up better with how we expect stories to go, a lot of the time, and, usually, for players invested in the arcs of the narrative, how they want it to go.

I tend to get pretty invested in mechanical struggle, myself. I like winning, I’ll admit it. I’d rather win than lose. But, honestly, given the choice between a difficult fight and a free win, I’d rather have the former, even with significant stakes for loss. The thought of the victory just being handed to me feels, iffy. But… I didn’t notice, really, until we actually lost. I didn’t think, “gee, is the GM throwing?” even at points when, maybe, they were. (Which makes the loss a bit more embarrassing, but shhhhh.) From my end, as a player, it looked the same as any fight where loss was on the line.

Here’s a question, then, in that vein.

Does everyone like to lose?

…Well, that’s an extremely loaded question, actually, which I need to deconstruct a little myself first. So, bad job, me. See, I don’t like to lose. I’m rather averse to it if I can help it, and frustrated if I can’t help it. But, I just said that when I’m faced with a challenge, I want it to be on the table. And, honestly, even that needs qualifiers. I quite like games that are built on failure per se not being an option. I just got my beta copy of Kedamono Opera, which I should talk about sometime, and its whole tech is based around automatically overcoming the challenges before you, but you roll to determine what other tragedies are foretold in the process and how difficult it is to get through. I find that neat! I don’t mind that at all. But the game’s upfront about it. If I’m playing a game that says, hey, here’s a challenge, it’s up to you to play well so you win and don’t lose, I expect that to be true. If a fight is a struggle to win, there ought to be a timeline where I don’t, and it’s on me actually paying attention and playing well to ensure that doesn’t happen.

That’s what I’m asking. Do you think everyone is like that?

‘Cause, I don’t.

I’ve played games with people who always reacted to loss with frustration. Not in the way one gets frustrated at bad dice luck, or having misplayed, or thinking your fellow players misplayed, or etcetera – not frustration at the process, frustration at the result. I’ve played alongside people who have said, in the same cadence as before. “I was supposed to win.”

Now, in most competitive games, I think people would have a rather dim view of that comment. I imagine words like “salt” or “toxicity” are springing to mind. But, I’m not here to cast aspersions, because I’ve found that with RPGs, a lot of the time, the expectations are very different. I imagine some subset of the readers are currently balking that I analogized a GMed RPG to a “competitive game”. There’s an idea in the zeitgeist, in players and GMs both, that it’s specifically not that. That challenges are a performance to explore how people overcome them, but not if. You’re supposed to win.

But you can already see the problem, right? Or, there’s several steps that could be the problem.

The key string of words, in my eyes, is:

“I’ve played games with people who.”

This is me speaking from personal experience. It’s not only speaking from personal experience, I’ve talked to other people who’ve observed this, I’ve talked to other people who have been this person themselves, I’ve read a whole bunch of dubious RPG advice predicated on the concept.

But why, when I’ve laid out my tastes, have I been playing games with people like this?

The solution is obvious, right? Some games are built with losing as an active aspect of play, some aren’t. Those games will require a different design paradigm to be interesting. When I’m playing for the struggle to win, I should play a game in the former category, and if I’m playing alongside people who don’t, I should be playing something in the latter, or they’ll be unhappy. If losing is on the table, it should be something that’s supposed to happen. If a player isn’t here for that, why are they here, with me, in a game like that?

And I think the answer is… they aren’t. We’re playing the same game, yes, and that game is built with structural expectations, but they aren’t coming here based on the expectations of the game itself. They’re coming here with their expectation of [how these things are supposed to go]. The game tells them they can lose, and they say, yeah, but I’m supposed to win.

So, again. The solution is simple, right? These people who aren’t me are just thinking wrong, and need to change their ways in accordance with my brilliant vision. Ship it, I’m so smart, I love it when a thesis comes together in a way that lets me change nothing about how I think.

Except…

I’ve laid this out to people. (In slightly less rude terms, I hope.) I’ve talked to them about this, and what they might want. I’ve proposed games that aren’t built around playing to win and accepting defeat as a primary mechanism of play. Games where you are, structurally, preordained to win.

And the most common response I get is some variant of, that’s not interesting. That’s cheating. Where’s the fun in that?

Now, I don’t want to answer those responses. I think they’re very answerable, though it’ll depend a lot how compelling any one answer is to a given person. Instead, I want to posit an idea of why this is the common reaction.

To wit: There’s a disconnect between [what’s supposed to happen] and [what a game is supposed to include]. The game, as its own object, has expectations put upon it. When I proposed that a game should only contain things that are supposed to happen, in that moment, my logic diverged.

That sounds familiar, from our earlier discussion of character death. Why can a pilot die in Lancer, but practically speaking that’s just not going to happen? Because, while it’s not supposed to happen, the game, as its own object, is [supposed to have it]. If Lancer had its pilots roaming around, but no way for them to die, some section of the audience would say “hey, that’s not right”, even though that section wouldn’t want that to actually happen. (The game has some affordances to make it so even if it does happen, it doesn’t, as I mentioned before – you just make a clone with the same personality at no cost and move on.) And so, as an appeal to that audience, the mechanics are included, just made unlikely enough that they don’t matter.

Simple enough, even if I don’t agree with the logic designwise.

Except… (again…)

What if you’re someone who does want that to happen?

You know, I frame all this like I do because I don’t particularly enjoy character death as a randomized possibility. But, I’m not everyone. I know that’s a whole contingent of RPG players. And there’s games built with that as a baseline, and games without that.

A player like that could read Lancer’s pilot rules, right? There’s no law saying players of certain tastes can’t read certain games.

What then?

Well, some of them might be confident enough in their guesswork when reading the game to go, got it, there’s enough steps in the way that this probably won’t happen. But I don’t think they all would. I don’t think that’d be a fair expectation to put on them, given the game’s new to them in this hypothetical. There’ll be some prospective Lancer players who go in, comfortable and interested in PC death, and think the rules support that.

If they’re a player, isn’t that going to be a bit of a problem for their expectations?

If they’re a GM, what if that becomes a push in their eyes to nudge the gameplay towards circumstances where that does happen? And where does that leave the players at that table, who maybe aren’t interested in that?

You see what I mean, right? These are all reads of the game that people come away with. I’d be happy to argue that mine is the most valid read, that people just shouldn’t get other impressions of what the game supports like that, but, they have, and they will. I’ve talked to all of these people. My question is, why is this happening, and what does that mean?

Don’t we know what we’re doing?

RPGs are built on communication. They’re social activities. A lot of the time, they’re only social activities – you just, talk back and forth until you hit somewhere the game has opinions on. Understanding what you want, and what other people want, is core to the experience.

But it’s not automatic to the experience. If you’ve ever had to read a section on safety tools when flipping through a rulebook, you already know that. Humans aren’t psychic, and they’re all operating on different baseline expectations. And some of those baselines are often seen as [so obvious they don’t need to be said].

If you were to ask me, on a lazy day, on a day where I’m not really bothering to think about this post, about that? I would absolutely classify “PC death is intrusive and bad for a game, it should be avoided” as that. I’d just, figure that’s how it is for everyone. And I’m not the only one there. I have been trying very hard to dance around the D&D in the room, but, I recently happened on someone talking about the game, and they very casually talked about character death as an active intrusion, and, worse, a sign of a bad GM. That a good GM would actively rein in and change mechanics on the fly to ensure it doesn’t happen. That wasn’t even the argument, it was the lead-in to what their actual argument was – that was a given.

But, it’s not given, is it? It’s not as if someone could read D&D, where hitting 0 HP puts you right on the fast-track to losing your character, and deterministically conclude the game doesn’t actually mean that. Just taken on its face, I’d feel obliged to say the people who think that death is expected are right! I mean, it’s right there in the rules! But now they’re running the game wrong, because they came to a different unspoken expectation than I did?

That sounds like a social trap, and I don’t like those. It’s an expectation of coming to a certain conclusion, in defiance of what’s put in front of you on the surface, and a social punishment if you don’t come to that conclusion.

Buuuuuut, I am not here to gripe about the cultural mores surrounding D&D. (Directly. Everything I’m saying here does apply to that context, but it’s not specifically about that.) Instead, I want to loop back to one of the things I posited earlier, in regards to a new question:

Why don’t we just speak these expectations?

Why wouldn’t a game just go out and say that PCs aren’t going to be dying from these fights? Why would a player set a social trap of expectation instead of just say it?

(There are, more complicated social factors regarding the latter question. Players are in an odd position, and many are timid. But the former? Games don’t have anxiety, they’re just words on a page. They’re fine!)

Or, to put it another way.

Why would a player who doesn’t want this as a part of their game, say it’s [cheating] for a game to work like that?

I think the answer is – players are liars.

Yeah, no kidding, I just lined out a mismatch between expectations and stated interest. But I don’t mean that. I think a lot of players are lying to themselves, and more specifically expect games to do the same.

(And, I don’t think that’s a bad thing! Frustrating to design around, maybe, but I want to be clear – lying is morality-neutral, in my framework, for this.)

See, the answer to “why don’t people just say what they expect out of a social context” is that that’s hard and people often don’t know how to do that. And, trust me, I find that frustrating too! Navigating interpersonal stuff would be a lot more convenient if people could just hand you a business card outlining what sorts of interactions appeal to them or frustrate them. But that isn’t how people work, entirely, and it’s not how they expect to work. Without sitting down and dissecting their own tastes, it’s not contradictory at all to say both “I expect a game to have provisions for characters dying” and “I actively do not enjoy it when my characters die”. Those are just two impulses that emerge from a given player’s thinking, and that’s all they have to navigate with.

The onus is on the game, or, often, even worse, on the GM role, to resolve this. To turn a set of impulses back into a structure that suits everyone, while, and this is the important part, still appealing to all of those impulses in how it presents itself. Because [I do not enjoy PC death] is structurally more important, the game has to be built around that – but it has to claim to be built with both in mind, or one of those impulses will cry foul! The game is expected to lie to them, to claim it covers every base they could ask for, and then actually only do what they structurally want!

Now, I might have been a bit misleading before. Saying I “don’t think this is a bad thing” isn’t strictly speaking true. I think this whole arrangement is frustrating to navigate, often leads to a lot of stress put on whichever player is put in the GM role, and my smug neuroatypical-on-the-internet take is that clearly people should just get a hobby of dissecting their own psychology and enumerating their structural desires, and we can return to that business card idea. But, that’s dumb. People aren’t going to do that, and it’d be nonsense to expect that everyone would. So, this is something that RPGs have to work around when presenting themself.

It’s also something that we have to work around when writing RPGs. Because, while I like to put people in boxes, game designers are, in fact, a subcategory of player. And I think it would be foolish to say that examples like this are included exclusively in opposition to the designers’ wishes, the designer filtering out which of their own wishes are lies they want to tell is something worth recognizing. Character death isn’t even the only one of these in Lancer – there’s a mechanic I really hate in there, primarily for how intrusive and yet nothing it is, regarding the game’s AIs having a risk of going rogue upon getting shot too much, and it’s a very similar story. Extremely unlikely to ever come up, it’s a literal 1 in 20 chance upon taking serious damage, but directly reflective of a conceptual facet of how AIs work in this world. They’re big naturally-occurring machine intelligences that have to be calibrated to think in a human framework, and that calibration can be knocked loose, and this is a reflection of that idea. The mechanic itself, frankly speaking, contributes nothing and makes the game worse for its presence. But! Its existence is a thing the players will read and go, “oh, this is an important part of the setup, this is A Thing That Can Happen”. It’s a flag. It’s a lie.

So, mechanics can be there to provide signals to readers about what’s conceptually possible, even though the mechanics themselves practically aren’t going to come up. Using a part of the device as though it were an extra layer of paint. And because players are primed to read mechanics that way, sometimes you get people fundamentally disagreeing on what [the actually important parts] are, and that way trouble lies. My obvious conclusion is – think about this more as something to communicate, and that way you’ll be able to separate people who read character death in Lancer as expected, people who read it as possible but unexpected, and, me. Those boxes would probably have a better time playing Lancer with one another, than someone grumping about this like me, right?

A digression of discourse

Have you ever heard of “fudging”?

It’s a rather contentious topic. “Fudging” is the act of specifically changing the result of a dice roll (or other randomization method) to a different outcome that is considered more interesting, desirable, or [supposed to happen]. (You can probably see where I’m going with this.) Notably, fudging is usually only considered for GM-role players in particular. Non-GM players doing the same thing are usually said to be “cheating”.

I’ve seen a lot of stances on the concept, often hardline. Fudging is never acceptable. Fudging is only acceptable if you’ve informed the players in advance that you do so. Fudging is only acceptable if you skew the outcomes in favor of the players. Fudging is a necessary component of GMing and refusing to do so makes you a bad player. Etcetera etcetera. I have my own thoughts on the matter, I cannot resist a bitter argument between unchanging viewpoints, but, I’ll spare you that today. Instead, I want to look at the notion in the context of what I’ve examined above, and see what the contention of fudging might be able to imply about broader concepts of what is [supposed to happen].

At its core, the drive to fudge something is the same drive as to apologize to the players after they lose a fight. The game produced an outcome, and the players, or, specifically the GM, declared that outcome wrong. The philosophical underpinning of fudging, from that lens, is that it’s better to do what’s supposed to happen than to do what the game tells you, even if that makes part of the game an artifice. In that sense, say, changing the rules of Lancer so that pilots don’t have a risk of death when being downed (something I regularly do) is not unlike fudging in concept.

However, then there’s the deception angle. One of the common complaints I see regarding fudging is that it’s lying to the players. They are told they can succeed or fail, based on GM-facing mechanisms, but then if the GM chooses to turn a failure into a success, or vice versa, there was never any chance at all. If the GM told the players that this effort was just going to succeed, or so this contingent claims, it wouldn’t be as much of a problem. The core of the issue is when the players are being lied to.

Now, there’s an easy way to tie this digression back in. Some set of players of RPGs expect to be lied to, some really dislike the thought, this produces problems when those sets are poured into the same pool. It’s a simple conclusion, and, I do think, a true one. But, see, it’s not quite that simple. I’ve seen people in both categories. People who raise this specific complaint about fudging, but then actively prefer a setup like Lancer‘s to out-and-out not including death as a stake.

That perspective implies a difference in the type of [deception] it is. And, when I’ve asked about it, the most common answer I’ve gotten is hesitance to call what the game is doing deception at all, followed by, after my trademark stubbornness and charisma, a begrudging acceptance of that with the qualifier that it’s “more fair” when the game does it. That, if this is the standard of deception I’m using, most of what an RPG does is deception.

I recently wrote a bit about stunting, a mechanic I don’t particularly like, and I expanded my thoughts into the archetypical skill roll from a bunch of different systems and how they share several of the same problems. Naturally, I think I did a great job. But I’ve been mulling over a lot of what I thought about since then, stunts and the like are a topic I have a lot of thoughts on, and, I’ve started to wonder if, in the context of this post, I’m the problem.

That is – if stunts are only a problem if you think about them.

For those of you who don’t want to go read a whole different blog post for context, which, fair enough: stunting, in the broader definition I examined, is [if the GM or the players as a whole enjoy your narration, you are mechanically rewarded]. With that having several emergent social problems when people try to game it, or make it fair. If you try to succeed at a game like that, the primary winning strategy is to appeal to your friends in a cynical repetitive way to maximize how many reactions they give you. The incentives get perverse in many dimensions.

But what if you… don’t?

If you don’t, then, you kind of just have it come up when people narrate something cool. Some people will get it more than others, some will try a bit harder at narrating, and… this still does have social problems, several of the complaints I wrote about in that post still apply, but, also, many of them matter a lot less. The mechanic works better if people just take it at face value.

And, hey, that brings me back around to the first anecdote I shared.

I like Lancer. I especially like it’s combat, that’s the brunt of what it’s about. We faced several fights, boss and otherwise, over the course of that campaign. Many of them were close shaves, and I had a lot of fun with them.

If I had been thinking, in those moments, ‘oh but I’m supposed to win’, would I have enjoyed myself as much?

I’m honestly not sure.

I think, what I would have enjoyed the most is that actually not being the case. Knowing that losing was expected would make me feel less like I’d failed as a player if we actually did hit that point (vs just slipping up on a tactical level), and it would make the victory feel more genuine. But if the big capstone fights had to be like that, as a concession to the concept of a boss battle with high stakes? Maybe I’d be happier if I just didn’t think about it.

I did get my mech destroyed before, in that campaign. Multiple times, I played a reckless frontline bruiser type. And then I was running around as my pilot, attacking enemies for light damage and trying to stay out of harm’s way. It was tough! And it felt all the more tense because the risk of death was there. Even though it wasn’t, really. Even if I got downed, it was supremely unlikely. It was an illusion, but because I bought into it, it affected my experience.

I think that’s what I’m getting at.

I like thinking about the structures of game design. It’s a hobby, it’s a passion, it’s what this blog is for. And, I think for designers, it’s very important, and for players, it’s valuable to think about what a game is doing and why. If I’m playing a game, I want to dissect it. And then I’ll want to play in accordance with what it most wants out of me.

The thing I’ve realized in pondering all this is that a lot of players don’t do that. I don’t just mean that not everyone thinks about RPG design as much as I do, anyone could have told you that. I mean that I think there’s a specific joy in being willfully ignorant. In playing a game where you can’t meaningfully lose, and being told that you can by the system itself, and believing that lie.

I don’t think I want to do that, too much. Like I’ve said. I like thinking through systems, and I like it when games are honest about what’s supposed to happen in them. This whole story started with what goes wrong when you buy into a lie like that, and it lets you down. I believe that an honest game is a better game.

But, at minimum? This is going to be how a lot of people will approach anything you write. On a meta-level, they probably expect lies where there might not be them. Being clear about, no, I mean it, this one actually matters, is, probably more difficult a challenge than it might seem! It’s like trying to indicate you’re not being sarcastic. Everything you try will be just as commonly used in sarcasm.

But it’s worth it, I think. To try to be clear about that.

And maybe, sometimes a game will work better if you just lie about things a bit.

Like I mentioned before, I recently backed the Kickstarter for the translation of Kedamono Opera, a fascinating game with some tech I quite appreciate. I’d be happy to gush about it sometime, but I want to leave on a bit of GM advice that I think represents a fascinating example of how to use this exact sort of deception.

Every player is a monster with vibe-defined powers, like, say, spinning a magically-sturdy spiderweb trap. The use cases are vague, and left to the player to pitch and the GM to approve or veto. A similar arrangement to the stunting post from before. To the players, that’s what it is. To the GM, however, it frames their veto power like this. Not as a refusal, but a nudge. The point isn’t to say no. It’s to say, “give me some more to work with,” and if the player backs down, the GM is actively expected to intercede to give ideas of their own to make it work.

Facing the players, these powers are limited in use to what makes sense. The GM knows, however, that they can actually be used anywhere – the veto power is there to try to push the narration to feel more plausible, even in outlandish cases.

In other words, the player-facing mechanic isn’t as constraining as it claims. And because it’s smoke and mirrors, you get the conceptual benefit of a stunting mechanic, without the social limits being anywhere as strong.

That, I think, has a lot of interesting potential!

It goes something like this:

“When a player narrates their action in a cool or exciting way, they gain [insert bonus].” Or, even worse, if it’s paired with: “If they narrate their action in a repetitive or uninteresting way, they lose [insert penalty].”

Now, on its face, there’s nothing too objectionable about this. The incentives are very simple. We take something desirable for gameplay, having exciting narration and framing for actions, and tempt the players to go out of their way to indulge in it, because a mechanical reward is offered, and, we assume, the players want mechanical rewards. Simple enough.

However, you might already see some of the issues with it. For one, what is it that makes a certain piece of narration ‘cool’? How do we know if something is exciting, and, more specifically, exciting enough to warrant a reward? What happens if everything a player says is really cool, and they just get more power than the other players because of this? Do we have to raise the bar for that person specifically, to balance it out? What if someone’s shy? Wait, do the developers expect me to give this bonus a lot, or am I breaking the numbers if I do?

Usually, the answers start with “the GM has to adjudicate that,” and that means they end somewhere pretty messy. The impulse for this, too, is simple to understand. Suppose the other players adjudicate it amongst themselves. One of the things RPGs tend to take as given is that the players are angling for their characters to materially succeed, sometimes to the level of failure actively grinding play to a halt. That means the players have a vested interest in going “oh yeah that was definitely cool,” because they stand to gain from it. Now, that’s framed dishonestly, and obviously, most players aren’t going to be weaseling like that. But. What if they’re on the fence? What if, because of this, they decide to err on the side of getting what they want? Or, if they’re a conscientious sort, consider the opposite. Something they think might be cool, but, for fear of not thinking they’re taking advantage of things, they decide it’s not. In that declaration, they’re actively signaling less interest in the play than they’re actually having! That’s bad!

So, putting it onto the GM makes some sense. They have much less of a conflict of interest, or, rather, it comes bundled into the preexisting conflicts of interest of the GM role (which is a doozy of a topic all on its own) – the GM wants to meaningfully challenge the players, but still support their efforts to be cool and succeed, in theory. So, “you don’t get this free bonus at all times, but you do when you do something exciting and neat for the game” sounds well in line.

However. This doesn’t actually remove these concerns. The open question of, how much is too much, is still very much in play. What if the GM has high standards for what’s cool, and so the players don’t get the bonus dice the game’s math assumes they’ll have? Or, in that same scenario – what if the GM thinks to themself, “I’ve been giving this bonus die out a lot, that’s probably not right, I should raise my standards”? I’ve started thinking about [yes fatigue] and [no fatigue] as phenomena of GMing, where, when the game calls on you to say yes to a given player proposal enough times (or, to say no), GMs will end up standardizing to a more even adjudication just because they get tired of it. This is a prime example of where both can come up. If the GM needs to be asked if a given narration counts as cool enough, then, even if the game wants them to say no except for, say, once an adventure… that’s unlikely to actually be the pace they hit.

Now, obviously, I’m an advocate of communicating things. “You should get this bonus at most once an adventure” is a thing you can just say. You can lay it down as a rule, even! But I think that’s rarely something mechanics like this do, because they’re intended to be inconsistent and stochastic. A cool moment is unpredictable and unpaced, and thus, unbalanced. But, even if you discard balance concerns entirely, in my experience, the actual players at the table won’t discard those concerns, and that worrying will compound the buildup of yes fatigue and no fatigue.

And that’s not the only concept of social fairness at play here. What do you do if one player is just, better at narrating moments the group finds cool than others? If you shift standards for them to avoid unbalancing the game, that’s got a very real risk of feeling discouraging for them. But if you don’t, that’s the game specifically rewarding one player over the others for their performative ability – starting a competition it’s really not great for the social dynamic to have. And if a player is notably bad at it, or even just shy, that gets significantly worse. If they don’t get any mechanical benefit because they can’t pull it off, not only does that feel bad for them, having weaker mechanical control means they have even less control over the spotlight, pushing them into the background even more. If they do get the benefit anyway, then not only is the entire concept revealed to be silly and pointless (since, now it’s not celebrating things the table finds cool at all), it also prompts the other players to feel like they’re wasting their time for trying to make cooler-than-usual beats. If you have both a notably good-at-this player and a notably bad-at-this one at the same table, all of these effects compound. And, really, since the pitch of mechanics like these is “this way, you get more cool moments,” the ways it actively stymies people who might be awkward about that but want to try and get better are the most damning criticisms I could give of the concept.

So, yeah! That’s stunting, and I do not like it. Whenever a designer thinks to introduce it to their game, I highly recommend they consider the perverse social dynamics I outlined above and if they actually want any of that in their experience of play. (Maybe, if it’s a game about unhealthy social expectations, that can fit! But probably not.) Short showing today, but this was mostly just a personal grumble. You can all go home now.

The predictable twist

Yeah, you know I couldn’t leave it at that.

Consider, if you will, a different mechanic, with a similar shape. A player can get bonus dice, or an XP reward, or, any other [insert bonus] idea we might have had from stunting, when they take an action, if they can describe how that action makes sense. How it works, you know? Why is this time that you’ve tried to stab your opponent plausibly more effective than the last one? Riff something about chinks in the armor, whatever suits your fancy.

On the surface, that sounds very different. But in practice, I’ll argue – read everything I wrote in the previous several paragraphs. That also applies here! If a player is uniquely comfortable or uncomfortable with narrating little quirks of the world they interact with, or, say, familiar enough with how electrical engineering to bolster their Elec. Eng. roll (in this hypothetical system, skills have a strict 10 character limit to their names), then, you have the same imbalanced dynamics. If the GM gets tired of giving the bonus every time, or worried the game is getting too easy because of how frequently it comes up, that’s yes fatigue. It’s a different player skill being tested, a little, though both do end up having a core ingredient of [how well can you convince the GM to give you what you want] – but the dynamics haven’t changed. The shape of what that mechanic does, is still the same.

So, arbitrarily-adjudicated bonuses. I don’t like ’em. If you give a consistent pace to them, maybe a resource to spend as a bonus pool, that works for sure, but making it contingent on one player’s judgement of another player’s performance, that’s questionable. Make sense?

Let’s consider another scenario.

A player has a set of skills, which they roll as a dice pool on a challenge. Among their skills, they have Stalk at 2 and Slaughter at 7. (All of the skills start with S, which sounded cute to the designer but in practice is confusing for the table.) That player is currently attempting to sneak up behind and assassinate an NPC, an action that could ostensibly fall under either skill. It’s the GM’s job to declare which skill applies, based on what the player narrates they’re doing, and how.

In other words, the player has 5 bonus dice on the line based on how well they describe their actions to suit one of two overlapping skills, and both they and the GM know that.

See where I’m going with this?

Now, the thing I just described, very intentionally, looks like what a lot of RPGs do for skill systems. In fact, this example is pretty much taken wholesale from Blades In The Dark (which does not do the S thing, the skill names and numbers have been changed to protect the guilty), with one notable exception. Blades affords the players the decision of what skills are valid for a given test – ie, to analogize earlier, letting the players declare how good their stunt was. However, the GM then has their own parameters of difficulty to apply to the test – meaning, a GM could make the Slaughter roll harder and the Stalk roll easier, within those parameters. This might make the Stalk roll a better bet, despite the smaller value! But it also might not. And, even then. If it does make the Stalk roll the better choice, that’s the GM saying “no, you can’t do that stunt for a bonus” by any other name, right?

Now, let’s go one more layer.

A player declares that their character does something. No roll, no mechanics necessary, just, this is a thing that happens. The analogizable reward to the prior levels of stunting is, the thing happens. Most prominently, the thing they’re doing solves a problem or accomplishes a goal.

To that end, they explain to the GM why they think this should work. You see, nuclear reactors always have emergency shutdown buttons that can flood the irradiated material with antimatter nega-radiation to render it inert. Maybe they even cite some real-world science about that! Nega-radiation is a thing, you know. Look it up.

The GM can either accept it, or veto it, or maybe they call for a check of some sort, and we’re back on the previous layer.

In other words, a significant reward for the flow of play is shaped by the GM’s judgement of the description of the acting player. How well it lines up with [what makes sense] and [what should happen]. And, of course, if they do too much of that, the GM gets tired of saying yes, and when another player proves really timid and unable to do this much, that means they trail behind in how much they can contribute to and play the game.

This is what I called in the title the “tyranny of human intuition”, and, that might seem like an odd thing to call it, when I’ve been talking about social pressures first and foremost. And the reason for that is – I don’t actually believe in human intuition. At least, not in the context of tabletop roleplaying games.

There’s a concept that gets taken roughly as given, in my experience, in discussions of RPGs and what they do. That of the [shared world-conception]. That is, all the players, GM included, will, over the course of play, come to an understanding of the world the game is set in, and how it works. That understanding is the same to every player that possesses it, such that everyone can have an intuitive understanding of what would happen if a given action was taken in a given context. Sometimes I see this framed as the most important aspect of an RPG, even, with mechanics as a subservient tool for the purpose of creating this. (For some more detailed exploration of a few concepts ancillary to this, my ghost engine post goes into some detail there.)

Now, I don’t think this is entirely wrong. But I do think it’s somewhat wrong. Specifically in that, while people can share broad ideas with roughly similar shapes, the nature of human interpretation and understanding means perfect translation of thought between beings is impossible. There’s a reason communication is an art form. (Several, actually. Writing, conversation, arguably all art forms are in part communication.) And with an RPG, an actively social activity…

If you think you understand how something will resolve, but the GM is suffering from yes fatigue and declares it won’t work because you’ve done too much, your understanding was wrong. Any meaningful understanding of the world, then, inherently has to involve an understanding of the boundaries and habits of every other player at the table. The GM, especially, a lot of games I see give an outsized amount of adjudication power to that role specifically, but even if we take that as given. If we know the GM is prone to no fatigue, and will say yes more often to people who rack up a bunch of nos, and we know a specific player struggles to narrate things in a persuasive manner, we know that player will, potentially, be able to do things that other players couldn’t get away with, out of an impulse to throw them a bone. (And if we know the GM isn’t prone to no fatigue, we know that player very well might not be able to accomplish things other more well-spoken players could.) If we don’t understand that, we don’t have an accurate understanding of how the fictional world works and interacts with us, but if we do understand that, we’re acknowledging that the world-conception is inconsistent and influenced by social factors.

The [tyranny of human intuition], then, is putting these adjudications on the shoulder of a player role, GM or otherwise, with the baseline expectation that it’s founded on this [shared world-conception]. It’s relying on [what makes sense] or [what feels right], and thus, as influenced by social bleed… on some level, it reduces to the dynamic of stunting.

This is a common ingredient in many RPGs. I won’t say all of them, I know some definitions of RPG would take it as a necessity, but my stance on that is a hardline “nuh-uh”. (It’s always important to elevate the discourse.) And, to be clear, when I said at the beginning that stunting was a mechanic I hate, with each layer of that exploration, some of that hate dissipated. I don’t hate games that have adjudicated skill checks. (Well, I do hate some games that have those, but not because of the skill checks.) I don’t hate games that let things happen based on what [makes sense]. But I do think, on some level, a lot of the perverse social dynamics radiate outwards through the layers. And that’s something to keep in mind! The more you lean on this intuitive adjudication, the more no fatigue, yes fatigue, and the persuasive difference between individual players become pillars of how play shakes out. Lean on that too much, and tables with more of a disparity might very well have problems.

It’s something to consider some more, at least. Among other things, these dynamics get taken for granted so much that you get stunting, their worst form, quite consistently. Stunting’s an old mechanic! Games I otherwise kind of like have it! And because these factors aren’t really considered as potential risks, or things to be built around where possible, it comes up again and again. And that, I hate.

So, yeah!

So, a disclaimer. I am a rather negative person, in demeanor in general, but especially in critique. I try to make a point of reining that in when in public. On this blog, and on other public platforms I show up on, I have a policy to focus on talking about things that I think are good and worth getting eyes on. By default… I’m meaner about a lot of things, and that means I have to do a bit of ‘putting on a face’, even for this blog. (Sorry, folks, you’re not getting my entirely authentic self. To anyone parasocial and devastated, my not-quite-sincerest condolences.) This post is born from that, so if I seem crueler than usual, my apologies.

I have a long list of things, games, systems, people, that I don’t like very much. And those do tend to color the way I view other, related things. If I dislike a system enough, and I see a different game is built on that system, sometimes I just give up on that game without looking at it further. Sometimes, if I find an author’s work consistently bad, I’ll inherently mistrust the next thing they write. Is this unfair? Yeah, a bit! It’s a personal privilege due to there being a lot of games I can enjoy out there, so, I’m happier indulging my pettiness than I am trying it all no matter what.

Thus, I do feel obliged to mention. I, the author, have some amount of an axe to grind against Caltrop Core, a prior system by Titanomachy RPG, the author of, well, I’ll get to it. On some level, this colors my reaction. It predisposes me to disliking what I see, and, I’d feel manipulative for not acknowledging that. (I’d also feel rather needless enumerating my dislike of that system here, if there’s a lot of interest I can bring it up later, but, for now this post is already bitter enough, and I don’t want that to grow any more than it has to.)

That said, this is also the product of discussing this piece with several other acquaintances, whose reaction was similarly unpleasant, and who do not share that arbitrary bitter predisposition. Some of them are generally quite positive and lovely, in fact, and seeing the ways this upset them is really what prompted me to write this out.

This is Possibility Crisis, a… well, it’s not a game, but it’s a project for public contribution, a world to make games in. By, as I said, Titanomachy RPG. The concept is that people will take the origin point of this world, elaborate it by creating pieces of it, and thus, a community around the games and world will grow in the process of creating it. It’s a clever structure, even if these sorts of innate community-building endeavors don’t tend to appeal to me. If the seed was something that inspired me, honestly, I think I would appreciate something like it.

The actual content of this world-seed is…

Baffling, is probably the most generous way I can put it.

This is the general pitch on the itch page. It’s several decades in the future, magic exists, and only queer people are capable of it. Hence, several groups of magical queer wizards have banded together to construct a magical island as a safe haven, which travels the world.

The vision of the world beyond is… dubious. To those uninterested in the continental United States, it is an entirely blank slate, and within that context, we have painted a vague vision of calamity, with a strong current of Those Evil Southerners. For those without the extremely specific context of the intensely-tiresome US geopolitical landscape: the southern states trend more right-wing in their elected political bents, for a variety of reasons. This is, of course, bad for the people living there, especially the queer people. It also sometimes prompts a particularly awful sort of callousness from people inclined to tar entire states full of people with that brush, in the vein of, “oh, people in Texas deserve what happens to them for electing Republicans over and over.” As someone with queer acquaintances in Texas and Florida, this is horrendously cruel, and the common second comment in that vein, “perhaps they should move,” is also cruel, but more insidiously so. To lose one’s home, especially to have to travel far away to somewhere new, is no light thing, and claiming that it is the fault of those driven out is a horrendous failure of allyship and support. If you hear anyone say anything to that effect, that means they do not respect your value as a person based entirely on where you happen to live, and they are not your ally.

Now, Titanomachy has not said any of those things. And I don’t wish to claim that’s their intent in this paragraph. But it’s certainly the veneer, alongside a sort of sneering “our enemies are incompetent” vein. That is, Texan militias (all right-wing and evil) are inherently defeated by the “superior Mexican military,” a phrase that strikes me as very out of place in a text that would otherwise seem to benefit greatly from not fetishizing militarization, and Florida’s consumption by Disney is a running gag among people inclined to mock the Republicans there.

The island has some more elaboration to it, but, this is where things really start to get alarming. Mentioned in equal measure are a group of violent accelerationists and complete isolationists, and only then in the final faction do we get any notion of these being groups that are not considered fine and dandy in this hypothetical utopia. (The tone whiplash of half of them being called “Shiteaters” or “Fuckers” and half of them having names that I would recognize as, faction names in a story of magic and politics, is its own complaint, but much lesser than the structural concerns at hand here.) It presents the island as “a fresh start for anyone who wants one,” prompting one to question if we are to assume the Olives are somehow a ruling faction or considered the “right” one, since, that certainly doesn’t seem to suit any of the other concepts offered before us, but, an outwardly hostile veneer and isolationist perspective seem to be supported later on as the ideal, so, no?

It’s trying to be a queer power fantasy. And it is also trying to engage with politics, which queer life in the modern day cannot help but do. But these two goals are not easily compatible. A power fantasy is a complex thing to examine, from a political lens, and not one to easily indulge in. The concept being presented is a semi-isolationist state where queer people have inherent power due to the nature of magic, and inherent structural power due to magic being a core part of how the island sustains itself. This is presented as a triumph, as a utopia, because we assume the reader is queer. And thus, the reader will hear “this is a group of people who can exclude and hurt your enemies, and you can have power over them,” and they will enjoy that. However, I cannot have that and also be genuinely invested in or thinking about the politics at play. If I want to indulge in a power fantasy like that, a prerequisite step is forgetting what a power fantasy like that means, and what ideologies would sell it to me. I don’t want to think about suffering under the boots of power, and then be told, “now you can have power!” and have the followup left unstated but very much gestured at. Especially with what queer separatism has tried to do to people like me.

Which brings me to a more personal reason to feel alienated by this.

This one, I am willing to presume is not the intent. But it was also the first thing that, when reading, made me sigh and go, “ah, got it, this is not for me.”

As an aro/ace person, my relationship to queerness is, complicated. And that is immediately a fraught statement. There’s an unpleasant history of people attempting to externally litigate whether I, or someone like me, can count as [truly queer]. And, my immediate stance, and if you disagree, shut up, is that, yes, I do, and anyone like me does as well.

But, that’s easy to say, and more difficult to internalize. When I realized I was trans, a part of my initial rush of relief was realizing, now, I would likely never be denied being [truly queer] again. That’s an experience I’ve known several other trans people to share, in fact, which speaks to a certain exclusionary vein in many queer spaces I’ve frequented. If you aren’t considered legitimate enough, you will have an inherent push of discomfort at you for your presence in the space, and, often, that gets internally amplified. Which is a reason I’m discontent with the premise in general – being able to draw an easy line between [truly queer] and not based on, hey, you can do magic, simply will never sit right with me.

Here, however, it tells something more than that. It tells me that [love] and [yearning] are fundamental queer experiences. That to be queer, as this game-prompt describes it, those are parts of who I am.

I have, in my own scattered notes, a concept of a game exploring queerness. It’s something I come back to every now and again, but it always leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually make and publish it. The premise is as follows:

Magic is real, and powered by [true love]. You are among a group of chosen ones, who must use this magic to fight against a great evil. You are aro/ace.

Now, it is popular recently to expand [love] into more than just, attraction. Love for one’s hobbies, or love for one’s friends. But, I find that rather dissatisfying. There are words for those sorts of relationships, too. And it removes the exploration of the ways people actually do relate to attraction of various kinds, how that intertwines with their other forms of interactions, and what that is like for someone who Does Not Get It, especially when pressured into going along with it nonetheless. If [true love] gives power, and power can save the world, do you have a right to express discomfort at [true love]?

Like I said, it’s a bitter idea. It’s dear to my heart, but hard to work with for long.

Things like this remind me of it. Things that say, “ah, being in love, yearning, these things are fundamental experiences.” And, for a lot of queer people, I’m sure they are! I don’t mean to discount that at all. But I don’t feel that way. Even in broader, abstracted forms of these definitions, the times I would yearn for, say, a more-fitting body are rare. The times where I care for those I know intensely enough that it might be called “love” are also rare. Matching those titles to my experiences would, at that point, be stretching them to accommodate who I am. And if that, why not stretch them to accommodate anyone? If I love, surely straight people do. This providing of the magical bounds of queerness tells me, I am not queer.

No, worse than that. It tells me, if I found myself in this world, and the world deemed me queer, the powers I got would not suit me. I would feel invalidated for my empowerment. And, of course, I would feel invalidated lacking it! That would be the world cosmically saying, I do not count as queer. And, how dare you, world! You do not define me.

Now, these are critiques of the concept. And, like I said myself, I find the concept of magic entwined with love, or identity, or queerness, or whatever else, fascinating at times. I don’t want to say, this concept should never be explored, or this concept should only be explored in a way that satisfies my fringe existence in particular. If this expresses what queerness is to the author, fair enough. But it rings hollow, it rings exclusive, to the ear I have trained in my heart.

It’s not queerness as queerness is to me.

And now, the part that convinced me to write this post.

Some of these are fine. Mostly the ones exploring the island itself and the relevant locales therein. It’s the first and fifth one, the red ones, that leapt out to me immediately. It’s these that set off my alarm bells.

The last one, the JK Rowling pastiche, is just, entirely hateful. The whole of the prompt is, “You know this person you consider an enemy? You can ruin her life now.” There is no other way to read “she just laid off the majority of her security” and the mention of her not being at home as anything other than an invitation to intrude on the place and… well, it’s left unclear what, exactly, presumably whatever the players feel like, noting that they have literal magic on their side. It’s the entire power fantasy of the pitch laid bare, and exactly what I was disquieted by earlier. “Imagine you could hurt these real life people.” I can’t say I don’t understand the appeal, and I wouldn’t particularly bat an eye at someone having a fantasy of hurting someone who has done a lot of harm to the world, but you cannot sell me a power fantasy and a utopia in the same package. If I am to be working to foster a community and make a better world for all, or, at least, for those the queer separatist factions and the metaphysics deem worthy, then, do not also tell me “hey, here’s an opportunity to cause problems for this celebrity cameo you hate, give it up for being mean to JK Rowling, folks.” And in trying to be both at once, with a mean-spirited veneer, it simply makes me, disquiet with the utopia. It reads like a story being told in a fundamentally unpleasant society.

If I were to write anything for this setting, and, in truth, I did ponder it, it would be of those marginalized by the expectations of the writing. Of those that would not be considered fitting for the island, or the magic, and how they navigate a world where their ostensible allies are seemingly interested only in themselves and those they seek to hurt.

As for the first prompt, I wanted to bring this quote up. It was put at the beginning of the booklet, but I noticed it last. And, in truth, it frustrates me. Not least of which for the angle of, “oh so many people are secretly queer and haven’t even realized it,” but in context of the first prompt? Of the Bad Gay Man? In the same breath, it says both that magic is from self-understanding and if everyone could embrace who they truly are then it might not be locked to queer people at all, and that a politically powerful bastard who happens to be gay can be a problem in a way that he never could if he happened to be straight instead. He has power because he is gay. Not because of any deep inner recognition of himself. I have had many deep conversations with cis people coming to terms with their gender identity, with straight people coming to terms with their attraction. Many lovely internal explorations of who they are. That introspection holds no weight here. It has nothing to do with power. You can be selfish, and cruel, and awful, and so long as you happen to not be a very particular subset of arrangements of gender and sexuality, there you have it.

The prompt seems to take as given that queer people are good, and should be protected, and their vision of a bad queer person is one who hurts other queer people. To that end, being exclusionary, being cruel, being violent – these are fine, as long as you’re in support of the group of [truly queers]. There’s an us, and there’s a them, and we will empower the us and keep the them out.

Like I said, that’s a nice fantasy, but taking that bent to real modern politics that hurts a lot of real people is miserable.

And, I mean that literally. I showed this thing to a group of friends when I stumbled upon it, and, universally, people were hurt. It upset them, it invalidated them, mostly it just activated all of their “oh I recognize that shitty ideology” alarm bells and I can absolutely see why. And that frustrates me. To see something talking about queer existence, something trying a novel structure in the space of game design to build a design community, and the result is it hurts people to read…

I hate that.

And, I don’t know what to do with that. In all likelihood, this post won’t do any material good, right? The best I can hope for is someone reads this and learns a bit on other perspectives of queerness and structures that support that, but, that’s unlikely. Mostly, this is just me spitting vitriol into the void, and either nothing happens or it spits back. I’m wasting my time either way.

But, I had to write these thoughts out, and I had to at least know that they’re out there. For someone to read. I don’t want Possibility Crisis to exist in the world and have people look at it and all they see is people nodding along and collaborating with that. I don’t want to be part of a community that does that.

Honestly, at times when writing this, I thought, “maybe the queer community isn’t a place for me.” And I don’t want a document that does that to exist uncommented on.

So… here I am making an angry callout post, I suppose.

I don’t have a better conclusion than that.