Normally I talk about TTRPGs on this blog but here’s a diversion on some other game design I do in making other kinds of tabletop games. This is something I’m working on now, a flip and write about learning geography. I chose Africa to start with, and I came up with a simple idea: you colour in certain countries and then have to work adjacent. That seemed like it would work, especially when I saw that the Democratic Republic of Congo bordered nine different countries. There were about 50 countries in Africa, and if you dealt out three cards from a deck, I did the maths to figure out how likely it would be to get one of those countries be one of the nine countries that border the DRC.

The easiest way to do this kind of probability is to consider the opposite: if none of the three cards fit, then the first card has to be not one of those cards, which means 41/50, the next has to also not be, which is 40/49, and the next also has to not be, or 39/48. You can even estimate this: 9/50 is about 20%, so you need three times for 80% to hit, which is (8x8x8)/(10x10x10) = 512/1000, so 51% of the time in those three cards there will be no cards that matched, which means 49% of the time there WILL be a card that matches. Not great, but it seemed a decent start. (You can see how good an estimate this is because the first number comes out to 54%, very close to 51%).

As Cole Werhle observes so well in this great video, game design is about going around a loop as often as you can, as fast as you can. So I found a map of Africa online and randomly generated entries from my spreadsheet (I use google sheets). This let me test the mechanic VERY quickly. As Werhle also points out, playtesting is best done with a very specific idea in mind. I was able to just test this one idea. And it didn’t really work. It was too likely to not get a country that matched your cards. So I had a new idea, which was that if you couldn’t get to a specific country, go to one that matched a category of country. I went off to wikipedia and grouped African countries by their population, when they joined the African Congress and the height of their highest mountain. Now I had two countries you could go to directly, and one “back up” card that was “go to this category”. I really like Welcome To – it seems to me to be the very best flip and write, so my original idea was each card would also show on their back one of four kinds of bonuses you could score, and so you’d have this choice of going to the two direct countries, or to the back up, and you might choose depending on the bonus. That felt like a decent mechanic. It was time to test it properly. I’m someone who rushes to get to physical templates because I think kinaesthetically – I solve problems better when I’m holding the cards in my hand.

I went to the shop and bought a $2 pack of 100 penny sleeves, a pack of playing cards and a bunch of different coloured sticky-notes. One thing I often do is do this stuff while watching TV or watching seminars for work. A few hours of write, stick, sleeve and I had my deck. I was worried the actual core mechanic still wouldn’t work at all but I ignored that worry and made the prototype anyway, because I knew there was only one way to tell if it worked and that was to make it. It used to frustrate me greatly to make 100 cards and watch something fail but I’ve learned to get faster at making the cards and learned to tolerate the failure, because learning those things helps me loop faster. And I was right to do so because as predicted, as soon as I had the cards in my hand, I saw that three cards was just too many. I went back to two, and that seemed to click.

Now all I needed was a rough map. I found something online that had the countries marked and was white, imported it into my free Canva account. I added some ideas about bonuses to make some countries worth going to for more points, and borrowed another Welcome To… idea of using your bonuses to increase how much you scored for each area. I did NO stop to figure out if my scoring ideas were balanced or even good. All I wanted to test was: is it an interesting choice to pick the exact country and get a bonus, or go with a category, and will you always be able to do one of those two?

At this point I was still thinking that something would force you to choose which bonus you got – a boat, a plane or an elephant (which meant you could increase your scoring for each section). Those letters are part of an idea of ticking off country names by starting letter. I couldn’t make the boxes look good and it’s just floating there but it was enough to test! Pretty does not matter. Amazingly, the mechanic DID work: it was an interesting to try to colour in adjacent countries and such. I also realised an easy way to add choice was to let you choose ANY bonus. I took that very basic version to my testing group and it actually goddamn worked. People felt it was an interesting and fun choice to pick which country to colour in. The scoring was totally broken but remember: I wasn’t testing that.

But since the scoring was broken, I had another go. I also made boats only able to go to one of the sides of Africa. I got rid of the postcards since they weren’t scoring enough and added “rest days”. Again, please note how ugly this is. Still, it was enough to put in front of another testing group.

Now I was worried because until this point I hadn’t dealt with my biggest problem: how to put the information about each country onto the map. Instead, I was handing everyone a table to use:

That worked but was inelegant. I knew the game wouldn’t really be fun if you had to use a table. I figured the only way it would work is if every country was about the same size and then we could colour them and pattern them. So I went to an artist I knew and asked him if he could draw a map that was mostly geographically accurate but each country was about the same size.

One of the goals of the game was to teach geography and this just didn’t look right. I suggested we do it it with colours and patterns. It didn’t look great either.

This is where collaboration helps because my lovely artist was like “I think I can do what you want with symbols”. See, I’m not good at visual stuff. Lots and lots of game designers are, but not me. Unfortunately, hiring artists costs money and four years ago I couldn’t afford this, but I scrimped and saved and I could say “I can pay you $50/hour”. (All up it was around $500 for what you see here. Which eight years ago was more money than I could dream of having. But I scrimped and saved and busted my ass with other things.)

The next step was of course, to get it playtested.

As you can see, the borders are really hard to see. We had to fix that – but I knew that before playtesting. Again, I didn’t STOP though. I just asked my playtesters to ignore that part and do their best, and try to concentrate on the icons. The icons were what we were testing. And the icons WORKED. So now we just had to make the sheet clearer. We also got some good feedback about scoring, but mostly, we were testing clarity. So we looped on that part.

Now we have a way to add everything up, and the boats are much clearer. I also made some changes with scoring, and moved the numbers of points for things off the map. That way I could change the numbers without paying my artist more. Likewise, I got my artist to change some of the scoring stuff as well because I’m not made of money. I tested a few thigns, then got all the changes together so he could do them in one go. Always try to save money!

Playtesters were very clear on one big thing about this version though: there should not be elephants where there are no elephants. Thematic integrity is a big deal! Someone also said that writing ACROSS Africa made them feel like colonisers, so I changed the name. I also figured that at some point I’d want to bring goals into the game. I didn’t know if the goals would work but I figured they probably would, so again to save money I asked my artist to just add some suitcase boxes on the map for goals to come.

Now it’s time to test the scoring again. Will the numbers on the map hold up? I probably should have turned them into empty circles so I could change them with cards. But for now, it will do. I also tidied up the cards so they now have the specific country on the front and the categories on the back, making them easier to read. But they don’t need to be any prettier yet, because they are clear and working. I’m saving up to make the cards nicer, while I also test the scoring. That’s going to take a while and some spreadsheet work, but it’s only NOW that it’s worth testing that, because again you try to test one thing at a time. And it’s also clear enough to enter the Geo-Facts challenge, where it is a semi-finalist!

And that’s how the sausage is made. Tiny steps, iterating fast, iterating often.

B.F. Skinner was a psychologist who played a key role in revolutionizing our thinking about how animals and people learn and is known as “the father of behavioural analysis”. Skinner helped develop what we now think of as the four quadrants of behavioural adaption. If an animal does an action and either receives a reward or has a negative stimulus removed, they are more likely to repeat that action. If they do an action and receive no reward or a negative stimulus, they are less likely to do that action. Animals using this learning are said to be using operant conditioning which is different from what Pavlov discovered with his dogs, which is known as classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is simply the linking of two things without behaviour being involved. In 1897, Ivan Pavlov was studying something completely different in dogs and noticed that when he came to take them to his experiment they would salivate, knowing that the experiment would provide tasty food. This Pavlovian reaction is only classical conditioning because the dogs had no behavioural activity – they were not operating.

Skinner invented the “Skinner Box” which is an animal enclosure that features a light, a shocking device that hurts the animal, a lever the animal can press and a food dispenser. This simple set up allowed researchers to do some studies we would now consider unethical but they could easily change the nature of the environment for the laboratory animal. They could for example make it so one press of the lever produced a treat, or many presses, or a variable number of presses, or only presses when the light was on. Similarly they could associate actions with the painful shock. Very swiftly they found that the more reliable the rule and the more positive the reward, the faster the rats and mice would learn. Even if it took 50 lever pushes to get the treat, the rodents would do it, but if it was sometimes 5 and sometimes 100, the rodents gave up. They also gave up fast if the reward was only the removal of pain. They also learnt faster if every now and then the reward was bigger than usual. They like reliability but they also liked surprise.

Skinner and others reasoned and proved that humans were exactly the same: we respond to the rules in the environment around us. We do what reliably gets us less pain or more reward, and if we can’t figure out how to get those things, we shut down or act randomly. Skinner argued, then, that the problems of human behaviour needed to be examined through what we knew scientifically, rather than through ideology. He expounded these ideas more in his later life, in his utopian work Walden Two and his pop-sociology work Beyond Freedom and Dignity. What’s happened since then is that Skinner’s arguments have been boiled away from their origins down to a what some describe as a cold or calculating view of the universe. If everyone is working under Skinner protocols, then it easy to characterize every living thing as being transactional or mercenary or manipulative. However, for an autist, this is often just obvious: of course I don’t hang out with people who are mean to me. Of course I work on things that return value to me. Of course I model and encourage the behaviour I want to see in others.

Of course it can be manipulative: this episode of The Big Bang Theory is a good example of taking things too far. Sheldon is of course coded autistic and as sexist and trite as the show is and became, it got that right. The other day I said that my approach to stop a family member from doing something that bugged me was to just steer the conversation away from it if it came up and offer lots of conversation and engagement on other topics and my partner reminded me that I could also just ask people to change. I was explaining to someone that I tended to like people who liked me, so Skinner made sense and they said they liked me because they thought I was a good person and had value, and I realised my life of people-pleasing and conformity was driven by trying to fit into a behavioural model where if I acted pleasingly the people would care for me, and that was actually really bad for me because it meant I lived my life in fear of love and respect being snatched away as soon as I fell short.

I had little choice in selecting this adaptive strategy, however: I grew up being autistic so confused about emotion and also feeling negative ones like anger towards me at extreme levels so had to come up with some way to adapt and survive. And that’s the flipside to the coldness of Skinner’s ideas: there’s a path in them towards total and radical love and acceptance. Once you understand that people aren’t totally free to choose what they do, but are shaped by their lives and their environment and that all behaviour is rational at some level, you stop looking at blame so much. This floated across my facebook the other day:

It’s called “empathy” but it literally says “humans are plants, and are running on Skinner’s operant conditioning”. So is Skinner thinking cold or loving?

The truth is this idea of radical acceptance was Skinner’s big idea too: that our legal and moral systems are grounded in this idea that humans aren’t a product of their environment whatsoever, but are these fully autonomous creatures who exist in a vacuum. There are some good reasons for this ideology of course! It many contexts it matters a lot to treat people as not merely philosophical zombies, regardless of whether it is scientifically provable. There’s also a lot of dangerous “evo-psy” magical thinking where we reduce all behaviour to some magical genetic gift that explains every part of who we are (or worse, that magically makes other people better). But we also know the truth of environment as a factor and apply it to lots of contexts in socialist, progressive and liberal politics: drug reform, for example, is based on the idea that people who are addicts will do whatever they need to get a fix and are not inherently broken or immoral or antisocial. Skinner eventually repudiated all aversive-based training and science, because he believed a principle we’ve now heard everywhere, but never worded as well as in the Good Place: “People improve when they get external love and support, so how can we hold it against them when they don’t?” Skinner also believed in making the environment work to support the behaviour we want, before we even start putting in reinforcers, and that’s the ultimate idea of an inclusive society.

So why is all this on my gaming blog? Because opinion remains divided on how much Skinner’s ideas should intrude into designing games, and especially rpgs. In many ways the orthogame doesn’t need and should not have behavioural control: it is enough for the rules of chess to suggest that you lose the game if your king is lost and the name of the piece and his design as the tallest piece exists to communicate rules not encourage behaviour. The orthogame – any orthogame – still operates under Skinner ideas though: you are punished if you take actions that are suboptimal to play and rewarded if you take more tactical actions. Indeed, a game is considered good when and because it provides this accurate feedback! By most people’s standards it is a poor game that rewards total random choice.

We are of course never only in an orthogame, but that doesn’t mean it’s up to the game designer to deal with things outside of it. Reiner Knizia observed that it doesn’t matter whether players want to win the game or not, only that they act as if they do. In other words, game designers should not be expected to deal with spoiling play, because we’re not magicians. I have seen someone who was helping me judge a game jam once argue that a game was broken because it was possible to play only to spoil. I pointed out that anyone who did would never win, only prolong the game with everyone not scoring. In his view this was “not enough”. I walked away, because nothing is ever “enough”, really: you can eat the cards in Poker but that doesn’t make it a game which “permits eating the cards as a spoiling strategy.”

On the other hand, I do also believe it is important in some games to do as much as you can to block certain kinds of play. And I am a huge believer in the idea that a game is an experience and our job as designers is not only to provide a set of rules for the orthogame but to manage and direct the experience of the players. And I believe games are a great way to control people. My great friend Gregory says that art is a kind of mind control, and game design doubly so. Without consent, my job is to hack your brain and make you do things you didn’t choose to do. But where does my responsibility end, then? If my rules say “Shuffle the cards” and the players don’t, is that my fault? I usually tell my players that if one group misses it, it’s their fault, but if 20 groups miss it, it’s your fault. But the point is that it’s not always clear how much is my responsibility and my fault, and how much I can do and should do. I can’t stop you eating the cards. But I should do some amount of trying to stop you. It might be direct operant conditioning or it might be just designing the environment to make it easier for you to find the fun or somewhere in between.

The same debate comes up when we talk about gamification, a term absolutely ruined by shifting it from its original context and making it mean “how do we get children more addicted to video games”. We now know that gamification has very rarely changed behaviour in the last decade but that’s arguably because it’s always been misunderstood, misapplied, or applied to do something toxic. Games CAN change us a great deal, but that also has positives and negatives. There was an amazing image I saw in a talk at Freeplay a few years back which looked a lot like this:

The point being that gamification had prided itself on forcing people to change their behaviour (by putting Pokemon outside, for example) but there was a vast hidden cost, and it wasn’t actually really making our lives better. In fact, in some cases it bordered on repression and control, getting people addicted to behaviours. Games are mind control, which means we can’t just use them carelessly.

Someone on Mastodon the other day said that no TTRPG should ever reward players for actions, by which they meant that if you’re having to dole out bennies or XP for doing a certain behaviour you’ve already lost, because you should just have players that want to do those things. I disagree with this entirely. My designs are the exact opposite of this, but my view is not a popular view in TTRPGs! I am now very used to people telling me I’m crazy. I like that. I put those next to my game awards and the games which people told me were impossible.

But like everything in games – and in life – I think the point is there is no easy answer to this. The same is true of pondering Skinner’s ideas and radical empathy. There is no easy answer for where individual responsibility kicks in when it comes to culpability and accountability. There is no clear line where a Skinner-ist view becomes calculating or controlling versus empathetic and accepting. And there is no clear line where game designers should and shouldn’t exercise control on their players, or where they can or can’t, and where it’s needed or not. There’s no clear line between gamification that enriches and that controls. But I think we can learn a lot by thinking about it, so join me for more of that in Part Two next week.

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

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

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

Opinions differ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For those who came in late:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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