As I’ve talked about on here before, one of the reasons I love MegaDumbCast is that as well as being funny and sticking it to bad, bad games, Kris is one of the rarest things in TTRPGs: a critic. Not someone who is negative, but someone who plumbs the depths and complexities of what makes an RPG good or bad.
I have a saying that goes “it’s always 1978 in TTRPGs” because there’s not really an evolving body of design thought. Partly this is because most people come into the hobby through D&D or something like it, and D&D hasn’t meaningfully changed since 1978, so they’re always reacting to the same thing. Part of this is because RPGs aren’t games, exactly: they are more like toolkits for making games. A lot of how and what and why you play depends on the people you’re playing with and the way you all agree an RPG should be played, which often isn’t in the book at all; and a lot of the activities you do in RPGs isn’t part of the rulebook or written down either, but things you do around, beside and outside those rules. It’s not entirely unlike how poker is barely about cards and almost all about bluffing, and/or having a beer with your buddies, or how bridge is more about bidding than play, or how Twister is about touching that other teenager you like in a socially acceptable way. You can’t critique something that exists beyond the text, because it’s not in the text.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of people writing about RPGs but for the most part the way that RPG ideas get attention is through games that become popular. RPGs then has few critics and many auteurs: artists that put forth a singular vision of what they think RPGs should be – which is then often copied poorly because the auteur doesn’t really explain the nuts and bolts of that, just tries to show through example. Kris isn’t that, and thank god for it, and it’s why he stands out so much.
John Wick is – was, I guess, since like so many he burned out on the low wages and went back to computer games – one such auteur. Not to be confused with the endlessly popular Keanu Reeves character, Wick designed games like Legends of the Five Rings and 7th Sea, which were pretty decent. He also insisted on being what we might now call Extremely Online in the first decade of the internet, where he decided to take the personality of someone who Knew Better Than You. (Something I have, at times, also tried on, I know.) He challenged the nerds and haters, and was occasionally right, but he also picked fights and acted like everyone online was by default an idiot, which meant you couldn’t have a conversation with him. It is of course human nature that if one is oft-criticised one rebuffs that by assuming the stance of the enfant terrible who delights in poking the bear. But too much of that and you end up assuming everyone is the bear, and you stop being able to read the room.
Not this guy
When D&D 3 came out, John went on an epic rant against it, with most of his complaints being ones that didn’t really resonate with most gamers. Specifically, he approached D&D as if it were a machine to create fantasy stories. He suggested a bunch of potentially appropriate fantasy archetypes and found that, lo and behold, he couldn’t make those things at first level, or at all. That was maybe 2001 or 2002. Now here we are in 2025, and Kris is making the same points in this weeks’ episodes.
I think this is interesting because I imagine that Kris is not going to be raked over the coals for this stance, whereas John definitely was. So I’m pouring one out for John for facing the opprobrium of gamers all those years ago.
The larger point, of course, is that this idea isn’t a neutral one. It may not even be how most people, over time, have approached D&D, or indeed any RPGs. It’s certainly not an assumption Gygax and Arneson ever had. In fact, Gygax explicitly says in AD&D first ed that the game is not intended to simulate anything, let alone fantasy fiction. Of course, intent isn’t the only thing that matters, and gamers quickly changed what RPGs were. But this isn’t just Gygax’s opinion. There are endless computer games and quite a lot of board games that claim to be RPGs and are mostly about tactical skirmish combat and exploring terrain, I have many on my shelf. Kris talks about how D&D is confusing because it seems to be full of all these rules that sound like it’s a boardgame about combat and doesn’t have any in-world referrents or talk about the story or fiction much, but it’s important to point out that for a large portion of RPG players, it doesn’t make sense to talk about those things because an RPG is a game designed around combat and moving through planned or semi-random environments.
This doesn’t mean Kris is wrong, of course, or that it’s unreasonable to ask these things of D&D. It does however return me to my central thesis: that trying to fix D&D is like trying to graft arms and legs to a hamburger. Although it lucked into being this weird hobby that sews improv theatre, shared story creation, tactical combat, socialisation and character/world simulation into one distorted – but compelling – frankenstein, it wasn’t built to be most of those things and we keep acting like it is. Indeed, it markets itself as being all these things. Just as a lot of people play and learn RPGs primarily as an oral tradition, past down from one group to another and that has large elements that exist beyond the rules and text, people have also come I think to think of RPGs as an idea that exists beyond what they claim to be. We know, in other words, that the image and the marketing is kind of a lie, that (at least for D&D and things like it) we’re inherently being sold a furphy when we’re told it’s a path to unlock epic adventure storytelling, and we will just pretend not to notice. We expect them to lie and forgive them for it, and we in turn accept that we’re getting handed a messy toolkit that we have to work at to turn into something we know will likely rarely fulfill any of those claims, but it will let us roll a lot of damage dice and kill that stupid orc.
Fig leafs are not inherently a bad thing, as long as everyone knows there’s a fig leaf. But I think it’s possible for people to buy an RPG and discover they’ve been sold a lie; doubly so if they buy D&D and things like it. And to look around and wonder why everyone else is happy with pretending so much, and wishing so hard. And I think this is also why it’s always 1978, because inevitably these people go “well, there has to be a better way”, and try to make something better.
Slowly we’re making gains, yes. But with D&D swallowing so many, and it still being how so many other games operate, it makes me wonder if we should stop pretending so much.
I always like it when people write a manifesto, and I found a good one recently, but before I talk about it I want to talk about this other post of the author. That’s Jay Dragon of Wanderhome fame.
In the linked post, Dragon argues that rules are inherently a cage. That we (and Dragon here blends player and character, confusingly) want to do certain things but the rules say we cannot. I agree. We can, for example, put the playing cards in any order we want and declare ourselves the winner of Klondike/patience. It is the restrictions that stop us from doing so that makes the game work, and playing a game is voluntarily putting barriers between what we want (all the cards in order) and how to get it (we’re not allowed to just sort them). We welcome the barriers to make the conflict that drives the game.
But Dragon’s next example is the avatar-stance of D&D: my character wants to climb a wall, but the rules won’t let me. And in her manifesto, he talks more about how this conflict drives his expressionist design philosophy. The good thing about all this is it is clear and well described, which means I can see clearly where we differ on things, and thus get better discourse. So I’m not trying to call Dragon out as being wrong. But I also think that I (and not everyone) plays RPGs this way.
I don’t know if my character wants to climb a wall. They might, but I’m not always working from this avatar stance. What’s more, I don’t see the roll and rules as getting in my way. The WALL is in my way. And that’s just as meaningful as the rules about the wall. And the presence of the wall in the first place is of course a kind of rule. In make-believe we can climb a wall if we want. But we can also just not put the wall there in the first place.
I might go further to suggest that there’s an adversarial approach inherent to this argument: that rules exist to stop us and prevent us and restrict us. Of course rules present some sort of control, but just because something is adversarial does not mean it is oppositional. My partner is a lawyer and she is frustrated that every game about the law ever made puts the players against each other. She says that although the law is adversarial, it is inherently cooperative. Each party has goals but their actual goal is to reach the best compromise everyone can live with.
A better example is in improv, where you learn how to introduce conflict without blocking. If someone has a gun you can’t just say “your gun has blanks”. That’s a block, it shuts an idea down. But “my god, that’s my wife’s gun!” is conflict without a block. It takes some control “away” from the gun-holder, but it doesn’t stop things dead. Good RPG rules work like this. They “oppose” actions in a way that creates story, not opposes it. If there is a wall in my way, who put it there? Presumably the GM, because it was an offer to create an excellent scene. The rules then are not blocking you from your goal, but saying “what’s this scene about? Is it about your amazing wall-climbing skills, or is it about how your character can’t get past this obstacle and has to confront that failure?”. In essence, you’re not even measuring success or failure, but because RPGs are story-machines running on wargaming code, we constantly think of it as judging if we are allowed to do a thing.
Ron Edwards did more to destroy RPG design theory than any human ever. He took a working theory that pre-existed (GNS) and turned it into a cudgel to beat people and a cult. He also said many times that popular games of the day caused actual brain damage, something people who dealt with brain damage found pretty fucking insulting, and with good reason. The glimmer of truth in that claim, however, was that if all you know is D&D and its descendants, you will end up seeing RPG design as a thing where the rules grant your permission to do what you want. And if you start from that place, you naturally end up thinking rules are bad. Since forever, a lot of people have believed that rules inherently by their very definition get in the way of the activity of roleplaying, and are at best a necessary evil. At its more extreme ends, this leads to people arguing that if you reward players for doing things, you’ve made a mistake, which is absolute nonsense. (That post also brings up Skinner boxes, as usual not understanding that Skinner is about gentleness)
Dragon definitely thinks rules are the enemy. She suggests that we should in fact be so desperate to go against the rules that we should wish, to some extent, to break those rules. In fact, she design games around this principle. The example given is one where the rules reward you for spending time with your family, and you are supposed to, in play, get so annoyed by this you will want to break the rules.
This reminds me a bit of Experimental Theatre techniques. Some of these included running into the audience and stepping out of “acting” to pick fights or shout at audience members, to try to get them to break away from their sense of “I’m watching this man shout at me” and into “this man is actually shouting at me”. But this technique often runs into the problem that was shown in the episode of Community where Annie puts Abed in an experiment where he is told to wait and the experiment is designed to make people get angry and break that rule – to basically trick people to go against the rules. Abed (who is autistic coded) does not break the rule, and there’s a tendency for autistic people to do this. This isn’t because we’re hidebound: it’s because the world is often so confusing we follow rules as a way to survive. Likewise, Experimental Theatre stopped doing this stuff because a lot of people followed the rules and just kept “watching the play”. Similarly, I’ve had bad GMs and escape room designers set up situations inside the game where A) it isn’t real, because it’s a game and B) the game rewards anti-social or taboo behaviour and then go HAHA! WE TRICKED YOU! You’ve done the morally questionable thing, so you are a monster! Power Kill was very much like this. In it, you play a regular RPG and then it is revealed that acting as the game tells you to act you have done something terrible in a completely different context.
(I tried to play Papers Please and the game said “do this to get points” and I said “no”, but I didn’t feel like I learned anything. Partly because I just didn’t like the mechanics but also because I know that systems of control exist. I had the same reaction to The Stanley Parable: I was already aware of how video game design sculpts behaviour so it was not shocking to me to have the game break the fourth wall and tell me they do.)
The game Dragon describes goes even further than Power Kill though: it says “This game rewards you for being pro-social, that should creep you out!” which is…a very specific line of thought. I wonder how many gamers actually had this experience in play. I have a feeling that it only works for players who think rules are bad – the ones with the “brain damage” built in.
Don’t get me wrong: I think violating consent, when used well, can be amazing. I’ve written before about the genius of great art in how it makes us complicit. But you’re not going to make me break the rules just by saying “these rules reward you for doing a thing”. I’m assuming the rules exist for a reason, and I am following them until I stop having fun. Now that may happen if I’m doing anti-social things in the setting of the game, yes. This is not really a great revelation, however. Nobody has ever made a game called Molest The Little Child where you get 1000 points for each molestation; nobody has ever played that game to get points, regardless of the explanation. Most people would go against the rules if faced with that game, and play to lose.
I also think Dragon knows all this, and is more curious than accusatory. She wants to put people in a maze and see if they knock down the walls to get the cheese, but it’s ok if they don’t. Yet she does end that blog with a heavy judgement against the mouse who fails to knock down the walls. She also concludes by saying that the best way to play is to strain as hard as possible against the rules and this includes safety rules. As in, when you set up lines and veils you should go as hard as possible up to the edges of those because that, to Dragon, is both necessary and the most fun.
In 2015, the porn star James Deen was accused of several accounts of rape and sexual assault by many women in the industry (Massive Trigger Warnings On That Link!). Deen was a frequent performer in BDSM scenes which involve simulated lack of consent. Deen would allegedly use the “No” lists of his fellow performers as guidelines to find their limits and push beyond them, and used the filming of “rough” sex as a cover and excuse for his violence, partly because the presence of safe words and rules protected him. If such rules existed in the framework, then of course he couldn’t have broken those rules.
I’m not saying that people who want to push safety rules as hard as they possible can are actually hurting people. But we know that safety rules are broken in RPGs all the time. And if you think all rules are made to be tested, pushed, wrestled with and even broken, if you build a cage to watch the rat throw itself against the walls, how am I ever going to be safe? Or more generally, how am I ever sure I’ll have fun? Especially if I am neurodiverse and rely on the rules as a core of my whole participation? And then eventually: why would I ever follow your rules to begin with?
I teach my game students that game design can be thought of as a very caring, nurturing artform, where we use our empathy all the time, to put ourselves in the mind of the player and use our tools of game design to control them, but with the intent of giving them a good time. They consent to give us that control with the implicit understanding that if they play the game under the control of our systems, they will have fun. If you violate that relationship, don’t expect me to come back for more.
If you have met me in the last…twenty years or so…and got me talking about fantasy RPGs, I may have brought up Lord Fang.
As I say often, RPGs weren’t designed in any particular coherent manner, and are more a kind of congealing of different ideas into a misshapen blob of poorly connected things. Probably lots of things are like this, and we only think there is some design brain behind them, years later. I think we’re in an interesting inflection point right now with D&D and RPGs, and more and more people are coming into them and seeing them in situ, and taking a lot of it as it comes. That is inevitable! But history matters. It helps us understand and be literate about where we are now. And it particularly matters when D&D is being robbed of its context, especially because D&D is really, really weird. And nothing more clearly illustrates that D&D is weird than the Lord Fang Problem.
In the early 1970s, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Gary’s Chainmail rules system, heavily inspired by other wargames and particularly Kriegspiel, into what we would now call a “skirmish-level” wargame for miniature figures. You moved around on a dungeon map and the point of the game was to get better at fighting the things in the dungeon. Exploration borrowed from the Kriegspiel model where the wargame simulated the fog of war and the need for troops to survive in the wilderness, usually modelled in wargames with random tables. A forest might be thicker than you imagined, or supply some wild boar; a village might be full of fifth columnists or saucy French peasant girls. But since the fantasy setting of D&D never actually worked out or written down, Gygax and Arneson accidentally created a system where the only way to figure out what the world was like was to buy their books and use their tables. Early TTRPGs were not so much big changes in systems but gigantic hexmaps and tables to roll on, just as different wargames of the time focussed less on the core mechanics and more on what is the most accurate map and random tables to simulate the reality of a certain battle.
People talk about things like Vancian magic and the alignment system from Elric as if the designers used those things as inspiration and tried to mimic those worlds. In fact, they came up with the rules in advance and then looked around for things that justify them. Magic in wargames disappeared at the end of each match, and the way Jack Vance described magic being nearly impossible for the human brain to contain fit that mechanic. Certainly there is mimicry in the D&D setting. But it’s mimicking so many things. I argue in my recent book that its biggest inspiration was the television westerns that Gygax grew up with, most of which were set in the far west, so that the ever-present Comanche tribes were a threat and source of action and drama. That’s why there’s always a small village on the edge of the wilderness in D&D, plagued by orc savages. Vikings were of course the other inspiration for orcs. Tolkien invented the word orc because he found the word goblin to be insufficiently epic, but because he invented them and because his books are very much written from a point of view inside the world itself, he never describes them. Gygax and friends had to invent all the rest. Early orcs had pig-like noses. During the first half of the 20th century, travelling fairs would capture bears and keep them intoxicated, then shave them and show them as if they were mutated humans. These kind of orcs were common enough that one of them ended up in Return of the Jedi.
The horns, tusks and pig-snouts eventually disappeared, but the green colour stayed, and that’s Gygax. A cultural commentator I read back in the 90s said that in the list of people who had the most effect on popular culture of the day, most people thought of Elvis and The Beatles, but there was also Gene Roddenberry, and Gary Gygax. Because although Gygax was drawing on a random bunch of things, we’ve let a lot of these things become standards…and then are surprised when they don’t make sense.
More examples of the random design: early on, the system did not have “hit poitns” but having watched the Errol Flynn Robin Hood on TV one week, where the hero and villain trade blows back and forth in the climactic battle, Gygax added them in. The ettin, the naga and the hydra and the undead are mostly borrowed from the Ray Harryhausen movies about Sinbad the Sailor and Jason of the Argonauts. These movies are also why there are actual dinosaurs or dinosaur-like creatures. Again, this is what Gygax grew up watching on TV. (For the younger audience, television in the 1960s created a system called syndication where smaller, subsidiary networks or companies like Disney, would buy up the rights to popular films cheap, and then run them over and over again, particularly in times children would be watching, such as weekends. The popularity of Its a Wonderful Life was due to it being snatched up for nearly nothing and run over and over and over.) Gygax’s childhood and adolecensce lives large; the rustmonster, the owlbear, the bullette and others were designed because they resembled poorly-made plastic dinosaurs. The gelatinous cube was invented because Jim Ward (who also invented Melf the wizard because his character sheet listed his Gender and Race as M-Elf, and Dwarmij the wizard, his name backwards) put a jello shot on the map one night. In they went into the rules. Not that there’s anything wrong with gonzo design! That’s part of what makes D&D what it is. But its important to remember that it has no real referent to anything that came before and the only things that have these things afterwards are direct descendants of D&D. And the best example of this is Lord Fang.
A lot of early D&D design, besides being haphazard and silly, was also antagonistic. As soon as the players worked out how a monster worked, the GM would change things to surprise them. There is a monster that looks exactly like the Beholder (another Harryhausen inspiration) but if you attack it it bursts into poisonous gas. Treasures chests are disguised mimics, and so on and so forth. During one early campaign (an “evil” game where players are just murdering everything and fighting each other), a player created Lord Fang, a vampire.
The 1970s was a big time for vampires, with Blacula straddling blacksploitation, horror and critical acclaim, Dracula showing on Broadway and Jack Palance starring in a big budget movie. Anne Rice’s best-seller, Interview with the Vampire came out in 1974. By 1979 there were so many vampire films that parodies appeared like Love at First Bite, and Christopher Lee was so bored of playing the character he took one role on the promise he would never have to record any dialogue (his character simply growls and hisses). Culture was now creating a sense of evolved subcreation: there were so many vampire movies, each movie had to establish which rules it would follow and which it would not. This is also where RPGs were born: as places where subcreation was turned into rules and tables, so that you would know what to expect but not exactly. Just as forests in Napoleonic France might hide wild boars to eat or bears to fight, you could codify fictional concepts down to table entries. And in this spirit, a player made a vampire, and because everyone knows vampires can turn into wolves, and bats, and fog, and can mesmerize people, and so on, the player’s character was able to dominate the game. The other players couldn’t stand against him.
Gygax, ever the antagonistic game “balancer” looked around to find the natural enemy of the vampire, and it was obvious: it was Van Helsing. This was also the era of Hammer Horror. Hammer Studios was a relatively-small budget film studio in England started in the 1930s. In the 1950s they found a way to make money from the new popularity of horror films, which also allowed them to reuse sets and costumes and locations. From 1949 to 1979 they made 156 films, more than three a year. They too enjoyed syndication and wide distribution. In the 50s and 60s, even young children would go to the movies to see four or five films at a time, some short ones or serials, and then a family film, and then usually a hammer horror at the end. That’s why D&D has mummies in it. Hammer also made their fair share of creature features beyond straight horror. I imagine every single week Gygax and friends saw a movie about going to a strange place and fighting bizarre monsters.
This was the cheap knock-off of the 1930s Harryhausen epic –
Hammer Horror loved vampires and the vampires always lost because they faced down someone who could make them fear sunlight and/or the cross. 1970s horror was transgressive in the blood and guts and nudity, but rooted in a kind of desperate fear of losing religious tradition, and the cross played a big part (even being a major factor in the 1980s’ Fright Night). So naturally the easiest way to defeat Lord Fang was to bring in a character class that wielded the cross. Enter the Cleric.
Before D&D, religion is almost entirely absent in fantasy. Conan specifically hates formalized religion, seeing it as a sign of corruption: their are no religions at all in his world, only cults, or his untrammeled noble-savage beliefs. Elric has crusades that have no gods to drive them. Lord of the Rings has no religion whatsoever, and it’s absent from the Fahfrd stories as well, and Jack Vance’s books, and the Earthsea books. Where it does exist it is sort of a homage to Friar Tuck: someone might refuse to shed blood and say a prayer before battle, but there’s no organisation. Or it is an actual crusade story, and the only God is one of slaughter. Arthurian legend is the exception, of course, but there there is only religion, and nothing else. The idea of a wandering cleric joining a team of wandering heroes pops up first in movies, primarily in Japanese wushu films, because it makes for an easy character note. There the character is a monk, which is also why D&D has monks, another thing that was glued on without making any sense in the world. There is a wandering monk in Beastmaster, which is also where the ranger class comes from – because again, Tolkien doesn’t say what a ranger is, so people guessed random shit.
And so the cleric doesn’t really make any sense. It exists only to combat Lord Fang and doesn’t actually fit into the setting. And it certainly doesn’t fit into fantasy. But nothing fits into D&D, and that’s part of the problem, because more and more there’s a culture around D&D and it pulls everything into it, and needs to justify all this madness, but never quite does. You now have to have clerics in fantasy, because fantasy is being morphed to fit around D&D, which is just a really bad idea, and makes more and more cracks form.
Last week I gushed about the genius if Kirs Newtown and MegaDumbCast, and how nearly every episode expresses some perfect truth about game design. Sunday’s episode did it again where Kris said that a fun part of D&D is trying to take the things that they IMPLY about the world and make up why things are like that in your game. (I’ve also argued that the popularity of early RPGs was in part because people were frustrated by how the Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure books would screw you over, and how early text computer games were too hard – people created via frustration!) But he is right to call it annoying that D&D doesn’t actually commit to any of this. It doesn’t lean all the way out and say “elves are just a few vague ideas, so you can fill in the page” or lean all the way in and go “yes, it makes sense that everyone hates elves because they are better than everyone” (aka the Warhammer Exception) or “if Sense Alignment exists then cities would install detectors at every city gate”. It never wants to commit to anything; it is a game designed on vibes, and so a lot of it is utterly impenetrable or useless to anyone reading the rules. Which means it is a game so often taught as an oral tradition, which means the game never has to get better at any of this, because it can always count on the community to keep filling in the blanks and pretending the game works.
But it doesn’t work. It keeps falling over. I have a saying that it is always 1978 in RPGs because every day someone realizes D&D sucks and starts iterating from that point, instead of the field actually progressing and adapting. And D&D isn’t going to fix this. Orcs are now trying to be reborn as Mexicans in a way to try to stuff a shaved pig-man Comanche stereotype into a suit that teens want to fuck. That might be a good solution, but I think it is also a Van Helsing solution. Which is to say, they are trying to respond antagonistically to fix something their fanbase hates, without fixing the problem that led here in the first place. And each new reaction only adds more to the problem, and creates even more problems. So it only gets more goofy with each passing year, and more incoherent and more unable to actually do what it promises.
The more popular and important D&D becomes – and it has become a media juggernaut in the last ten years, something beyond all our wildest expectations in the 1980s – the more it needs critical engagement with its tropes and foundations. But D&D cannot and will not do that, because it has always been a nostalgia product. The one time it tried to reinvent itself, in 4th edition, fans reacted as if the game had spit on their mother’s grave. So it remains what it always is: behind the times, clumsy, witless, cloying and driven by a singular goal to to catch the unwary, seduce them into believing that clerics are a sensible, well established fantasy trope and that D&D is more than it appears. That it’s not just a bunch of goofy TV movies, Hammer Horror and freakshows pretending to be cool. And once it has them, D&D can bleed them dry, first of their money, then of their ability to move beyond it. At best we can only react to D&D, which means its shadow still deforms everything. D&D is a vampire, and it’s time we staked it in the heart.
Winston Churchill was a racist asshole but he was also neurodivergent as hell. He spent his nights during the blitz rehearsing strategies over and over of how he would leave the building if it was bombed or taken by nazi troops. He had contingency plans for his contingency plans. He was a ruminator, and he was wracked by what could happen and how he might be responsible. When he was seven years old his father let him borrow his gold pocket watch, and a school bully threw it in the river. Winston paid his own money to have six men from the village divert the river so he could search for the watch in the mud. He did not find it and his strict, emotionally distant father made him pay for the lost watch. Sometimes ruminators are built from trying to stop their parents withholding their love. They live in the “if only”, forever.
When my grandfather was 19 years old the nazis invaded his home country of the Netherlands. Resistance immediately began. One day, after the assassination of a leading figure, the nazis marched into the middle of the town square and randomly grabbed fifty men. They put the men in the middle of the square and then they gunned them down. They knew that people were helping the resistance, so they made sure everyone knew the price of that help. My grandfather was standing near a younger boy who screamed and yelled when they took his father and then when his father fell, the boy stopped screaming, and went into a kind of catatonia. My grandfather was looking at the boy, and he never, ever forgot that look.
My grandfather survived the occupation, just barely. Once he was rounded up by soldiers who intended to have him shipped to the work camps in Germany. One soldier left to get back up, and he and his two friends rushed at the nazi. My father grabbed the guard’s gun and hit him in the stomach hard, and he never forgot the look of pain on the man’s face as all the wind was knocked out of him. My grandfather survived, and left his homeland and had four children and eleven grandchildren and dozens of great grandchildren. He raised a dairy farm out of nothing but dirt and built a life. Sixty five years later, I visited him in hospital when he was quite sick. It was the first time I had been alone with him in my whole life. I held his hand and I saw fear in his eyes, the fear of dying. I held his hand and I comforted him as best I could.
Last week someone died while I was performing CPR on them.
For a long time as a young boy and young man I was terrified that when the time came to save people, I would falter and not be strong. I lived in a permanent rumination of what I would do when the time came. In my autistic fashion I would listen to The Impression That I Get over and over and over, because I was so worried that when I was tested I would fail. Turns out I shouldn’t have worried. I have carried people out of danger. I have given my last bit of food to feed another. When my grandfather was afraid I held his hand despite my fear. When my friend was dying I didn’t panic. I pulled her onto the floor and I did everything I could to save her life. But the worry goes on. I live in the perpetual fear of failure. Trying to make myself into something that cannot fail. That will not fail. And that will stop the bad things from happening. If only I had concentrated, listened, paid attention, they told me as a boy, then the silly thing would not have happened. I had to pay attention. I had to stop it before it happened. I have to stop it.
This is a blog about games. Bear with me.
I don’t watch horror movies much. I have enough horror of my own. But I keep making them. My latest game I have just announced, and it is dark. As dark as it gets. It’s called Five Years After and it’s about the apocalypse, and the nature of how we self-destruct. It’s based in part on the post-apocalyptic fears of my youth: movies like The Day After and Threads and When The Wind Blows. The nature of the game is that we begin five years after a terrible apocalypse, and then we wind the clock back and back and back, to find out how the terrible events took everything from you. Bit by bit, the things that kept you safe and happy in the world before the zombies, those things are stripped away. The fun of the game, the power of the game, is discovery: the random nature of which things you lose when tells a unique story that cannot happen any other way, and reveals things to you that you did not know about your character and could not know without playing. I think it is fun and beautiful, but it is also very bleak, because there is no happy ending. You are left with one attribute that you keep, but that is often bitter sweet or darkly ironic. The world ended and so did you.
Threads by Barry Hines is something everyone should watch once.
My great colleague and co-developer Peter asked me what the game was for, then, if it was so bleak. I think it’s a fair question. I have always believed that everything we do echoes unto eternity, that small things matter and that my games and my art can and will change others. That’s why we make art, really: to take our thoughts and struggles out of ourselves with the hope that it connects with other people. I also believe that art isn’t always just a good thing, and that we should justify what we put into the world, as opposed to flippantly believing that art has no power and can’t affect anyone. I keep making grim, dark games and I think I should justify that, even if I find myself unable to make anything else. Peter thought the game’s message was that you cannot change your fate, and therefore the game was defeatist and nihilistic. The game might even be adding to the wickedness of the world, then.
I think sometimes there are people who give up, who see a wicked world and decide that it’s not their job to clean it up and they might take fatalism as an easy excuse to justify that. But I think there are also people like me who think the opposite, who think that everything is their responsibility and their fault, and if they try hard enough, if they work hard enough, then nothing bad will happen, and that everything bad that does happen must be because they didn’t work hard enough or love well enough or think things through. This has only gotten worse in a world of advertising that desperately makes you feel insufficient, and the panopticon of social media, where everyone is judging you, all of the time.
Terrible things have happened to me. Things that I cannot tell you and might never speak of. Things that defy belief in the suffering they have inflicted, and the cruelty of their shape, and the callousness of those who inflicted them or let them continue. These things took things from me and they took things from the people I love and those things will never heal. Or rather, healing will not make them back to where they were, back to good as new. And yet I persist. I grieve for what I have lost but I remain and that is worth something. What I lost in the fire, I find in the ashes. Like the phoenix I was burned but did not die; I was reborn.
And there is nothing I could have done to stop this things from happening to me, and these parts of myself being taken from me. They were not my fault.
The fascists are rising over my friends in the USA. Their gestapo is snatching people off the streets and killing them in death camps. Israel is conducting genocide. The world is full of monsters and people are dying and in a way, maybe, all my games are about all of this. Relics is about how we can believe in our own potential to be good. Partners is about trusting one another. The Score is about how security is all theatre and the most powerful forces are much, much weaker than they look.
And Five Years After is a reminder that terrible things are happening and you must be brave and you must fight hard and it will cost you. But none of this is your fault. In their panic, people will blame you and tell you you should have done more to stop it. But there is always more we could have done, and more we could do. Blaming ourselves is not going to help. They did this to us. It is their fault. And now we have to be brave, and we will survive – but it is not our fault.
I don’t know if Five Years After can help us deal with the apocalypse on our doorsteps, but maybe it can, and even if it can’t, it’s what I feel and think. It’s what I want to say. It’s what my heart aches to speak of. And I hope that someone out there finds something in it for themselves.
(Note: it turns out Substack is boosting nazi profiles and trying to drive culture wars for money so I’m back here, blogging away)
As someone with autism and a whole host of mental illnesses, I often feel as if the world is not made for me, that I will not and do not belong and never will. Over time I’ve learned to draw some power from that, and also lessen my belief in the totality of it. Still, when I find something that seems made especially for me, I am often overjoyed – and bewildered. Such is the case with the MegaDumbCast, a creation of the brilliant Kris Newton.
I first stumbled unto the wonder of this podcast when a friend reached out to me to see if I wanted to be interviewed about my autism. The podcast, you see, began as a way to make fun of Palladium Games and their epic badness, a sort of MST3K walk-through of the worst dregs of published TTRPGs of the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, it was common for some games to turn mental illnesses, neurodiversity and even less-than-mainstream qualities into flaws and/or powers, often intersecting with random tables. One could, for example, see too many zombies and as a result become homosexual, or terrified of clowns. Palladium’s version of Call-of-Cthulhu horror investigation was Beyond the Supernatural and it was happy to use the then popular trope of the Magical Autist. This was a VERY popular and stylish trope of the 1990s, especially after Rain Man won oscars, appearing in many TV shows and they even made a Bruce Willis movie about it. With the first two series of MegaDumbCast covering Ninjas and Superspies and Heroes Unlimited, series three covered Beyond the Supernatural and I was happy to take part and point out that the guy in Rain Man doesn’t even have autism.
In return, Kris healed my soul with comedy genius.
It’s possibly hard to explain what it was like to be nerd in the 1980s, and how absolutely arcane and demented most ttrpgs were on top of that. Designers were still figuring out what rpgs were (really, they still are) and had no idea what to include and why, and often their guesses were absolutely insane. And few books were as gloriously insane as Palladium Books. They served a particular kind of roleplaying which has (oddly) mostly fallen by the wayside nowadays, where everything is really about finding some insane combo to make you an untouchable godlike badass, and the GM’s role is to hit you as hard as you can until you man up and find those combos. But even that wasn’t presented coherently. Poor baffled gamers around the world had no idea why Kevin Siembieda simply cut and pasted his table of medieval weaponry from Palladium Fantasy into every other game he published (or rather why his long-suffering and hardworking wife Marianne did for him), or why it cost only $100 to buy one of those FBI lockpick guns which would make every GM plot swiftly solveable because doors couldn’t be locked, or why anyone would buy a dagger that only did 1d4 damage when it was cheaper to buy an Ingram submachine gun that did 4d6. I think a lot of game designers were born in this era because the games were not complete or coherent and you had to first build a useable game first, before you could even show it to others. And that experience, of being hunched over these amazing, arcane tomes, that you could only get from one store in the very centre of the city, that never had all the line so you only ever saw snippets and fragments, and trying to figure out why Kevin Siembieda was obsessed with how much bullets would penetrate bones or why certain superheroes would own a comb but others would not – that experience was not something a lot of people went through. So it feels very special and personal that the first few series of MegaDumbCast was about very much this, through a lens of “now we know better”. It’s like watching Space Mutiny being MST3Ked (or Hawk the Slayer) with people who grew up seeing it in the cinemas. (Being an MST3K fan was also a weird niche experience too, before the internet!)
But things grow. What started out as riffing on Palladium’s mistakes evolved. Kris crashed into the weird moment that White Wolf games were so rich and popular they tried to make a Street Fighter RPG, and along the way Kris also shined a light onto arcade culture. He took a stroll down FASERIP Marvel, which was still very much in the goofy 1980s school of design, when we learnt RPGs from our friend’s older brother, who was also a non-digital Joe Rogan. Then – as I said to him at the time and he mentioned on the podcast later – Kris hit series six and speedran the entirety of the World of Darkness. Much like me, Kris and the RPG hobby Came of Age via the World of Darkness, and Kris started to talk about how he left his restrictive Christian upbringing. As all great art does – and I use the phrase great art without a drop of irony: the show is goofy and ‘dumb’ but it’s really smart and really deep as well – as all great art does, it revealed the artist. Early on, Kris refers to his other podcast, Gameable, as his real podcast, but over time, MDC became the more popular one, and the one both he and I think has more depth and more legs, and the one that the fans responded to. It became a more personal journey, into Kris’ and our pasts, and who we were becoming over the years the podcast ran.
Along the way of all this, Kris has also proved to be not just a historian of tabletop roleplaying, but an incisive critic thereof. Every episode there’s some core nugget of why these things are bad and what is better, and every few episodes I’ll hit a quote that I’ll write down or a concept that I’ll blog about. Like me, Kris gets that there’s something interesting in ttrpgs, even if it’s only interesting to ttrpg nerds, and it’s worth thinking about them and getting them right.
A few weeks ago we found out that series seven would tackled D&D 3rd ed (2000). Now, even though it was only 5 years after Advanced D&D 2e Revised (1995), 3E is quite a different beast than anything that came before it, representing a kind of seismic shift in terms of quality and coherence. It was certainly anything that had been on MegaDumbCast before. In many ways, 3E is a GOOD RPG. It’s not insanely bad like Palladium, or messy like FASERIP, or a bad idea like Streetfighter, or poorly assembled if ambitious like the World of Darkness. I wondered: what could MDC say about such a game? Indeed, would Kris’ insistence on taking our games to task mean he would come for a game I quite enjoyed? Would I find MDC coming for me, and thus find it less funny?
I should not have worried.
The second episode is Kris being angry. Angry that the game isn’t Ninjas and Superspies. The contents is in the right order, alphabetically and numerically. Shit is nailed down and specified. Everyone is credited correctly. Things are done well, and there seems to be nothing to make fun mode. This is “MDC hardmode”, says Kris – the jokes aren’t just writing themselves. 3E, he says, is “beautiful and obscene…because of the mania of (these designers) for creating something perfect”. To the point that Kris starts to wonder if, after all, the megadumbness we found along the way is inside himself, that he was the Kevin Siembieda all along. Or at the very least that he has met his match. This is his White Whale, his kryptonite, his Nemesis: the unriffable RPG. In other words, he is saying what I’m thinking. But also – because he’s really, really smart and really, really understands TTRPG design – he’s pointing out also the deeper problem with 3E and its moment in time, and its precursors and its decendants.
See, that precision comes from a particular kind of mindset, which is that the rules as written are sacred. That what is in the book is not just more important than your homebrew, but acquires a kind of mystique and power. And this idea emerged early in D&D’s history. Although Gygax intended to emulate something like Kriegpsiel where the players would not know the world and react as if they were themselves, stumbling onto strange things, what he ended up making was a world where knowing the rules and the text and the monsters described was the secret code that unlocked how you win. To a certain kind of nerd, this was a spiritual proposition. Just as D&D came out, nerds were sliding into popular culture and being taught, along the way, that they were at once the downtrodden, just as people of colour and women and gay people were, but also that they would inherit the earth, and grow up to control the computer that the jocks had to work on. The 80s told us the nerds would get all the women, soon enough, and in the 1990s, as computer gaming took off and the tech boom began, it seemed to be coming true. By the 2000s, nerd culture had become no longer something that other people laughed at, but still liked to pretend they were outcast martyrs (much like Christian fundamentalists do). And that, and culture around it, was transforming into something that believed this religious proposition: that if you knew enough of the rules, you got to be in charge and you were not just a king, but a philosopher king. You were SPIRITUALLY better than other people. Futurama made a joke that “technically correct is the best kind of correct” and the nerds took this literally.
Which is why they were utterly bamboozled when the humanities came along and insisted that they were sexist creeps. Gamergate could never have really been comicsgate or fantasygate because it needed that sense of Rules As Written precision.
And what’s really bad and really important about all of this, is that the people who really truly believe this? They are now running the world. Neonazi Peter Thiel met neonazi Elon Musk when they were both running D&D at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1990s. Musk was a game designer who was known for running a bit off-book. Thiel was more traditional, following the core D&D. They are not isolated examples. I sometimes call them Gygax’s Bastards: children of a dark enlightenment, who think that knowing facts makes them powerful. They are both, interestingly, most likely autistic, as well as having high IQs. A lot like me.
I’ve been pondering a book about this, about how D&D broke the world, about how Rules As Written became a magical thinking that broke nerds and made them into fascist futurists, and how we now live in that world. In lieu of me writing that, I recommend you tune into MegaDumbCast, for this series or any series. D&D3E is Newton’s great challenge, but I think what we’ve seen is he is rising to the occasion, as he and us grow older and understand more of who we are and how we got here. Sure it’s dumb. But it’s dumb on the square – dumb with meaning. Dumb with insight. Dumb with truth.
Strap in. Join me. It’s going to be epic. Like a twentieth level fireball.
Wittgenstein was correct when he said that language is a game and games are about language, and the easiest way to see this is by watching the wonderful British show Taskmaster. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a panel show where five comedians get given bizarre and ridiculous instructions which they must feverishly try to attempt and be measured in their success by various arbitrary standards. Inevitably, nearly every single task is open to some element of interpretation and whenever the participants ask questions the official task deliverer says the catchphrase: “all the information’s on the task”, which it never is.
A show that will never work in America because Americans have no irony.
Games are often described as being both freeing because they are not real but also freeing because they are – for once – clear and delineated. In real life we can never know if our car is better than our neighbours, if we are truly good, if we should have another beer or if we should go kill and eat the person who cut us off in traffic but in games we have a magical system that tells us all these things are possible/permitted, and these other things are not possible/not permitted, and at the end we will know for sure who is best and who is not. Which is relaxing, in the same way that doing a sum is less fraught than writing an essay.
All of that is sort of true and almost entirely false.
That is not to say – as some hacky game designers have to my face – that there’s no craft or diligence to our field. It is our job to design rules that are clear and beg no questions, and to be unclear is to fail as game designers. Yes every player can eat all the chess pieces and they maintain that freedom, but you’re not to blame if you begin with “place the pieces on the board”. You also are allowed to make some base assumptions, like that the person reading the rules is also going to explain those rules to the rest of the players, or what “shuffle” means.
Although that said: I used to keep a tally of every time a computer game didn’t say anywhere that you should use ASDF to move because how would anyone know that? So even these assumptions are moving targets as literacy changes. We are always engaging with an audience and the audience is always changing. In this, game designers are like comedians: there is little that is always perfectly funny in all times and all places because audiences change. This is true in the micro (tonight’s group at the game table, tonight’s audience) and the macro (Western hobby gamers, American tv viewers). A comedian I know once told me about how his Amy Winehouse jokes were considered hilarious until she died at which point he instantly retired them all, because humans are like that. We – all of us – had felt okay laughing at her addiction until we didn’t.
It’s a potent example because games are exactly as fragile. Huizinga invented the idea of the magic circle: once we all collective consent to play a game together, we enter the circle where normal social rules vanish and we can lie (bluff), betray, compete ferociously and attack with violence; we can be deeply antisocial and deeply antagonistic and it’s all fine …
… until it isn’t.
There are times in Taskmaster where it’s pretty clear that the players aren’t having fun and are close to what in computer games is called the rage-quit, or they just give up trying, or are otherwise upset. Consent must be FRIES – freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic and specific, and lots of games make all of those things impossible. It is hard to know what is going to happen in many games and how they are going to make you feel and the rage-quit is just one example of rescinding consent. Nowadays in TTRPGs we talk about the open table which means we (try to) discard the obvious social pressure to “keep playing” – you can walk away at any moment.
The anti-racism educator Jane Elliot runs a savage day-long simulation where blue-eyed people are singled out, bullied and subjugated. Sometimes she lets people leave when they become overwhelmed. Sometimes she doesn’t, because black people cannot leave racism. There is an incredible phone game where you are given a little chicken to care for and then sixty seconds later the chicken is killed. You do not consent to that, because if you did the game would not work: the violent shock reminds you that every single day millions of chickens are born then slaughtered in sixty seconds when the machine determines them to be male. The lack of consent makes the game work. In 1940, feeling he had done enough gaming of art, the surrealist Marcel Duchamp abandoned art to become a (terrible) professional chess player. In 1966 he returned to art with a piece called etant donnes. The work invented installation art and forces the viewer to participate (so it is a game) by walking through smaller and smaller rooms until one approaches two eye holes. One is compelled to look through and is met with the sight of looking into a the genitals of a young naked woman. You become complicit in a simulated violation (or are you, as her expression and pose makes it unclear) – and the lack of consent is the point.
Games are more participatory art forms – maybe the most participatory – and therefore they violate and mess with consent far more than other forms of art. And this doesn’t just happen between the designer and the players or between the rules and the players: it happens between the players themselves. In both areas, consent is not clear and is constantly negotiated, and so are the exact nature of the rules and their edge cases. And – and this is really important – even when the rules are clear, social negotiation is still going on. We are never truly in the magic circle at all, and we are certainly never only in the orthogame. As an example, consider a small child coming up to bat in cricket (or baseball). Naturally we bowl slowly or underarm, not how we would bowl to an adult. We do not play by the rules, which tell us our goal is to try to get the other person out. Of course, for some people, games exist precisely so they can be anti-social and luxuriate in “wickedness”, or at least in obedience; to some this is not permissible. We MUST bowl as hard as possible at the child, or how will they learn what a game is? When I was about eight years old my father taught me how to play patience (aka solitaire, or Klondike) and after a few games I ran to him jubilantly to tell him that I had “won” the game (which rarely happens in that version) and, I added “I only cheated once”. He shook his head and told me that it didn’t count. It hit me like a blow. But I also – now – see his point. And all of us likely have a moment where we too would yield to the rules. If the child in the cricket example was saying his being caught “didn’t count”, we would insist on the rules kicking in then – or maybe we wouldn’t. Maybe it depends if we thought they had had a fair go first. As another example, a gentleman I know insists that when we play scrabble, we can’t use any “weird” words. When we point out that that’s an impossibly vague description, he gets cross because of course we know what a weird word is. When we suggest adding an authority like a dictionary, he gets cross because we should just be able to know.
And the point is, as much as we pretend that games are these places where these complex, individual beliefs about which rules to follow and how much disappear thanks to a strong structure being opposed from the outside, in fact games are the opposite:BECAUSE they require us to constantly negotiate how much we’re going to obey arbitrary outside rules, games are sometimes just as or even MORE complex and tricky.
Now all my previous talk about Skinnerboxes is to bring me to this, which I guess will be next week’s blog: how do we negotiate the inherent savagery of games, as we learn about how games are masked rituals that reveal our bloodlust, but also learn that maybe entering those zones are not something that actually helps us learn or change who we are? And how do we use what we know about how to change behaviour by using game elements (and using play) to perhaps change what people think games are, and maybe even change who people are? Is the key to the glorious Sexy Communist Future of Star Trek perhaps a world where there are no games as we know them, because they’re creepy? That’s not just rhetorical: I’ve always been keen to defend games when they are accused of being unimportant, but one must always be ready – at least philosophically – to consider that one’s life work is monstrous and must be destroyed. I think right now is a good time in our culture to start finding out.
(I am increasingly disenchanted with and horrified by what social media does to people and culture but I hope blogging continues and I hope I can find someway for all of this to be read by someone. I am resisting putting these on substack or Medium as yet. Maybe one day someone will turn some of the hit ones into a book. I live, as always, with the dream of an amanuensis.)
I want to really get into the weeds on how players negotiate playstyles and play events, but first I want to stay on the orthogame more, because we’re in a really interesting place with that right now.
I never thought of myself as a game designer until very recently, which is odd for many reasons, not least the patterns you see in the other things I’m interested in: con artistry, education, animal behaviour and probability, the last two which I studied to very high levels at university. I actually spent a lot of time researching games and game design while I was doing my probability studies and was disappointed to find out that game theory, despite the name, has almost nothing to do with games. The definition of game in game theory is one of an abstract mathematical system where there are different choices a “player” can make, or may make with certain probabilities, and which lead to certain outcomes. Although game theory started with the idea of games, and was developed off into psychological concepts, if you pull a book about game theory off a shelf, it will be lucky to feature any games at all in it. It will be about optimization algorithms, which we do now see more and more use of in AI, and the expert systems that came before them. AI is game theory in that it makes choices, runs down those choices, and checks the outcome, and then compares the outcome to a win situation. If it doesn’t win, it then adapts the choice gates, weighting them differently.
I was disappointed, thirty years ago, because I wanted to learn game design and – unlike now! – it was not an area with any academic study. Such things just did not exist before the year 2000 or so. We relied on Homo Ludens and developmental psychology, and the few rare cultural studies like the amazing work by Gary Alan Fine which was the first person ever to go “these gamer nerds, how does their subculture work?”. But then in the 1990s computer gaming became big business and everything changed, and all of a sudden you could get a grant to study this stuff and we started figuring out what people liked in games and how to monetize that hard. It’s important to remember though that we didn’t know these things at all then and we had to learn them through making mistakes. One now-legendary game design anecdote is the story of Golden Ages in the Civilization computer games. Originally the game had Dark Ages, where production slowed down and it was harder to achieve goals and make progress. They swiftly discovered that players hated them so much they would often stop playing when they encountered them. So the designers made Dark Ages play regular play and made what had been regular play Golden Ages. In effect, nothing had changed, but psychologically the game was completely different. This became known as the phenomenon of Loss Aversion.
Nash Equilibrium is a game theory term that has almost no relevance to game design theory, but it’s fun to say.
Most of the study of game design has been in psychology, and understanding human behaviour. But interestingly, so far, not a huge amount of that has actually trickled down into the orthogame space. By this I mean that the design of the orthogame tends to still operate as if we are making chess, and thus operating in a game theory space. A game is designed to be, still, a mathematical and tactical and strategic operation, where the participants make choices with the goal of producing the optimal outcome. Games typically have dramatic win and loss conditions and score tracks around the outside that provide constant feedback, measuring how well you made those choices. This is considered good design – as I said last week, nobody would play a game where your choices didn’t matter.
But here’s the thing: games, we are discovering, are inherently learning environments. They teach you how to play them and how to learn more about them, and they teach you how to master them, and then they also teach you about yourself and the world and the things they represent. Games in fact have some of the best possible tools for learning because of that direct, actionable feedback, and the ability to repeat the same circumstances over and over again, and to experiment and explore different options. Games we now think overlap with educational processes, in that you can’t play a game without learning more than just how to play that game, and games and game elements may be the best way to teach many things. In fact, I’m thinking about writing a book about how games are actually a kind of social learning ritual, more in common with ceremony than warfare. Given those things, it’s worth knowing that education has been going through something of a revolution in the last few decades and is also still a very young science. We’re starting to explore this new idea that making mistakes and being corrected isn’t actually as useful as we thought. Which is to say people respond better to learning that isn’t based on saying “no, that’s wrong” as a fundamental principle.
At first glance that sounds insane – are we going to start saying something like “one plus one equals three, yes, good job, but let’s try and imagine a better answer.”? It’s not that. It’s more thinking that as much as possible we want to give the participant in learning the most chance of succeeding at something before testing if they succeeded, because the more they failthe slower they learn. Mistakes and failure aren’t learning opportunities at all, but rather impediments to learning. Navigating this is the new frontier of education, because even while we’re not entirely sure how to teach this way, we know that our current education system leaves kids good at taking tests but lacking in imagination and often crippled with a need to be correct. I sometimes use the metaphor of expanding what the light can see: you’re not wrong if you hear something in the bushes and guess what it is, but you’re guessing until we expand the light.
I work in animal training and we are doing the same thing there. To return to Skinner, he helped us divide the learning in operant conditioning into four kinds:
Positive Punishment – you want the rat to not go on the platform, so you shock the rat when it goes on the platform. The word “positive” here means an element was ADDED to the rat’s environment. Contrast that with:
Negative Punishment – you want the rat to not go on the platform, so the food supply stops when it goes on the platform. It is negative because something good was SUBTRACTED.
Positive Reinforcement – you want the rat to go on the platform, so it gets extra good food when it does go on the platform.
Negative Reinforcement – you want the rat to go on the platform, so the electric shock STOPS (is subtracted) when it goes on the platform.
Note how the terms positive and negative here don’t refer to the consequence: the middle two use only something nice, and the first and last use only something nasty. Of course, there is a fine line here. For a young child, losing access to a toy can feel like a terrible terrible thing but it is a world away (at least experimentally) from giving the child a smack. And here we return to loss aversion: it felt bad when the Dark Ages kicked in, and it feels great when the Golden Age kicked in. This isn’t operant conditioning (because these weren’t causal) but it shows the paragidm above, while also showing how psychology can shade how we see these things. In effect the Dark Ages felt like aversive – something came along and made things worse – and the Golden Age felt rewarding – something came along and made it better.
So the question then becomes: are we taking this knowledge into designing orthogames? And should we?
Let’s take a look at chess. Chess has positive punishment all the time: if you make a poor move, you experience loss. You had a queen, and you lose it. (Some find Go much more relaxing because when you realise you’ve lost territory you can dance away somewhere else and try to come back to that space a different way. It can still feel very punishing, but it’s less direct.) Modern games have, generally, moved away from the chess model though, and try to instead just reward the leader for good play. They are learning this idea of nice for others rather than nasty for you. It can still feel a bit rough to miss out on a bonus card or a combo, but it doesn’t (for most people) sting like losing a queen. Don’t get me wrong, if you have ten points and your opponent has fifty, you are definitely likely to rage quit, but it does (we think) feel different from “this player keeps moving to attack my pieces”.
A lot of game writers say that the “euro” style games tend to have less “head to head” conflict than American and take that games, and that’s true but also not the whole picture. Because getting cut off, penalised or torn down or knocked off your spot is still an attack and still a loss. So euros often actually feel a lot more cutthroat and “mean” than they look (and that some say). Having the Robber on your hex in Settlers of Catan is in theory only denying you resources (you aren’t losing things from your hand but not gaining them) but it feels like an attack and it feels very personal! Something can become an attack by comparison. If everyone else gets cheese, the act of “not getting cheese” becomes a nasty thing, rather than “not getting a nice thing”. Games like Tokaido are said to be “cosy” because you’re just walking along a road and the worst someone can do to you is get a prize before you do, but the game actually feels like musical chairs: everyone gets a good thing and the loser gets shut out. This makes Tokaido one of the harshest games I know as a result!
It’s like a knife-fight in a phone booth.
All of which is to say: yes, we’re trying to look at the orthogame and say “can we remove the nasty stuff” but we still end up in punishment territory a lot of the time, because games are either competitive or they are pass/fail. Not winning reflects and becomes losing. As hard as we try to make everything a Golden Age rather than a Dark Age, it’s hard to make orthogames actually feel nice. That might be because the orthogame is set up to be a ritualised test. In other words, our idea of a game is that it should be inherently educational not experiential: you are here to learn to play well, and if you fail to play well, you will be marked down. And that may not be something we want to change! We might not want to do a crossword that lets us put any words in the box. But I think as education begins to ask “what does education without being wrong look like?” we might wonder the same about games. We don’t know what that looks like. It may be impossible, as in, games stop being games if they aren’t about correction. It may be rethinking games entirely. It may be that this is what play is. It may be why we like play so much, and it may be why we should do much more play and why games are actually a poor substitute! (Look, for example, at how many computer “games” now are just colouring in exercises, or dolly-dress up).
I am not the only one who has argued that games are the primary medium of the 21st century. But I’d like to expand that and make sure it doesn’t just include orthogames. I think PLAY is bigger and more important than game. This is the same as how we know that painting the stairs like musical notes makes people more likely to walk up them, and scoring them for how fast they did it does not. Games really are a poor substitute to play and I think as humans we crave play but are told the only way we’re allowed to get play is through games. We have decided that games are good, and play is bad, because if we’re not fighting or being corrected, it cannot be worthwhile. Maybe it’s time we looked at that attitude as well. Maybe the orthogame is a petticoat allowing us an excuse to be playful, and it’s not always the best one. At the very least, we might want to admit that it’s not the only part of play, and we’ll look at that in subsequent blogs.
Time for some #ttrpg theory. Go watchthis scene from Aliens. it’s 2 and a half minutes long and one of the most important scenes in the film.
Carter Burke is the best villain in all SF because he’s just a weak-willed doofus.
The scene just before it is crucial exposition: they have lost contact with the colony on LV426. This scene is a character beat: Gorman is going, Ripley isn’t, Burke is negotiating to try to get the latter to change to the former. But forget plot and character for now. Look at what happens in this scene: Ripley makes coffee. Gorman declines, he’s all business. Burke is a softy, he needs more milk and he’s used to taking advantage of people so he goes to the fridge and gets it himself. It was Paul Reiser who decided to go get the milk. It’s not in the script and it doesn’t have to be. Some would say it shouldn’t be! (Most scriptwriting advice is reminding you that a script is closer to a blueprint than a description of the action happening on screen, and early scriptwriters often over-write description and acting instructions.)
The scriptwriting jargon for what’s happening in this scene is “business”. It’s not action because it’s not key to advancing character or plot or exposition. In this case it does establish character and in plot beats it will often colour the action and in setting beats it often helps highlight setting! But it’s not those things in itself. It’s things the actors can do while doing their lines so they aren’t simply standing in space and announcing them. And it’s not the same as stage directions, because theatre is different: movement is so important on the stage that these kinds of things are more tightly controlled. However, yes, theatre too will often have business. Let’s compare:
Actors and directors might suggest “Oh, when Estragon asks Vladimir about rope, Vladimir will pat his pockets” and someone else might say “No, no, Vladimir should look around on the ground.” And these are important choices! Business isn’t nothing. Sometimes business is everything!
And sometimes business is very much in the script, and described and laid out. It’s just not actually the action. It’s either in the foreground where something else is going on in the subtext or, as in our example in Aliens, in the background where something else is going on in the foreground. Here’s an example where the important part of the scene is Jimmy, the coach who until now hasn’t engaged, has an argument with Dottie about the right call. The business here is that baseball signals are funny, and it’s funny to have an argument indirectly.
The actual definition of what is business and what is stage direction and what is action is not going to be particularly clear, but the point is that there are lots of times in all kinds of media where what’s happening isn’t really what’s important. The purpose of business is to fill the scene, so that whatever else is happening – the action, dialogue, scene-setting, setting-establishment etc – has something to hang off and build on. Not every scene has business, because sometimes all you want to do is fill the screen with acting and dialogue or a kung fu fight. But particularly on screens, where we feel the need for there to be cinema-verite (that is, we expect film and TV to feel sort of like documentaries, capturing reality faithfully), there’s often a lot of business.
I’m going to argue that a lot of the time, a lot of what we’re doing when we play RPGs is like this: it’s business.
I think this is especially true in games where we are simulating things, and as such players spend a lot of time planning things or discussing strategy. I think sometimes buying equipment and levelling up is a kind of business too! We’re not entirely out of the story, but we’re not doing any actual storytelling. I would even say that for a lot of people almost all the mechanical parts of an RPG are “business”, and it’s just there so they can tell a story and act in character (and socialize in a way that’s half-in, half-out of character). I think different RPG players think different things matter! And I think we often don’t know how to talk about what matters.
Often, the way that TTRPG design evolves is in these moments of religious jerks. Someone will experience something bad in a game, and then go off and write down in a rulebook “Don’t ever do this”. Or even stronger, they’ll design a game where you CAN’T do that thing. And then other players will read that advice or rules and they will have a moment like “oh my god someone finally put into words the problems I’ve been having with my games”. And then those people will often make the error of going “this is the new milennium. All previous ways of doing things are inferior or wrong. This is the RIGHT way to game.” Or they’ll go “I want to play games that do it the way game X does it.” And the thing about those approaches is they often skip over understanding what has actually changed and why, and we never actually get good vocabulary for what’s actually happening.
One of the reasons Apocalypse World felt unlike any other game before it is that it has no business. One of the key parts of the design is you only roll the dice when it really fucking matters, and actions don’t exist. Nobody just “does” something in a way that involves the rules in AW. Instead we have moves and every move is important and has the power to drive the scene and the story in a powerful way. The GM advice says not to let players try to “do moves without doing moves” – players should commit to “yes, this is a Cause Harm check”. You can see a similar thing in the Trophy system: potentially, every single roll in that game can cause you to gain insanity, so every roll is REALLY important. Again, these aren’t ability checks. They aren’t “see if you can do a thing”. These rolls are always asking “in this scene, how much does your character embrace their dark side to get what they want or avoid suffering?”
In one of those games, the coffee scene above wouldn’t likely involve any dice. Or if it did, it would push the business aside, away from the rules. It might look like this:
Ripley: I invite them in, I make coffee. Burke: I want to convince Ripley to go to LV426. GM: Okay that’s a Change Their Take roll. Tell me how you’re doing it. Burke: First I’ll imply she’s very safe and will just be advising (fails). Hmm. Can I add a die somehow? (looks at Ripley’s sheet) oh, can I trigger your Goal of getting back into space? Ripley: Yeah, definitely.
But another GM might go:
Ripley: I invite them in, I make coffee. Gorman: I think Gorman will accept the coffee but not drink it. Because he’s all about following orders but he’s also all business. Burke: Is it good coffee? GM: Ripley, make a roll. Ripley: What’s the stat? GM: Let’s say Intelligence. Ripley: Fail. GM: Sorry, it’s not good. Synthetic powdered stuff, and Ripley is sleepy from working nights. Burke: I go get some milk from the fridge while we’re telling her about the attack. Ripley: Hey that’s my milk? Burke: What are you, the milk police? Anyway (drops into character) “We want you to come along as an advisor” Ripley: Yeah nah. Why do you need me if you have marines? Burke: I’ll roll Persuade, flattering her as the expert. (he fails) Can I try again? GM: Yeah, but you’ll need to find a new angle. Burke: (looks at Ripley’s sheet, sees Goal: Get Back to Space) I’ll hint that we can get her off loader duty and back as a flight officer, that’s a new thing. GM: Sure.
Now here’s the thing. At some point, some GM in the second scene there might have gone “oh you fumbled? Yeah the coffee is so bad Burke pukes everywhere.” And now Ripley feels like she’s playing the wrong game. She’s a klutz, and now this is a sitcom! She yells at the GM that she wasn’t going to make coffee if that could happen! The GM says “no takebacks!”. So Ripley goes away and writes down “only roll when it really matters” or “say yes or roll the dice” or “always establish the stakes in every roll”. Or worse she says “old games suck because they didn’t understand that we were trying to tell a story”. Or “game X sucks because it’s too easy to fail”. Or “I want the system to be invisible until I need it, stop rolling dice all the damn time”. But what really happened is the GM (or the rules) took something that should have been business and made it into action – without telling the players that might happen.
All of those conclusions are valid, let me be clear. But thinking about how I GM, I tend to make a lot of business rolls, all the time, because I find that a) rolls keep players really engaged with the activity of “playing a shared experience at a table” and b) add tons of colour and story. Does that occasionally risk throwing off the whole story? Yes, if you’re not careful. But it has benefits as well! Some of the greatest moments in my games have come from business rolls. Also, I think it’s okay if sometimes business rolls do become important things. That’s fine with me. I think if we avoid a lot of that, we end up deciding too much what the story should be. You don’t want to wreck someone’s idea of their character or violate the contract of what the game is about, but it might be really interesting if Ripley’s coffee IS a plot point!
But also, making lots of business checks isn’t the only pro-business solution. Heck, sometimes the solution is “yes, the roll is for the key part of the scene, but other elements of the dice roll provide us with business and colour” – this is sort of what Genesys does. Games with lots of funny random tables like Mork Borg are kind of throwing out business options too (and secretly want you to take them and turn them into big plot points!) Mork Borg and Warhammer like rolling lots of dice and failing all the time because it helps build grim comedy as a mood, and so lots of rolls are going to be business. But rolling lots of business doesn’t have to be for comedy or grittiness. A lot of early game designs tend to assume you’re rolling business all the time. Call of Cthulhu, for example, is one. It loves business! But you can’t take that attitude into Cthullhu Dark (which became the Trophy system).
In a similar way, making everything an ability test with a chance of failure has lots going for it, because it means players never know how they’ll solve the mystery. But if you aren’t careful, in a system with low success rates, you can lock off the ability to move the plot forward behind information-gathering rolls that everyone fails. There are lots of ways to solve that problem, like using a system like GUMSHOE where information-gathering uses a completely different system! But you can also just use ability checks in a slightly more careful way. Often GUMSHOE advocates act like the solution in GUMSHOE is obviously needed, obviously better and obviously easier, when it’s none of those things. It’s just a question of solving a problem in a particular way; there are plenty of other ways to solve the problem. And the better idea is to also understand the problem better! Trail of Cthulhu uses the solution where there’s a forced disconnect between types of actions; Call of Cthulhu just understands not to gatekeep information when they write scenarios.
It’s perfectly fine to go “well, I think Game X is always better”, if you really want to. But it’s worth understanding what’s going on when you do. Players who don’t like systems that generate business are often players who find it easy to come up with business on their own! Generally the biggest problems in RPGs come when there’s a mismatch in player styles and goals, and almost always this happens because some players think that the way they do it is the way everyone does it, because it comes easily to them (or it comes easily to the person writing the game). Assumptions are so easy to catch us out. Hopefully this helps you understand things better and communicate things clearer, and thus have better games.
A long long time ago there was an RPG called “The End” which was set in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s hook was that the Rapture had happened, and all the truly good people were taken to heaven and all the truly bad people were taken to Hell, and the meek – the wishy-washy, uncommitted, cowards – inherited the earth. Since a lot of RPG nerds grow up immersed in American bible culture, some of them CREAMED THEIR JEANS over this “inversion” of the familiar Beatitude. But as I pointed out at the time, it didn’t mean anything. The setting was just another fight-for-scrap post-apoc setting. You didn’t even make up meek characters. The setting didn’t DO anything. It didn’t effect anything.
There’s an old Knights of the Dinner Table comic where the titular RPG crew have switched from fantasy to sci-fi, with the joke being that nothing has actually changed: the Hackmaster +12 sword is now just a Hackmaster lasersword, and fireballs are now flamethrowers. Very very slowly a variety of interesting, less mainstream titles (I won’t use the word indie, all RPGs are indie really) have nibbled around adding different structures but most of the time, if we’re in an avatar space we’re always going to end up having the same kind of stories. We have to! If you’ve got a band of uniquely talented individuals who need to constantly fall into plots that can be solved at least somewhat by violence, you end up telling the same kinds of stories, every single time. Huge seismic changes in the RPG hobby came from things like Call of Cthulhu, because there you had to investigate and go mad and die, and Vampire, because you actually had to talk to people in a society. Steve’s Second Law of RPGs goes that no matter how inventive your setting, I am probably going to be hired to protect a caravan or solve a mystery in my first scenario. The widow with goblins in her basement, the thieves robbing caravans, the low-level superheroes robbing the bank, these things always end up in most every RPG, which means setting means almost nothing.
You CAN do quite a bit, though, if you push on things well. You can make a standard fantasy setting and a group of PCs interesting, but to do it you have to make sure your setting elements have impact, at every level. World building isn’t just a bunch of ideas: it has to drive every single thing the players think about and do. The Shadow of the Demon Lord RPG by the great Rob Schwalb gets this. Although I want the forces to be stronger, the setting assumes you pick one of several apocalyptic scenarios that are rocking and wrecking the world the moment that play begins. The standard example is the orc rebellion. In the setting, the human empire conquered the half-giant vikings to the south, blasted them with dark magic and created a race of near immortal mindless killing machines called orcs. Except yesterday, all the magic wore off and every orc stopped being mindless. One of the orc generals stormed into the Emperor’s throne room, killed the Emperor, and took the throne. That’s a good example of a Big Thing that Effects Everything Else. Until yesterday, the empire was protected by orcs, now the orcs are in rebellion. Nobody can ignore that. You can run around the edges of it, but only for so long.
Good worldbuilding doesn’t take long.Conan the Barbarian is actually a masterclass in deep worldbuilding with the smallest touches.
There’s an old rule of narrative building that a good way to start is with your villain. The thinking goes that in a lot of stories, the villain is the one with the chief amount of agency, so you need to figure out what things they want to exploit to achieve their evil plan, and what their weaknesses are, so you can then create a plausible way that a hero with everything against them can foil it. Building the villain first gives you the mold for the hero, so they perfectly fit. I think worldbuilding for games is best done the other way: you have to know what kind of heroes (or protagonists) you want, and what you want them to do, and then build the world to suit. It’s too easy to get it wrong the other way. Either your world won’t support heroes at all, so they become so aberrant it becomes weird (like trying to fit murderhobos into cosycore), or it will have things that are in the setting that don’t mean anything because they don’t connect to what the heroes are doing. The setting will be “Oh there are sixteen planes of genies who wished the world into existence and magic is a kind of fish…but you’re going to be defending a caravan, and/or solving a mystery, and most of you are detective ninjas”.
No! Not again!
Superheroes tends to work well here because the comics have already been built around the idea of patrolling and dumb-ass villains doing stupid things that heroes can just stumble across. The setting was built around the needs of weekly comic book action. Fantasy less so, which is why it gets weird trying to map SEAL Team Six onto Lord of the Rings (which is why it was such a great moment when John Tynes said “just run it like SEAL Team Six, it works better that way”). Warhammer also has murderhoboing built into the setting: there are a class of mercenaries who wander around protecting caravans and fighting monsters, and that ecosystem is built into the setting. They have a place. The terrible option too many RPGs opt for is “the system is designed for you to be combat machines, but there’s a big sentence here that says you’re supposed to tell stories.” I flinch when I see “story first”. Fuck off with that. If you have to tell me to put story first, YOU HAVEN’T DESIGNED A GOOD ENOUGH GAME. The same goes for “don’t metagame”.
(Even worse, sometimes you’ll have games or game advice suggest that you punish players who make up murderhobos with dead relatives, as if they’ve been Naughty and have to be Shown How To Do It Right. Or they’ll suggest that only bad GMs create these kinds of players, and they are the Naughty ones.)
You do have to be a little careful though with how you build your world around your heroes or the action of the story. If it fits them too well and too snugly, it can make everything that isn’t connected to them seem less real (which means they might start killing the NPCs etc). It can also stretch believability and make things feel staged, or require players to suspend their disbelief a LOT. (“Yes there’s always a gang of the Joker’s thugs on a street corner in Gotham, waiting for him to always escape from Arkham, because that’s the rules of the story”.) Or the shape you create will be limited to only certain kinds of plots. It might do those well but it might work against you trying to do a slice of life drama or romance story in between. Players can also be pulled out of suspension of disbelief if they see too many of signs of the authorial stance (at which point they will probably conclude they want to just be authors). There’s only so many times you can Acquire Plot Points until you Trigger Act Three before setting also fades away – narrative structure was the caravan all along.
Of course, RPGs have it hard, being both a simulation of a believable, sandboxy world, where you can go anywhere and do anything, but also provide rich narrative. It’s no wonder then that we shrink the types of narratives down to suit simulations. There’s an old saying that RPGs tend to be wide, and provide tons and tons of options, so you can play them forever, or narrow, and thus really good for a brief encounter. With this rule there is often the suggestion that the former can tell any kind of story, and with the latter only one kind of story, but that’s not true, because the sandbox stories are all the same story. There’s just more stuffing around in the simulation parts. The narrative works the same way. So there are good reasons why we end up guarding caravans. The point is to be aware of this, not necessarily throw it away.
I’ve just written a book about worldbuilding and next week we launch a brand new world-creating game – The World Well – and both of them are about exploring the WHY of worldbuilding. They both start with the question: what is the world FOR? That’s what you need to know. Outside of the weird hobby where SF nerds build fake biospheres, worlds must have a purpose, and you should know what that purpose is, and you should make sure they achieve that purpose (and maybe even tell the players or at least the GM why the world is like that). It’s okay to say “there’s a bunch of clans in this setting because that makes for a good game, even though it’s not entirely realistic that this clan structure would exist in this context”. Like I said last week you should tell us why.
The World Well is built from the ground up to make a world riven with fractures, with contested factions fighting desperately over coveted power, exactly the things an RPG setting needs to give big exciting events and different points of view of the world. You may still, however, be protecting caravans. I can only do so much with groups of powered individuals fighting trouble. But at least the worlds you build will tremble as you do so. If that interests you, please go back it (and pre-order my book, too).
Many years ago, a friend of mine was once asked by a friend in common what RPGs were. He said “well, a bunch of people sit around a table and roll funny dice, and whoever rolls a one, they’re dead.” He wasn’t wrong.
My argument in part two is really as follows: Firstly, that when we’re roleplaying, we’re doing three things at once – playing a game, creating a story and also simulating a reality where our avatar moves around and does thing. Secondly, that because we give supremacy to the last one, the other two aren’t very good.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a bit of fun in the game of most RPGs, but it’s mostly to be had in min-maxing. Then there’s the activity of “making up stuff from prompts” which is also a kind of game and a good one, but when we talk about the gaming part of RPGs we don’t usually mean that, we mean the “skirmish level wargame” thingy. And that? That’s okay. But I think it’s worth noting that computer RPGs often do that better. Gloomhaven does that better. It’s about as much of a game as a game of craps – you roll and try not to roll snake eyes. It’s not much of a game. But I also think it’s worth noting too that it can’t do it much better, or – as proved by 4e – it takes away too much from the simulation.
Similarly, we know from the long history of TTRPGs that narrative mechanics are generally only accepted grudgingly, and slowly. I know gamers to this day who complain about how in the roman RPG Fulminata, your social rank determined initiative. We have slowly come around to what Wushu invented – the idea that it doesn’t matter what the fiction says, the game is only over when the hitpoints of the story run down – but even that is very contentious. Blades in the Dark‘s Fiction First principle is angrily against such things (although maybe not – it’s not really clear what that means). We’ve realized that for the most part, virtue and flaw mechanics are dumb because it means you get more combat points to spend if you hog the spotlight with your narrative baggage. The GM has to give you another scene about your nightmares AND you get more points to spend on gun skills? Not fair.
The RPG industry famously has very little memory: the reason fantasy heartbreakers exist is because so many people start with D&D and then inevitably hit a wall of “wait, we can do better”. They even come to this realization if they’re the Critical Role guys! But the consequence is we’re almost always stuck in 1976, design-wise, still learning the same lessons, generation after generation. But I think despite this, we are creeping forward as I say. We’re getting people to move away from flaw points. To accept Drama Points or GM fiat for narrative flair. To be okay with someone getting to go first because they have Impulsive Hothead as a narrative principle, not because they have a high dexterity. But I still think we’re trapped in the tyranny of truth-making that comes from simulation.
Back in Part One, I mentioned the vibes vs plot debate, which was primarily set off by the fantastic Partick H. Willems, who shot to youtube fame with his amazing X-Men by Wes Anderson video. He kicked off that discussion with this video which starts by explaining that plot isn’t what films are made of, despite our obsession with plot. There’s a key example of this at the 32 minute mark, from the 2006 Miami Vice film . Willems explains that the scene we’re about to see has the following plot: the two leads coerce their informant to set up a meet and greet with the cartel. In the actual scene, Crocket (Colin Farrell) breaks away from the conversation and stares out over the ocean, as if imagining an escape. This is important. Regardless of Willem’s ideas about vibe movies, this is about motif, and theme, and character. The opening act of the film has an informant trying to leave Miami and save his girlfriend; when he discovers his girlfriend has been killed the informant commits suicide. Later, Crocket seduces the wife of the cartel leader and talks about running away with her, but they both fear it is too dangerous. Crocket’s partner, Tubbs has a romantic interest who is terribly injured. Crocket wants to preserve the woman he has fallen for she is a criminal and he is also lying to her about being a cop. The film is about how being cast into the battle between vice cops and drug dealers, the lead characters compromise their true desires and may be trapped.
The point of all this is that in most TTRPGs, if you were playing out the scene where Crocket and Tubbs get the informant to set up a meeting, you would focus on plot. You’d roll Negotiate and see if you did well or not, and that would determine how the scene played out. You would not have Crocket’s player roll his Need To Escape. You wouldn’t activate Lonely Stare. You wouldn’t even check a table for The Ocean Is The Stand-In For Freedom.
Mullets? In 2006? Maybe you can change the past.
There are exceptions. Again, I’m not the only person talking about this. Smallville understood this. Robin Laws got into this with Hillfolk, GUMSHOE and Hamlet’s Hitpoints. As Laws has it, there are procedural scenes, where the plot is interacted with and moved forward, and character scenes, which have characters develop and engage in conflict. Smallville, famously, was originally written with plot-moving mechanics in it, but then they course-corrected through playtesting. In that game, Superman never ever punches Lex Luthor with his fists. He rolls his JUSTICE plus his relationship to LOIS to decide if he will save the world or his girlfriend.
But this kind of thing is still rare as hen’s teeth and I’ll argue that one reason it is so is because, just like we’ve got poor game mechanics for the sake of simulation, we’ve got poor narrative mechanics for the sake of simulation. Because simulation is obsessed with “what is true”, we can’t get away from plot. Again, as I said in Part 2, this doesn’t make the standard RPG model bad. It just means there’s other things we can do.
Let me give you another example. I was playing The Score recently and we’d loaded an endangered tiger onto the boat we’d come to the island in. Then later, as we ran to escape, it turned out we’d been set up, and the drug dealers were already on the boat we were running too. They came out and held some of the crew at gunpoint. Then we turned over the last card and it activated my driving skills. I explained that when we had said we’d loaded the tigers onto the boat, the camera had just shown a boat’s interior: we were actually loading them onto the drug dealer’s boat! Which I was now driving, and smashing into our smaller one (with time for our crew to dive safely into the water). Again, this would be a difficult thing to do in your standard RPG because if you say “hey, GM, we load the tiger onto our boat”, that (usually) becomes true. You can add flashbacks, you can spend a Drama Point to make a boat show up, but usually – USUALLY – you can’t edit the past. Because that’s not what GNSMISHMASH is all about. If you can edit the past, simulation stops working. Players stop feeling like their actions have consequences. The tension in most RPGs comes from that simulation element: we did kill the goblin guard so nobody knows we’re coming. The GM cannot later say we did not kill the goblin guard. We rolled to hit and he died. We spent points on our stabbing skills and our move silently precisely SO we could kill the goblin guard. To change this would actually be unfair, because it would invalidate spending those points.
But story does not work like this. Story has no chronology. More importantly, the camera does not work like this. The camera always lies. Plot is a made-up thing experienced by the audience and only the audience. And the audience is always being lied to, because that’s how stories work; they present elements that the audience think are true things that the characters are doing as if those characters were real and time moved forward, but when we create stories, we present ideas. And so there is the issue: if we insist on serving the GNSMISHMASH of “this has become true”, we can be prevented in actually going where narrative mechanics can take us.
THAT SAID not everyone wants to go away into narrative mechanics. It can feel invalidating, like the example above. It can feel “weird”. For example, some players don’t like Brindlewood Bay‘s mechanic where the players just decide who is guilty of the crimes, even thought authors do this mid-book all the time: it can feel like the characters are just framing someone. In the GUMSHOE system seen in Trail of Cthulhu, you never fail investigation tests, because it’s pretty rare in CSI that the labs get lost or they just can’t figure out how the blood splatter fell, but when we ran that game the lack of the role made it feel like we weren’t “doing” anything in the scene. The simulation felt empty because there was nothing for our character to push against. We were also able to understand that when we “failed” at something in other games, it didn’t mean the characters were incompetent, it just meant the plot wasn’t in that position, or that scene wasn’t really a good one in the plot – we were already converting things to have more narrative meaning. And that is the beauty and the flaw of the GNSMISHMASH – because it is three goals glued together, it can lead to groups being terrible mismatched, but it also lets us shuffle these hobbies back and forth across each other, in a way where the friction makes things fun or funny, rather than hurting the game. Where the tension between the three goals becomes the spring in the trampoline of fun. The whole fun comes from the fact that the audience and the author are the same person, and if we go too far into author, we stop being audience.
But as an autistic person, I really struggle playing TTRPGs because I never know if I’m supposed to be writing a story or acting as a character or maximizing as a player, and the GM often refuses to tell me. And one of the reasons I burned myself out as a GM was because I shifted from running pre-written adventures (where there always was a simulation happening, a set truth for me to present) to doing more improv stuff, where the ability to both make anything I wanted be true AND present things however I wanted ended up with me just not knowing what to say. It’s great to have the combo. But I need clarity. And just as I really like how 4E opened up a whole new game of skirmish fun, I want to push this envelope into narrative much much further. I do want to roll for The Ocean Is a Metaphor for Freedom. And given how much people want to put RPGs on the stage, I think the world does too. Let’s see where we can go! But along the way yes, we might have to let go of “truth making” all the time. Funnily enough, what we find in The Score is people love to see it go. Because constantly worrying about what’s true makes them play defensively and get anxious all the time. We tend to say that creativity is the hard part of RPGs, but I think for most people, it’s actually way easier than figuring out what feat you should take.
STEP INTO YOUR POWWWEEERRR
And since the Actual Play movement is more and more focusing on story, it’s time to rethink what RPGs actually are. We didn’t call The Score an RPG because that name has too much baggage – not just all the math and the chunky books and such, but that fear of having to choose feats. And if D&D insists on squatting on that idea and ruining it for everyone, I’m going over here to do something else, like the RPG I just finished which does what is impossible with truth-making approaches: it runs in reverse.
(Although I’m not entirely giving up the GNSMISHMASH of course – I’m actually working on a traditional RPG right now as well.)
D-Constructions 
