Here’s a thing I like to say which isn’t entirely true but it sounds good and it points to interesting thoughts:

In improv, everything you say is automatically true (“I’m police! Pull over!”) but there are usually strict rules about what you can and cannot say and when and how you say things (for example, you can only say two word sentences). RPGs, broadly are the opposite: you can say anything you want whenever you want (“I waste him with my crossbow!”) but there are strict rules about how and when things become true (“ok roll to see if you hit”).

I like that because it identifies the differences between improv and ttrpgs, and also identifies the similarities between the two things: namely that they are both exercises in sitting around and deciding what happens. Usually collaboratively with others, and usually without the planning involved in more directed forms of what-happens-creation, like writing. This is actually pretty impressive because it’s been historically very difficult to define what rpgs are and why we play them in a way everyone can agree upon. Which is of course why theory exists in the first place: to try to solve that problem.

The definition of “truth-creating” doesn’t quite help us delineate between rpg and traditional game, though: games and sports are engagements with rules that produce a final set of actions that are true, that are (outside weird edge cases, as always) unpredictable and unplanned, and we engage in a shared, rules-governed process to create what-happens. The difference, again, comes from theory.

What most people might not know, or could easily forget, is that RPG theory existed long before Ron Edwards crashed into the scene. Edwards’ sins are mostly well known, I think, but probably his biggest is convincing people that theory was a bad idea. This is always the risk of an enfant terrible – if they become attached to the ideas they spout, then the ideas die when the individual does. But before Edwards the same work had been done, although it was just as often GDS – gaming, drama and simulation. Edwards made two chief conclusions which helped poison the well: that games should pick one thing and do that well, and that games that did not do this were necessarily incoherent. Both these statements are in contradiction to how the theory was being used before Edwards. Indeed, we can look at Everway which condensed these terms down into its core mechanic: when it came time to figure out what-was-true in Everway, you either used karma (what should most likely happen in a simulation), drama (the best story) or fate (roll a die, broadly close to playing a game). This is how most (nearly all) RPGs work at some level, even if the rules say otherwise: we all (consciously or not) are doing all three things, all the time, switching back and forth between them, because slowly though the 1980s we took a weird poorly designed game-that-became-a-simulation and decided it was a game-simulation-storytelling thing.

And again, the point of GDS was not to turn it into a Cosmo quiz and draw battle lines but rather to help players talk about how they made these choices so they could get better games. The point of the theory was so that when we had discussions like this:

Player One: look, I think it is more ‘fun’ if every time we have a fight we are evenly matched so combat isn’t either a total bloodbath for them or for us
Player Two: I agree, it makes stories more exciting
Player Three: that’s nonsense, you are absolutely insane, why would that ever make sense, it would stop me believing in the world, because why would us jumping a bunch of novices be just as hard a fight as fighting some extremely deadly experts

I have had exactly this conversation many times, and I am always player one

We could instead go “oh, Player One wants to have an interesting mechanical Game experience, Player Two is thinking about Dramatic Stortyelling and Player Three values a sense of Simulation, and none of these things are bad and everyone is okay to do their own thing, and perhaps find a group where more people think the same way as you.

Now to be clear: that doesn’t necessarily mean, as Edwards suggested, picking ONLY one of those things for our rules design, or what we do at the table. As I said in Part One, I think a large part of the enduring appeal of the RPG is that there is all three of these ideas acting at once, and the tension is not a sense of failure, but rather it is much like the tension in a trampoline: the very source of the fun. Indeed, the ability to step out of the avatar stance into an author stance and make jokes like the cast of MST3K is only possible BECAUSE it is a game as well as a simulation and a story. BUT this combination also has its costs – we often cannot take the story seriously because we step out into this mode. And that is where I absolutely agree with Edwards. Trying to mash them altogether may be the essential part of what makes an RPG an RPG, but in doing so, I would argue, we often make fairly weak games, confused simulations and poorly executed story-telling machines.

An example of the first is in 4E D&D. To me, this is the only D&D that I find worth playing because it makes combat an interesting game; combat in most RPGs is about as much a game as snakes and ladders. You roll and see what happens. There are no tactics and few choices. But because 4E did this, it made people think it wasn’t even an actual roleplaying game. That was the trade off! We may in fact want our games to be poor games so they are better at what I shall call the GNSMISHMASH. Similarly, we abandon exhaustively detailed simulations often, because we find them poor games or poor stories – throwing away things like encumbrance or wandering monsters for things that are more fun to play or produce more drama. We COULD have mechanics that are completely dedicated to telling really amazing stories to each other but, much like 4E, a lot of TTRPG players instantly back away, feeling like that’s Not How It Is Supposed to Work. Because they want to stay as avatars, which again, as I said in Part One, resists good stories.

My most recent game, The Score, was designed with lots of goals but one particular one was trying to get the idea of shared storytelling to people who either a) bounced off TTRPGs or b) haven’t played them much. To that end I tried to remove all the usual barriers that make TTRPGs hard to play:

• Most RPGs take a few hours to play, even simple ones. The Score is easily under 15 minutes, from chargen to the end of the film.
• Most RPGs tend towards regular play. The Score is one and done.
• Most RPGs are big and bulky books. The Score fits in your pocket.
• Most RPGs have a lot of rules, even simple ones (hence why their books are large). The Score has just enough rules so that it’s not just “make stuff up” like so many other simple card based RPGs, but so few you can fit them on a playing card.
• Most RPGs need a GM. The Score doesn’t.
• Most RPGs need a fair amount of creativity and inspiration and ability to make shit up on the fly (or it puts all of that onto one person). The Score, as much as possible, doesn’t.

But the really sneaky thing The Score does is this:

• Most RPGs demand avatar play; The Score pretends to that, then doesn’t do that at all, which sets players free to tell better stories.

I don’t know if The Score is a TTRPG, but it certainly runs counter to most of the principles of TTRPGs, and as I say, that’s deliberate, because I think most, if not all RPGs operate in the GNSMISHMASH and thus are bad at telling stories. They CREATE stories, but don’t tell them well. And here’s the big big thing:

To me, this is really important information. It tells me that there is a thing that TTRPGs do, and it’s this weird GNSMISHMASH, and then there’s another circle, over there, that’s a lot LIKE TTRPGs, but is also not like them at all. I’m not saying there’s no overlap. But over here, in “games that tell stories”, is something that is so unlike TTRPGs that people who hate TTRPGs love The Score. And that to me means we should pay attention to what makes The Score different, and why, because again, the reason I made this game is I think not only does D&D deform the TTRPG hobby with its outsized influence, I think the idea of TTRPGs-GNSMISHMASH that most other games do is actually also doing the same thing: deforming our idea of storytelling games by forcing under into the GNSMISHMASH. And I think the only way to figure out why this is true is by using theory.

Because Edwards so thoroughly poisoned the well, however, we have people saying such nonsense that GNS is merely a tradition of design. If it is only this, then we remain back where we were in 1989, reading Prince Caspian, with no idea what we are doing and why we are doing it. If you insist on throwing theory away, I would at least ask you to provide an alternative.

Now look, I’m not the first lunatic to kick down the door and say “over here is a Brand New Thing, Outside the Establishment” – Edwards did this too, but I have the proof of concept and I can explain why I think things are different. And there are plenty of examples like this – Fiasco, For the Queen, Decaying Orbit and other “prompt” RPGs are doing much the same thing. Do we need to call them some other genre of game so people don’t get confused? That’s hard to say. On the one hand, it is pretentious to act like there’s this Other Hobby; on the other hand I feel like why not let GNSMISHMASH be a thing, and create a thing over somewhere else in the hobby that is free from all that baggage, and doesn’t seek to improve GNSMISHMASH. That’s always the key thing here: I am not here to fix TTRPGs/GNSMISHMASH because I think that is a fine and wonderful thing, perfect as it is.

I just want to do other things as well. And clearly? I’m not the only one. Here’s one more example from a Kickstarter update for a game called Lunar Uni – the teacher was so used to standard (D&D influenced) GNSMISHMASH they were using that game totally wrongly. They had to unlearn that whole style of avatar driven play.

And also, yes plenty of more traditional games have moved the needle on this issue, changing the nature of or expanding the amount of D we want in our mishmash. But (partly because dnd dominates everything) we can’t really get away from the core form. I will talk more about this in part 3.

That’s why I don’t call The Score an RPG. That term may just have too much baggage attached to it. I like what rpgs do. But the core way it decides truth is holding me back. And I got places to go, and people to be.

There is occasional nonsense spouted that ttrpgs are not emulative of other media and should not be thought of as such. This is broadly very silly: if they are not emulating media then they would only be simulating the real world, and a Star Wars rpg would be impossible. But I do think a lot of people making this argument are coming back to the GNS/GDS discussion which remains both relevant and interesting – and also obtuse, so worth revisiting, regardless of how The Forge ate itself into unimportance.

Probably the biggest thing this model gets right is that it captures the history of the rpg, because understanding that history is absolutely key to understand how and why they are designed as they are.

The original design of Dungeons and Dragons was just meant to be a game. You could lose (your character dies) and win (defeat the GM/other players/environment. It did not have the language to describe itself but it was a skirmish level miniatures game. And people still play it this way or partly, and so they should! The enduring strength of the genre, I argue, is because ttrpgs are at least three kinds of games in a trenchcoat, scratching multiple itches at once, each providing the scaffolding for the other.

Then all of a sudden the simulation idea began to emerge. You can actually see this in the BECMI/Essentials D&D books: the very first thing that happens in the basic red book is you are in a dungeon killing a goblin and then, right at the end of that book they hint that you might have a town to go home too and might engage in the most fundamental of all rpg activities: shopping. The expert and companion books describe themselves by expanding this idea of your life – we will pull the camera back and reveal your town has a road in it to bigger cities and you will begin playing what was then also not put into words but what we would call like a Castle Sim today. You’re supposed to progress to hiring staff and running a fiefdom. This is probably a big part of why high level D&D play has so often been poorly designed: it’s still trying to think in dungeons which was never the intent!

All of this comes to a head in 1987 when Prince Valiant is released and says it is not an RPG, it is a storytelling game, to which a lot of folks replied “aren’t they the same thing?” because by 1987 there has been already a vast shift in how people thought of ttrpgs in play. And YET – as I will show – both of these were still in a simulation kind of space, depending on what you mean (it’s complicated).

The simulation mode of play, though emulating fiction and still full of fictional contrivances, is basically centred around the avatar stance of play. You can also think of it as a Watsonian position. It says “let us assume you are Luke Skywalker, and inhabiting that person, describe the actions you take”. And to respond to any decision Luke makes, the world around him is modelled to respond to those choices. This kind of thing is why so many early dnd adventures have what is sometimes called “waiting for the bus” monsters: there must be 1d8 bugbears in room 12 and there must always be 1d8 bugbears in room 12 because room 12 is a fixed object in space and time. They may leave at 9pm and go home if undisturbed before then. When Eric the Cleric enters the room the GM can check the game time and say if the bugbears are there or not.

Crucially, in this model, it is important that the GM not simply say the bugbears are there no matter when Eric enters because Eric might be clever and wait for them to leave. This on the other hand might be intolerable to someone trying to tell a story. I remember being quite young when I read in a Star Wars rpg that if the bad guys set up a big front defence, you should not move it if they come in the back and I was like “that makes no fucking sense to me, you put the story wherever the players go”.

While I think the tension between some parts of RPGs is part of their appeal and often pulls things together, not apart, I also think that this tension between simulation and story (much like the tension between game and story) has seldom actually been analyzed properly or giving much actual language. As a result people often have extremely strong views about this stuff, and often assume their conclusions are obviously, prima facie correct and what everyone else believes, when of course the opposite is true. Nobody actually agrees on these kinds of things and nobody is quite sure how to talk about them and it’s a big part of why most ttrpgs are pretty floppy things, and why adventure writing is so shied away from.

The important thing is though that most games that we think of as being extremely story-based aren’t actually designed to tell stories. They’re just simulations with more dramatic conventions. Twenty years ago when we had something like Extreme Vengeance and other such games come along and tell us that we had to take damage in order to be strong enough to fight the big bad, they were only really putting their toes into the water. They still weren’t fully engaging with storytelling mechanics, because – and here’s the kicker: you can’t really do that while you remain in the avatar stance. We’ve got much closer with things like Donjon, where each success gave you the ability to add another sentence of description, but even it was still using avatars. As long as a player is given a character, they tend to put themselves into the world as that character, and the moment you do that, you stop thinking the way writers think.

I don’t mean that games with a huge emphasis on story don’t produce amazing narratives. But they remain simulations because they must become so when we put characters inside them. The more we step out and don’t do that, the more we quote-unquote “metagame”, the more we think how stories actually work. You can of course do both at once – that’s the beauty of the ttrpg artform. But we aren’t really embracing the power of the author stance to its full degree. I don’t mean we’re hampered by our foot in one camp, although it can slow us down. What I mean is we’re not unlocking the full potential of the other camp.

Much has been made about how Christopher Nolan’s film about memory heists is actually about making a movie, but it’s actually more about how storytelling works. When we watch or read a story, we assume the characters move around to go from place to place as if they are real, but writers don’t do that when they write stories. It’s our brains that do that. And when we step into RPGs, we forget that we can do that. We can be writers. Watch the scene where DiCaprio explains this – he says he’s talking about the film’s technology to go into dreams, but he’s talking about how we watch movies. How did we get here? he asks, which is very much like the questions we hear in RPGs all the time: “Where are we?” we ask the GM. “What are you doing?” asks the GM.

You can draw parallels here to how almost all the discussions about Inception are about explaining all the levels of the dream and how the characters move through them, instead of looking at what the film is actually saying. This is not the same as saying movies should just have vibes and not a good plot though, which a lot of hacks have decided to argue about: it’s just that plot isn’t the only thing. One of the points of this particular film is that plot isn’t story! In the plot, you might say “Later on, Cobb and Ariadne meet at a cafe” but in writing the fiction, you don’t think like that. You think: “we cut to a cafe. COBB sits across from ARIADNE.” Those two things are not the same thing. You think they’re the same thing. Because stories are amazing.

When I go to conventions and give people the chance to play The Score and let them realize it’s a game where they can tell stories, I get to see those moments where they stop asking “how did I get there?” and realize they are already there. And once you start doing that, you can unlock some big big stuff, which I’ll talk about next week.

I’m a great believer in not reinventing the wheel. I have a teeny tiny platform but it’s not nothing so every now and then I like to share that with others who don’t have one. So this week Elodie Lloyd, an Aussie TTRPG designer (check out their games here) is interviewing another Aussie TTRPG designer, Logan Timms.

I’m Logan, he/him pronouns, living on Wurundjeri country, just in the outer suburbs of Naarm. And I am a big tabletop games nerd. Broadly speaking I am a tabletop designer, I play games at home, and every now and then I’m on streams but that’s kind of rare. I also am one of the mentors for the ARC tabletop roleplaying mentorship program and sometimes I do stretch goal writing. Oh, and I have a podcast about lyric games.

Tell me about your RPG projects as an expression of your art and how it ties into other art forms, in your specific instance.

Great question. I do consider tabletop roleplaying games as my primary art form, like it’s my primary way of expressing myself, and that wasn’t always the case. It’s become that way as I’ve come to really enjoy it and come to understand it and all the different ways that a tabletop game can be designed. But yeah, as an art practice I often use tabletop roleplaying games to unravel or explore things like topics that are interesting to me, relationships or relationship dynamics, or tensions or dynamics that I’m experiencing in my life. And they can be positive dynamics or crunchier, less fun dynamics as well. So a tagline that I often use for my games is ‘games of connection and self-reflection’.

That’s what it looks like for me but I guess connecting it to other arts practices, particularly thinking about lyric games, that intersects with poetry quite a bit, so I have been dabbling in poetry just a little bit and it is interesting to do that. In the venn diagram of tabletop games and poetry is lyric games, and I feel like in the overlap where lyric games are is where ‘connection and self-reflection’ are commonly themes. So it feels like a very comfy niche to find myself in, which is fun. So yeah poetry and prose writing fit quite well under and around tabletop roleplaying games. Other arts or creative practices that I do currently are woodworking and that’s about it really.

Tell me about lyric games. I guess your personal definition of them because I know they’re broad.

Exactly. There’s no one unified definition of lyric games, but to me lyric games are games that often intentionally blur the line between reality and the game in ways that often evoke a very personal and emotional experience, that can sometimes lead to insight or personal reflection that is actually usable or useful to your real-life self. And I think that’s really powerful. I think a lot of lyric games are solo and so they allow you to have that time to be as deep or as vulnerable as you feel that you can, in that space being alone which can feel safer for a lot of folks. It can be really interesting to have that space to sit with yourself and learn something about yourself in a way that doesn’t feel like a self-help book or a lecture or anything like that, and it’s actually also fun.

There are some duet lyric games and some group lyric games as well. Having the safety of rules structure- you know, we’ve got the rules in front of us so we both know what we’re getting into and we’ve got agreed terms for how this is going to happen- can make space, can create that safety and structure for a really deep and intimate and personal experience between two or more people.

For me personally growing up I didn’t really understand the importance or benefits of just, like, sitting by myself, and self reflection, and yeah like ‘who do I really want to be,’ ‘how do I want to be’ and a lot more about being; rather than just doing and kicking goals and doing tasks and things.

Do you have any very very entry-level advice for someone who wants to appreciate games in the same way that you do; experience lyric games to some extent?

Oh, the other great thing about lyric games is they’re often very short; five pages or less. And so yeah you can dip your toe in quite lightly and get across a lot of them quite quickly if you read them all back to back. As for games that I would recommend: one of my all time favourite lyric games. Well, I spoke to the designer on Lyrical Ludology and he was like ‘oh yeah okay, if you want to call it that that’s alright.’ And that is Pyrescence by Achillobators on Itch.

That’s a great game, there’s no fancy layout. It’s just black words on a white page. Very simple mechanics and yet it was super powerful. If you allow yourself to really lean into the experience, yeah. Pyriscence is about a forest burning, and what burns away and what is left behind and what is saved, but the fire and the forest and all of that are a metaphor for different elements of yourself.

And then everyone always talks about We Are But Worms by Riverhouse Games, which is, yeah, a one-word RPG, and it’s on the sillier side, which is where Lee likes to play. I’ve been talking about RELATIONSHIPS and INSIGHTS and all this. I enjoy the serious end of lyric games, but there’s, like, just bonkers silly ones too. So, Pyriscence and We Are But Worms kind of show off that spectrum a little bit.

What’s something you’re passionate about that you’d love to see more of in the RPG space?

I think I’ve lightly touched on it in my overall approach to tabletop game design as my arts practice, but really explicitly drawing from personal experience I think can be really powerful.

Even if someone makes an autobiographical game and never publishes it, I still think it’s super worthwhile. Of course just because someone’s played my autobio they can’t go around saying they know exactly what it’s like to be a trans man. My experience is just one of many, but I think it’s a good way to even start getting your head around what that might look like or feel like; consequences or outcomes, or joys and difficulties, of various life events that have happened to a person, in a way that is more interactive than just hearing a story. For example if they were playing my game, they choose who they want to come out to or if they want to come out, and have the agency to make that choice.

And I know that all art has some autobiographical flavour to it, pulling from our experience. And I think with the autobio game I was just curious to see if I took that all the way to its extreme, what would that look like?

Links:

Logan’s games
https://breathingstories.itch.io/

LOGAN: An Autobiographical Tabletop Game
https://breathingstories.itch.io/logan

Logan’s podcast, Lyrical Ludology
https://open.spotify.com/show/4W8rWngzwLNOP3SU9RG97W?si=7kAdUZuqSlWIhXlVgC09hQ

Beau Jágr Sheldon’s Script Change RPG Toolbox
https://thoughty.itch.io/script-change

Pyriscence, by Achillobators
https://achillobators.itch.io/pyriscence

We Are But Worms by Riverhouse Games
https://riverhousegames.itch.io/we-are-but-worms-a-one-word-rpg

This blog post is too long and too effusive but it’s trying to say that The Isle is a well written adventure for three key reasons:

1. It says only what is necessary, instead of a lot of over-writing
2. By just saying what IS, it doesn’t direct how anyone should react to it
3. By virtue of the sparseness of the text and lack of an introduction, it can be read like fiction with an element of discovery.

Let’s talk about those things as once again we continue to hit the Non Trivial Problem in Narrative Game Design, of how to allow complete freedom of movement but still produce tight linear exciting narratives. (A problem that TTRPGs have never wanted to solve and never will solve, as always.)

The first point is fine. We have a bad habit in all TTRPGs of overwriting things, and saying a lot of words that add up to very little. The third point I can kind of jive with in that I appreciate making things more readable in general. We decided the default presentation of the TTRPG is technical writing but it certainly doesn’t have to be and it doesn’t have to be so bland. But I object to needing to read the whole thing before I start running it, because who the fuck has time for that?

This is the core problem with the linked blog: it is all about how good it is to remove the walls of the house without stopping to ask if the walls had a purpose. The adventure summary exists for a reason, and that reason is so a) we know if we want to run it without having to read the whole fucking thing and b) we know the scope of it going in so we don’t HAVE to read the whole fucking thing.

The second one is exactly why I gave up trying to run D&D adventures entirely. It was just so impossible to turn a bunch of laundry lists into anything resembling narrative, drama or excitement. The blog wants to assert that in the magic of minimalism, we have true freedom but in my experience, no we don’t. We have a lot of shitboring fights, is what we have. But I think this does touch towards an interesting question on how we solve the Non Trivial Problem Nobody Wants To Solve (NTPNWTS).

There is something to be said for the model used in so much D&D and the Isle, the what I call The Waiting For A Bus model, because everyone is just remaining in situ until encountered, and the virtue is, indeed, that you have lots of lovely randomness. The downside is that the randomness isn’t very random, because if it doesn’t matter what order you go in, then it doesn’t matter what order you go in. Random noise is just noise. Again, this is why the problem is hard: how do you allow for maximum randomness but also produce something out of it? But I think that IS a good question and I think we definitely do often overwrite a lot trying and typically failing to find good answers. Throwing away all consideration or responsibility for narrative and going “they’re all waiting for a bus, go for it” is at least an aesthetic choice, as opposed to fucking up a railroad and then pretending the characters have agency.

Call me crazy, though, but I think there are lots of clever ways you can have your cake and eat it too, and there quite a few games playing in that space: very random, completely player driven, always unique, but also not just a floor plan. There is also a sense that the Isle does this too because you will eventually, one supposes, find closure in final rooms (unless you, you know, do what most gamers do faced with a floor plan, which is murder everything in room one, leave, go back to village, level up, come back with a large amount of portable lava, fill dungeon with lava, realise lava has melted the treasure, blame the GM for not reminding them and then get in a fistfight). I can’t tell if The Isle is any good however, because I’m not going to read the whole thing. It should have had a blurb.

Sometimes it feels like all TV is weird now, because it all has to be eight to ten episodes and tell one gigantic story, and set up series two but also stand alone and ensure that every episode is brilliant but also that you watch all the way to the end… and so shows like The Office or The Sopranos just couldn’t exist. And then you have Only Murders in the Building which rises to the format effortlessly. The murder mystery is perfect for this new format of prestige TV. An out of work old TV detective teaming up with a pompous producer and a tween would actually be exactly how you would write an old 1980s TV show, when you think about it, and there would be mysteries every episode. Yet in adapting to this new format it feels fresh. It doesn’t help that Steve Martin is a comic genius, the cast is flawless, the direction and photography stunning, the settings gorgeous and the costuming unbelievable. I always feel very spoiled when a new series begins. When Rian Johnson makes a movie it’s like I know this one BBQ place in a back-alley that somehow foodies also like but it’s really just that this guy and I know each other and he and I vibe. When Only Murders comes back it’s like I’m at a fancy New York restaurant and the chef would like me to try some new EXPERIMENT. It’s decadent, but it’s also as comfortable as going back to your parents’ for a home cooked meal.

Naturally, I want to do it justice with Partners. Perhaps you do too. Perhaps this is the jog of an elbow you need to pull out your rulebook and play along with your own mystery in your own building.

OMITB doesn’t look like your standard two-act Partners show but Martin and Short are absolutely the stick in the mud and the loose cannon. And Mabel is a combination of Oddball and Touchstone, or if you like, a second Straight Shooter. The core rules of Partners says to take turns with who sets the shot up and who concludes it, but you can just as easily pass the jobs around in a circle. Any participant can set up a question and anyone can resolve it. Or, for an OMITB feel, have the third player describe the architecture, set dressing or costuming in the scene, before or after the crime takes place. I’d do perhaps three scenes per “episode”, then break, and doing the finale in one final episode, for a five part series. It’s always a bit shorter in an RPG – no room for montages or lingering shots or extra jokes added in the “punch-up” (actually those are the jokes your friends do around the edges, of course).

(Don’t worry if your show gets too silly. It might another great show about an old TV detective solving mysteries, like Lookwell)

If you want some extra tables to get you in the OMITB mood, you can substitute this one below to get your Victim and the one following to get your four Suspects. You might also find inspiration in the Teatime Files, the expansion by Cameron Hays which focusses on cosier murder settings and styles.

Ambrose Bierce was one of the 19th century’s greatest minds and sharpest wits and his most prominent legacy was his Devil’s Dictionary. Not only does it continue to delight readers, it has also prompted others of the passing 120 years since it was published to add entries in a similar style, so I thought I would have a go today with some new entries. I encourage you to add or email me your own.

Asymmetrical: A magic word that helps dispel the wrath of Playtesters (q.v).

BGG Rating: A device fitted to a game by a website to announce how impressive the owner of the game is.

Broken: A state occupied by games which you do not own.

Complexity: A device fitted to games by a website that announces how clever the owner of the game is.

Expansion: A way to solve the problem that game prices are too small by making game rules too big.

Heavy: a game too complex for your tastes. The opposite is Light, a game too simple for your tastes.

Kickstarter: an alchemical process that turns buckets of cold cash into BGG hotness.

Luck: A demon trapped in games by wicked designers that causes you to lose and your opponent to win. Not to be confused with Skill, which does the opposite.

Max Player Count: a number equal to one less than the number of people at the game table.

Multiplayer Solitaire: A situation where your inability to make small talk is now a game designers fault.

OP: A demon that is associated with Luck (q.v.). Always possessed of items used by your opponent but is entirely the fault of the game designer and suggests the existence of Broken (q.v.).

Playtime: an imaginary number, bearing no relationship to reality.

Playtester: A creature that is rewarded with attention every time it complains and as such has learned to somehow find fault in absolute perfection.

Prototype: a miraculous item that always arrives by mail the day after the trade show or playtest event

Publisher: Individual who does not design, test, illustrate, lay out, print, ship, market, promote or sell your game and takes fifty percent for this service. The other fifty percent goes to the Distributor.

Quarterbacking: A situation where your inability to discuss things is a game designers fault.

Replayability: A key factor in determining the BGG Rating of a game that will never be played in the first place.

Solo Mode: A situation where your inability to make friends is now a game designers fault.

Sleeves: Plastic sheathes sold to prevent wear and tear occurring to cards that are never used more than once.

Winning Strategy aka Strat: A numbered item. If a game has too many of them it is a Point Salad. If it has too few it is Broken. If it has the right amount, it is Solvable, which is another kind of Broken (q.v).

Unbalanced: A state occupied by games you own, but do not win.