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[consilium-games]

Setting, Genre, and Principles

I talked recently with a friend about Apocalypse World, genre, and Principles. For those unfamiliar, Principles are a design and game-running technique that Apocalypse World did not invent, but did refine and explicate, a bit like how the Greeks knew of static electricity, but it was Galvani who made a battery on purpose, that others could study. Since I haven't died yet, I have a project in mind, in this case one that really explicitly relies on Principles in its basic design, so in this essay I want to work out a basic edge of 'what Principles can cover'. Namely, the edge of 'genre'.

I'll define a couple technical terms here because I intend to use them pretty narrowly:

Diagetic means the usual, "bound within the world of a given story".

Commentative means "outside of any story, things we say about stories-generally".

So a setting counts as diagetic, bound within its own logic and the logic of the single work it appears in. Diagetically we'd ask "why does the author choose to write dragons in this way?"

A genre counts as commentative, not bound within any story. It may or may not codify some stories, an author might consciously bend to or defy a genre as they understand it, but most importantly on the genre level, we don't ask "why did the author write dragons like this?" Instead we ask "why do people-generally like to see dragons?"

In talking with that friend, she said she had difficulty reading AW, which I can't really fault anyone for: I'd consider AW almost as much a polemic manifesto as a procedural manual. And the former undermines the latter. Part of her issue came from her looking for a setting, not realizing that properly speaking, AW doesn't have one. I said as much, and as we talked, I then said a lot more than I should:

After confirming that "Baker does not give AW a setting", in a bit of enthusiasm on the idea of 'genre emulation', I went on to say that "Baker gives his apocalypse". This prompted confusion, for the reasonable question arises, "how can Baker provide his own, particular, post-apocalypse story without giving a setting?" So I should have spoken more carefully, and I wrote most of this essay to over-answer that question for my friend. I've massaged it into its current form, for you non-her readers, in hopes that it helps someone, or if nothing else I can refer back to it as I clarify my own cranky lit-game-dev ideas.

To me, 'a setting' goes like this:

DnD has a kind of proto-setting, it has dragons like-so, it has elves who look pretty and live in the woods, it has dwarves who look TV-ugly and live in the mountains, it has orcs who look ugly-ugly and live in the wastes, it has humans it treats as default and live wherever. It has vague gestures of settler-colonial race-relations but not enough anything to explore, unless you the reader put it there. DnD doesn't really have much of a genre more specific than "uh, generally sword-and-sorcery fantasy".

Shadowrun has basically the same things, and a specific setting: neoliberal dystopia and collapse of the state, but otherwise 'basically our world'.

But more than that, Shadowrun also--for its many faults--has a commentative-sense genre: in Shadowrun, might makes right (or at least right-now); money rules everything, except maybe loyalty; it treats magic as innately cool and natural but technology as evil and you maybe would better die than get an artificial heart. These story-contours don't care at all about where things happen or what institutions exist.

To take another example, Cowboy Bebop tells a solid noir western story set in space. The fact that it takes place in space ultimately matters very little to the 'western' or 'noir', though. Spike knows he lives in space, and he'd agree that--to someone alive in our world today--he lives in a sci-fi story. He doesn't know that he got cast as a western-revenge-fable protagonist (though he might agree if someone asked). He definitely doesn't know that he has a corner of the story that goes more-western, while Jet lives in a corner of the story that goes more-noir.

If you wanted, you could tell Cowboy Bebop beat for beat, almost unedited, as a straight-faced noir western. Instead of Jet's main ship they have a wagon, the individual bounty-hunters have their own horses, Ed does something weird with telegraphs and adding-machines. Instead of vacuum between planets of our solar system, they weather the desert waste between far-flung towns. It would remain a story about revenge, losing oneself, finding oneself, remaking oneself, and the things we have to do for the people we love, and what happens when we don't.

You could not do this and also remove the noir, or the western, those define the kind-of-story. If you left it in space but took out the noir, entire episodes of moral ambiguity would disappear (like Ganymede Elegy). Likewise taking out the western, the premise of bounty-hunters wouldn't fit and couldn't stay. I would even go further, and say that while I don't mind Cowboy Bebop sitting on the 'sci-fi' shelf so that consumers can find it, I wouldn't class Cowboy Bebop as sci-fi. A masterpiece, but not sci-fi. Because I think that as a genre, the core of sci-fi asks "where are we going, and what will we do when we get there?" Cowboy Bebop does not care to ask this question, it cares about the human condition right now, and what people right now will do. It takes place in space because space is cool.

Second hot take: Kafka's The Castle counts as sci-fi, by the above conception. Extremely, disturbingly prescient sci-fi, precisely predicting things from call-centers to Big Data and the professional managerial class, and warning of the ease with which a competent, level-headed, and well-meaning person can confront The Machine, and The Machine will completely hollow out and dehumanize them, rob them of every competence and agency, until The Machine no longer notices them as a foreign object.

No one would put The Castle on the sci-fi shelf, because it has no shiny labcoat SCIENCE![tm], telephones and typewriters show up as cutting-edge in the setting. But just look at the concept of tracking, monitoring, filing, and refiling, and bureaucratic shuffle and managerial maladaption and "not my department" and "oh you have to fill out a form 204B -> well file a form AV-8 to requisition a 204B -> look do I have to do everything for you, I'm a busy cog you know". Look at that concept as a technology, like Kafka did.

The story explicitly refers to this as innovation, as a deliberate thing that the Count and his bureaucrats did, on purpose, with intent and expected effect. The Castle explores social science, political technology. And Kafka rigorously explores its psychic effects on the subjects, more thoroughly than Gibson waxing poetic about VR headsets and the Matrix. The Castle qualifies as fiction about science, where we're going and what we'll (have to) do when we get there. It takes place in a quaint provincial village that might lie somewhere in Bohemia in the very early 20th century.

So I allege that while setting matters for writing a given story, it doesn't matter a lot for kind-of story. And in my conversation with my friend, I should have sensed the kernel I could have dug out, but instead, I wrote the rest of this essay, particular to post-apocalyptic genre fiction, and germane to Apocalypse World.

Bringing this back to apocalypsii:

In the Australian outback in the late-70s, the gas supply all but disappears, causing societal collapse and civil breakdown.

In the American midwest, an unspecified disaster wipes out communications and supply-lines, causing survivors to turn feral and cannibalistic.

In New York in the late 60s, food shortages and overpopulation cause the government to criminalize almost everything so that they can grind people up into food.

These are settings in the sense that I mean: a place, a time, implicit societal structures and institutions, "where is this, what world is this, what is here?" DnD's setting doesn't have much of a 'where' but it more or less assumes "uh, Earth kinda, sorta"; Shadowrun says "literally Earth but N years after magic becomes real and also DnD races". But the above three post-apoc settings have very different everything-else: if you were making a post-apoc section of a library and wanted to break down into sub-genre, you'd want to put the three works above on different aisles.

Mad Max tells a story where holding on to old power structures is complicated, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and it emphatically matters how we go about doing it: when marauding punks kill your family, you may justifiably go and kill them back; but when a power-mad warlord inflicts his brutal regime, you owe him no allegiance.

The Road tells a story where everything we care about can just blow away in the wind, and at best we can only cling to what we cherish, while we can. Power comes and goes, structures don't last, but cruelty and misery endure eternal and will always win--but we try anyway.

Soylent Green tells a story where societal structures can technically endure, but themselves have no moral compass and can inflict as much cruelty as uncaring nature. You may live in an illusion in which civilization appears to function, but in fact you have no more safety than the wilderness, and indeed you didn't realize it, but you're the cannibals, and perhaps soon the meal.

Those considerations all sit at the genre-type, commentative level, and I class them as wholly unconcerned with setting. Each of these stories would tell just as well in space, or an underground complex, or even Bronze-Age Fertile Crescent if you twist a few narrative arms. The where and when and what doesn't define or determine the kind of story, the genre, even if setting can help or hinder genre goals.

Bringing this back to Baker: he doesn't give a place where things happen; he doesn't give an inciting event that brought the apocalypse; he doesn't even describe what happened during the apocalypse, or how long ago it happened, or give a date for "today". I'll list three AW settings I've run or played in or heard about:

Sunlight vanished altogether, though somehow it hasn't gotten any colder. Darkness and shadow can become animate and even sapient, and can claim people, though it doesn't seem exactly malevolent or 'evil'. Rule of law has mostly fallen apart, but out of fear and prudence people mostly avoid wanton violence, because if you see someone you don't like, you could roll up on them and take their stuff--but just as easily they could kill you, and just as easily as either, the Dark might just take both of you; you're safer keeping the Dark at bay and not hassling someone else, unless you've got good reason.

A few years(?) ago, survivors woke up from total amnesia and some kind of fugue: it seems like this fugue lasted at least some years, there's some decay of modern-to-us structures, but the ruins look fully recognizable and often quite well-preserved. But signs abound, literally painted twenty-feet-high on buildings and structures, that something unfathomable happened. The giant wordless pictograms seem to warn to protect tools and structures, to stay together and not go off alone, indicate places that once had lots of food or other important resources, and most alarmingly they show gigantic hands reaching down from above onto some of the pictogram figures. No one can remember anything from before the wakeup though, so the meaning is lost.

Something like twenty years ago, the world broke in some fundamental way: it always rains or at least fog abounds, long-distance communication inexplicably but insurmountably fails to work, and cityscape has sprawled on its own to incorporate seemingly the entire world. As far as anyone knows, the city spans infinitely in every direction, it has no edge, only more city. The city-cancer seems waterlogged and rotting everywhere, some few places fit for use and occupancy, but if you go down any given street and step inside an empty house or shop, it probably won't suit human habitation. People still habitually carry on the forms and outlines of societal norms, mostly, because what else can they do? You can't burn it all down as long as it keeps raining.

I brought these up because Baker's conception of 'post-apoc' does not cover the whole of "all post-apocalyptic literature"--it couldn't, shouldn't, and if it did it would have little or no use to anyone. Baker's narrower conception, the Principles that AW's rules expect a setting to follow, narrow things down and keep the rules crisp, tight, and tractable.

Each of the AW campaigns above has a totally different setting, aiming in totally different directions for different things--but, they all live inside Baker's Principles for a post-apoc that fits within AW: scarcity, weak but present society and norms, a Before, an After, and no going back, and each has a 'Psychic Maelstrom' that excuses a lot of narrative fiat and deus ex machina and having characters just do weirdness not otherwise specified.

That 'Psychic Maelstrom' comes closest to giving what I'd call "a setting" as in "place, time, institutions", because it sits at the diagetic level. A distinct thing bound within a given story--except it only barely counts as 'diagetic'. Because Baker only gives loose guidelines for what a Psychic Maelstrom should be or do. Baker's own at-his-table Psychic Maelstrom will look nothing like mine, or my girlfriend's, or her erstwhile friend's, because in those three AW settings up there, each of us had totally different ideas for what to do with a Psychic Maelstrom in a post-apocalyptic setting.

But: all three of us used our Psychic Maelstroms for the things Baker says to use them for: unleash weirdness, justify unrealistic but narratively satisfying twists, allow and excuse extra awesomeness, maybe use as a metaphor or allegory for "how it got this way", as well as "where it could go", in literary terms. And . . . Baker doesn't really get closer than this, to giving "place, time, institutions, history and people and events". So in the sense I understand 'setting', a diagetic construct within a given story, AW doesn't have one.

But in the commentative genre sense, AW very definitely gives Baker's apocalypse, in that it gives a recipe for the things that Baker considers essential to the post-apoc genre (or at least, the aisle of the post-apoc library he wants to confine his game to). He doesn't try to tell a Soylent Green apocalypse so much--you'd need to twist some arms and ignore some Principles to tell Soylent Green. Nor does he try to tell Children of Men so much--you'd have to leave a lot out to rein AW in to just Children of Men. He instead aims* for something closer to Mad Max, but heavy on Weird West, and a lot less somber and desolate, so more like Fury Road. And he says, "here's how:".

(*) But, of course, he doesn't actually tell these stories. Instead he has the project of telling the reader how to tell this kind-of story. So, while he gives some sample poetic images of skylines on fire and the world torn asunder, he doesn't care to talk about the virus, or the metorite, or the gas-shortage or the food-shortage. He doesn't care about the where or when or what, and even with the Psychic Maelstrom, the one concrete diagetic thing he gives--it sits there as a meta-thing, explicitly unstated whether it resulted from The Apocalypse or its inciting event, or caused it as the inciting event, or something else.

All of which boils down to: commentative, about-stories, genre-level stuff owns bones, and I weigh it heavier than diagetic, in-stories, setting-level stuff. Baker gives excellent tools, within his purple polemic prose, for that first stuff and gives little or nothing for the second.

[whetstonefires]

Some years ago, someone suggested to me a bunch of alternative takes on the Joker that were all demographic changes. I liked several of them, but was chiefly fascinated by what it changed, which the person doing the suggesting didn’t like.

The point, they said, was that the Joker doesn’t have to be male. Or caucasian, under the clown.

And I said, well no, he doesn’t…but it’s a different story, if he isn’t.

This didn’t go over well, but it’s still true.

It’s true on a meta level, in terms of what the Joker-as-character says to audiences in the real world as soon as he stops being a) white and b) a man, and it’s true in-universe, in every single reaction everyone he meets has to him.

And honestly, I think it’s even true from inside the Joker.

Because so much of everything the Joker does is about attention-seeking. (There are other reasons, but this is the biggest one.) The way he’s written changes so wildly so often it’s hard to pin down much more of him, but that at least is true. Whether he wants that attention from the whole world, or everyone in line of sight, or really just Batman, the Joker does the things he does, the way he does, to provoke reactions more than for any other reason. Even the most impulsive acts are very often done for effect.

And the attention-seeking violence of white men occupies a very specific cultural niche, in our society.

It’s privileged, for one thing. We tend to grant it space and respect and narrative weight that nobody else gets for doing the same things.

It’s much less likely to be dismissed as hysteria or stupidity, or gunned down on sight and forgotten as the act of an individual. As opposed to a type.

Which means that the exact same plots and performances by a woman, or a black man, or someone from Malaysia, wouldn’t land the same way, or spawn the same storylines. Even apart from the specifically bigoted reactions. They wouldn’t, in their interpersonal elements, trigger the same mental scripts. In anyone.

And which also means that anyone but a white man wouldn’t come at being the Joker from the same place. From the same ingrained presumption of entitlement to the space you occupy, when you start carving strips out of the world to make it bleed.

There are reasons almost all our spree shooters and serial killers are white males, and they’re not biological. They’re all about the story you think you’re living in.

It’s very easy for a white man in America to tell himself and the world a story about why he wants to make it bleed that has nothing consciously to do with what he is. It’s very hard for anyone else to do that, especially and be believed.

And that changes the story. It changes the questions people are willing to ask, and not ask. It changes when people will be patient, and where the beats of fear and shock will fall. It changes what people think it means when you scream, or when you flirt, or when you die.

It even, almost always, changes what you do mean, just a little, even if only by adding in another note of defiance, or of surrender to expectation. Especially if you’re doing things for effect, and thus your every action is also a communication.

The Joker is a monster. He’s written in the shapes of transgression. And as long as the implicit rules are different for one class of person than for another, you are going to materially alter a story about transgression by altering the transgressor. You can’t avoid it.

Monsters are exquisitely context-sensitive.

That’s all.

[consilium-games]

I saw this just before going out to acquire survival tokens doing effectively-menial work, and needed to share it.

[consilium-games]

Genresick, or: Six Ways to Heartache

As I discussed allll the way back in this post in March, I've been working busily on the supplement to Lovesick. And at very long last, it's finally, finally done:

Genresick

Go on, click on it, I worked hard on it! I'll wait!

. . .

You're back? You took a look at least? Excellent. Cause I'd like to say a few things about it here.

First, "what could have been": my initial idea was a lot more weird and high-concept. I'll probably realize it in some form later, but it entailed a bigger focus on collaboration in storytelling, and in particular, loosening up the focus on "a few main characters (PCs) in the hands of cooperating players".

Instead, it was going to or will in the future use a whole ensemble of characters that players would make, terse thumbnail sketches at first, and maneuver together and against one another, striving for one of three 'endings' to the shared story. Still centered very much on passion, internal motivations, psychological damages, and unhealthy fixation, and still both very self-aware and very determined to tell its kind of story. But that concept needs to stew more.

I've been thinking a lot lately on some of the more abstract ideas involved in storytelling: how stories about ourselves often define us, how we build ourselves out of these stories, and how dissonance between stories can feel like you've actually entered some other kind of reality, where even the laws of nature don't match what you've grown to trust as much as gravity.

Heady, nerdy stuff, in short, and I think the untitled game I didn't make--because it basically would and should be its own full game--is both a necessary step to getting where I want to work on, and still a bit beyond my reach.

Second, "what is": Genresick is a few things at once. It's a supplement obviously, a pile of toys and backdrops for Lovesick surely, but it's also a kind of reassessment. I think characters by themselves can make for a really compelling story--as long as they want things, for reasons, and do things to get them, you have a story. So people wanting relatable things to an unreasonable degree and doing dramatic things to get them seems like a perfect pitch to me!

Not so much the people who find their way to click on my downloads.

Now, I'm not defeated or even disheartened by this, so much as attentive: "hmm, that didn't work . . ." So, let's see what people make of something packaged more in the traditional trappings and tropes of Geek Culture[tm]: science fiction, unpronounceable names, airbrushed paperback covers, the kind of genre fiction set-dressing that "stories for nerds" often comes with.

Thirdly--let me dig into that a bit.

Still inflamatory after all these books

I could go dig up citations and quotations from better commentators than I, citing the operation of a kind of "low-brow chic" in the many intersecting and overlapping orbits that enclose "people who read, buy, play, and make roleplaying games". I won't though, I trust that it's not a foreign concept, but I'd like to stake out how I see it a bit, and what I think it means.

To put it really briefly and only a little reductively, science fiction and fantasy as we know them today were very strongly influenced by being relegated to the gutters of culture. Most recently as Young Adult[tm] books and over-contracted mandatory-trilogy series and hypercapitalist conventions, but prior to that, low-budget TV series, three-color comic books, and before that, B-movies and 'cult classics'. You can even see a lot of that in the earliest incarnations of Dungeons and Dragons--there's an actual robot wizard in there. An actual robot that is an actual wizard.

This influence isn't any weaker today, it's just weirder: genre mashups and "what even is genre, really" sensibilities, and the slow dissolution of previously-stable subcultural boundaries mean that the idea of a "space western" isn't a radical new thing--it's Firefly. But, what hasn't left? The genre fiction domain, and the tendency to live entirely inside it.

When a piece of Geek Culture[tm] tries to articulate itself, to position itself and give itself context, to say what it's about and what it's doing, the points of reference are always firmly inside the spheres of genre fiction, the low-budget, the literarily maligned, the 'nerdy' rather than 'intellectual'. This has to include my own work, too--RPGs as an artistic medium live more or less entirely inside the geekosphere, and I credit FROM Software in my first book--a video-game company, who made the sword-and-sorcery game that inspired Succession. Good work can come out of the genre fiction ecosystem, but . . .

But. The fact that anyone needs to point that out, even as a defensive disclaimer, is not a very healthy sign. A story set in the future exploring the possible effects of technology on society can be a true work of art--just look at Mary Shelley. But when the wealthy and lettered at some point decided that the only good stories, worth studying, involve wealthy and lettered literature professors contemplating an affair--well. Two things happened:

Firstly the academics set the standard for Good Art[tm], which you've probably seen some reaction against, say, Duchamp's 'Fountain'. But standard it remained and to a large degree remains: severe attitudes, reserved speech, refined vocabulary, abstract and sometimes even indiscernible stakes and ideas and goals, when it comes to stories and how they're conveyed. The groove carved into (white Western anglophonic) culture's psyche at large is "this is what Good Art is, and if you wish to be a Good Artist, you must aspire to this; if you cannot appreciate this Good Art, you are no artist or intellectual at all!"

Secondly they deprived the rest of us of a vocabulary, half by claiming it themselves and using it only for their kind of "Good Art", half by everyone else identifying even trying to form such a vocabulary as one of those effete ivory-tower intellectuals here only to sneer on Bad Art or even Non-Art. So weirdos like me have to travel far and dig deep to piece together analytical tools to understand how "Bad Art" stories work, what they do, how they function, what makes them work and what makes them fail.

But, as a consequence of that second thing, in Geek Culture people kept making art! But they didn't have a vocabulary for the many new concepts they kept forming and inventing independently and from scratch, and then borrowing and elaborating from one another. I think this is both why application of basic storytelling techniques like foreshadowing and mixed motivations can be so captivating for a nerd-as-a-first-language audience even when bungled: they're the same techniques refined over centuries over there in "Good Art", good techniques that work--but that don't work without adjustment. Adjustment that outsiders lack the vocabulary to discuss, and thus can't really derive for their own needs.

All this boils down to Geek Culture more often than not tending to shy away from something that looks "intellectual" unless it first looks "sci-fi" or "fantasy" or some other identifiable public forswearing of the scary ivory tower. You can see a lot of this in video-games' audience: "it's just video-games, don't put politics in my video-games, can't it just be a video-game?!" Of course it can. There will always be games for the sake of games (Chess), and songs for the sake of songs (most any pop song), and now video-games and movies just for the sake of something flashy to look at and something to do for awhile after earning a daily wage. That's not what bothers a person making that kind of complaint.

What bothers them is a lot more complicated than I have the energy left to get into, but hey, I think if I can develop and popularize and expand that vocabulary we've been denied (and denied ourselves), we can use it to make some really wicked cool things. I'm not about to tell anyone to toss out their Dragonlance and instead read Dante's Inferno--honestly, I'd have to rate them on a par if you look at the work and not at the reception. Both are fantastical fan-fiction, though Dante's is a lot meaner in spirit and departs more from the source material, though it certainly has more technical execution on its side.

Instead what I want is for us to have, as a "Geek Culture", a way to understand something like Dragonlance as thoroughly as Dante's Inferno. And we're getting there! Meanwhile, if the only way to sell people on "intense character-study and focus on relationships" is to put on a space-suit, then suit me up.

So what's up next?

Aside from stirring the new pot bubbling over on r/consilium_games, and hopefully starting some form of discourse, next is a full RPG in its own right, in keeping with my self-appointed schedule of "full game and supplement"! And since I've implicitly asked my readers and/or the RPG community at large to stretch so much in looking at Lovesick, it's only fair that I stretch myself too.

Specifically, I'm working now on a very mechanics-heavy, combat-oriented game, applying the same mechanical components I've used since Succession and especially some of the ideas in Substitute Reagents, but building them around concrete, reified, 'gamey' interactions rather than purely narrative beats and character-focused stakes.

I also intend it to dig into identity formation, structures and systems of power, how people 'cast' themselves and one another, and a few other themes very close to my heart. Come for the crunchy cinematic action, stay for the pensive meditation on selfhood!

[consilium-games]

Bold New Adventures in Platforms!

First, the admin and general shilling:

After the--well, some sales of Lovesick, which you should definitely look at or read more about here, I've nearly finished work on the supplement, Genresick. I'll have more to say about it later, but if you were lukewarm on "intense, emotional, interpersonal roleplay" before, I think the premises in each of these genres will sell it better. And if not, you still get some neat genre premises, several with unique mechanics to support them that you can use for any other title from consilium games.

Still finalizing editing, then EPUB and then layout ordeal for PDF, and creation of a good cover, and then it'll be up! I'll announce it here, for the two of you still here and reading, but--

A new platform, you say?

Yes, I've made an account on reddit, and have created a subreddit, predictably named r/consilium_games! If you have an account, stop by, say hi, make comments, even start threads! So far, there hasn't been a whole lot of back-and-forth discussion here on this tumblr. A few exchanges, sure, fun ones! But not much talking about an idea.

I'm not really here for "like share subscribe retweet reblog". That's not engagement. I don't care what some MBA who wears a necktie as a belt says, that's 'engagement' in the same way that "a wry smirk" is "ROFLMAO". It's not actually that thing! It's the very least positive quantum in even the direction of that thing.

What I want or at least what I think would be really neat is: thoughtful, detailed discussion about the media-criticism and literary-analysis and system-design stuff I blither about here. I'd love it if someone would step up and say "well, actually cons, you're wrong about--", especially if they can back it up with how and why. I'd learn something!

I'd even like "wow that's a good idea I'll use it in--". I wouldn't learn much in this case, but I'd learn one thing: I said something evidently useful and productive. Maybe I could look into it more and uncover more!

Now, I do appreciate the idea of like/reblog/I don't actually even know the details of Tumblr's "monetized engagement from user-generated content" model. But I know the basic premise that it can at least in principle put "the abstract idea of 'consilium games'" into more people's awareness. Cool! But, really? It doesn't matter. After DriveThruRPG's cut I have made about USD $322 off of publishing. Total, ever. That's great for a hobby--most hobbies would have me spend that amount over a few years, and that's for the really cheap ones!

But I want to get better at making games, and make better games. I want to get better at understanding games and what makes them work, and what makes them not. And I hope to get better at understanding stories and how we tell them, and how we use stories to understand ourselves, each other, and everything else. And it's a bit late in the game and a bit pricey for me to go double-major in cognitive neuroscience and psychology. This'll have to do.

So come over to the subreddit, I've currently brought over a selection of posts from here! Just pick some chunk of some post, and chip in what you think. Reddit does not allow a moderator an actual list of "who has subscribed", so I'll have no idea, unless someone says something. So c'mon, say something!

[consilium-games]

New File Frontiers!

First, Some Admin

For those of you who still haven't abandoned ship, I have not yet selected a new blogging platform, and don't yet know if I'll even leave Tumblr. If you have good suggestions and actually read this post, by all means send me a message here or by e-mail, or even stop in the IRC channel! I have considered expanding into Reddit, but still exploring my options, since Reddit can get . . . unruly, and my resources for moderation more or less don't exist. I'd like a place where maybe I could have something like a community, people making games together, to make stories together, but right now I at least need a place to put down Big Important Thoughts About Game-Design (if only so I can tell myself I'll laugh at them later). But, who knows, maybe my post on hermeneutics might get someone thinking about something cool, too.

And with that out of the way and no further comment on our corporate overlords and their . . . actions, on with the real topic!

New! Improved! Obscure! EPUB!!!

I really, really should have known three years ago what I figured out a month ago: making ePub documents doesn't have to sap one's will to live, and with my ideosyncratic workflow (HTML in Emacs, import into LibreOffice, swear for hours doing layout), ePub can even work pretty smoothly! So get over to my publisher page and see the shiny new ePub format option!

If you've bought any of my books, and didn't get an e-mail about this, firstly you didn't leave an e-mail address so DTRPG didn't know to send you anything, so don't complain. Secondly just so you know, DTRPG does not tell me anyone's e-mail address. That doesn't really matter but I like people knowing what happens with their data when I can answer, and in this case "they sure don't tell publishers". Thirdly: just send me an e-mail at [email protected], tell me which book you bought, and I'll e-mail you an epub of that title.

Basically I consider it a failure on my part to not have offered an epub edition from day one. I know the many, many technical benefits epub has over PDF: data accessibility (it's just a zipfile), user accessibility (screen-readers don't work as well for most PDF readers), and biggest of all, reflowable text. This matters a lot for anyone wanting to read on a small screen.

You can stop reading now, the rest just kind of rambles

Lately I've been reading Chuubo's Long Title, a bewildering masterpiece by Jenna Moran. I have . . . thoughts about what I've managed to understand of what I've read so far, but they need to anneal a bit. Saliently though, I saw how astonishingly readable the epub was on the pocket typewriter I write my RPGs on now, especially over trying to read PDFs on that thing.

See the default, built-in PDF reader on modern Android phones . . . well, it works, sure. It just about displays one page of a PDF at a time and doesn't output gibberish. But it doesn't recognize any links in a document, and if the document uses printer-size formatting for pages, the only thing the PDF renderer can do is show you whatever will fit on your screen and let you zoom in if that's too small.

With epub files, though, the program can increase text size, increase paragraph spacing and margins, can even change the font, without the reader ever, ever, ever having to scroll sideways or pinch-zoom. A good program will even display a nice table of contents anywhere in the document letting the reader jump where they like. And even for the stingy short documents I crank out, I consider that a significant benefit.

In pretty much every respect, epub beats the snot out of PDF on mobile devices. And I should have pieced together that I have an unfair advantage making them, should have realized it three years ago. But, now I know better, and though the past few weeks have had a lot of headaches poring through my old documents and trying to ensure they match what I've actually published and then formatting and testing and tweaking . . . I finally finished.

Curiously, in my research on how to do this whole project most effectively, I found that only a very tiny few RPG publishers even offer epub as a format! But, that shouldn't come as too much of a shock: "file formats" just in general fall under the purview of "technical considerations" and most people in general do not consider themselves "technical people". So when I tried to figure out "would any meaningful number of my readers benefit from easier reading on their phone", I got some strange and unhelpful answers. No one reads RPGs on mobile devices because no one has anything but PDFs of RPGs (and mobile devices don't handle PDFs well).

But, I then found out that if I exercise a bit of diligence in the future, "make an epub" becomes trivial. And--well, it only took me a couple weeks to epubbify my catalog after not exercising such diligence (because I didn't realize I would need it). And with the 'cost' of epub at basically zero, the question shifted to "does anyone read epubs, at all", and that I can conclusively say yes to! Which leads to here, offering epub editions like I should have, because it's pretty easy.

On that note, I did rush a bit. I tried as best I could to match the text of the epubs to the published PDFs; where my existing HTML differed in wording, usually I wanted to say that, and edited it in the PDF, almost always for formatting and layout reasons. So if you spot a really minor difference in wording--that's probably the reason!

But, if you find something actually wrong, please send an e-mail! Likewise, if you think you're using a really common popular epub viewer and the formatting seems broken, let me know what viewer and what issue you find, and I'll try to fix it! And while I can't actually pay for "crowdsource open-beta free testing", and feel kinda sleazy about it, I simply cannot test on any device but my own, and I'm more than happy to give a free copy of a book in exchange.

That wraps up what I wanted to announce, so I hope your holidays pass enjoyably and I hope this next year treats you well. Look forward to my next book, it'll be a pay-what-you-want follow-up to Lovesick taking the gameplay in a very new direction. And if you've read this far--hey, send an e-mail just to say hi. I've been play-acting at "game-designer and publisher" for three years and change now, I'd like to know how I'm doing, and what I could improve on!

[consilium-games]

A Rambling and Brain-Fried Post on Hermeneutics

It's a godless and blighted hour (11AM) as I write this, and scheduling heartache has left me swirly-eyed and sleep-deprived. Lately I've absorbed a pretty specific combination of media that's led me to think dazedly about hermeneutics, basically "systems of interpretation of a work of media" such as stories. And in light of my past couple games, and a game whose premise I haven't finished chewing on, I think getting some thoughts down (and maybe even some discussion?!) might help someone. I don't know, maybe me?

Inciting Events

By now anyone reading this has heard of Undertale. Spoilers happen here. The creator of Undertale recently released a . . . possibly-related videogame called Deltarune. I say possibly related with good reason, and I don't intend to directly spoil the game as it just came out, but it gave me interesting questions about narrative interpretation--hermeneutics--more generally. I also will probably talk a bit about Doki Doki Literature Club! which you might not have encountered or played. Some high-level spoilers will occur. This post will contain zero 'fan theories', as that has nothing to do with my game-design beat--rather, academic theories on "how do people approach interpreting stories" has a lot to do with my pretentious narrativist game-design ethos!

Also of note, I've watched a playthrough of a videogame called Witch's House, and without spoiling that, it struck me that one of the puzzles will behave drastically differently, depending on whether the player reads one of the ubiquitous hints. Meaning, not only do the hints constitute a mechanic, but discerning how to trust hints becomes a game objective. And further, since "reading a hint" is an in-game action, but recalling a hint is not, the game may behave unpredictably to the player who reads a hint, doesn't save, dies, and reloads--and doesn't read the hint again.

Lastly, I've revisited some analyses of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, and it put me in mind of discussions about This House Has People In It and The Cry of Mann, and in particular: discussions about those discussions, arguments about how presenting interpretations can color people's formed interpretations. And last warning, I'm still pretty brain-fried, I'll blame that if I end up rambling incoherently.

Setting Out

There's a lot of literature about literature, and literature about literature about literature. Perhaps some day people will spill ink about ink than anything else. Fortunately, we haven't yet entered a boundless singularity of self-referentiality. So I can afford to stake out a couple terms I expect I'll mutter:

hermeneutic: a specific approach, strategy, or philosophy to understanding a work. This can be totally informal ("Christian songs are easy to write, just take a pop song and replace 'baby' with 'Jesus'") or very rigorous ("Derrida's analysis of identity puts it to blame for religious and nationalist fanaticism"), but just treat it as technical shorthand for "approach to understanding a thing".

auteur theory: mostly used in film analysis, in our backyard it means "the author of a work arbitrates its meaning". So, eg Stephen King can definitively and canonically say "Leland Gaunt is an extradimensional alien, not Satan, the Adversary and the Prince of Darkness, from orthodox Christianity". And if King says this, that makes it true and the audience should understand Needful Things in light of this fact King told us with his mouth but not with his story.

Death of the Author: by contrast, 'Death of the Author' means that once a work has an audience (the creator published it, or put it on Steam, or hit Send on Twitter, or just played a song on their porch), the audience has liberty to interpret it however they please, and the creator's word about What It Means has no more weight than the audience. Which would mean that if King tells us Leland Gaunt is an alien, and Needful Things is closer to Lovecraft than King James, that's cool--it's a neat theory, Steve, but I think it's about . . . (Note: I don't know if King has made this claim, but Needful Things does have a few weird neat textual indications that Gaunt is some kind of Cthulhu and not the Lightbringer.)

code-switching: technically from linguistics, borrowed into social sciences, in this post it means a creator of a work putting something into the work that implicitly or explicitly prompts the audience to consciously alter or monitor their interpretation. As a very simple example, suppose someone says with a straight face and deadpan delivery, "I'm a law-abiding citizen who supports truth, justice, and The American Way." Now, suppose they make air-quotes around 'law-abiding'--it rather changes the meaning, by prompting the audience to reinterpret the literal wording.

Okay, I . . . think that'll do. So hi, I'm consilium, and as a goth game designer it should come as no surprise that I like my authors with some degree of living-impairment. Interpreting a text has an element of creativity to it that the creator simply can't contribute on the audience's behalf. More than that though, there just seems something off about the idea that, say, a reader of Needful Things might read about Sheriff Alan Pangborn, and interpret the specific way he defeats Leland Gaunt as allegorical of how cultivating creativity, community, and empathy can help prevent the dehumanization of consumerism and capitalism--only for King to say "no, Alan was just a parallel-universe avatar of the Gunslinger and thus could defeat Gaunt, who was just an extradimensional eldritch predator". If King were to say such a thing after audiences have gotten to know and love Alan on the terms presented in the text, and King were to come back with "maybe that's what I said but that's not what I meant"--my response would have to be a cordial "interesting theory, but it doesn't seem supported by the text".

So, I generally like Death of the Author! But . . . but. I've taken to gnawing on this idea in this game-design blog because--of course--It's More Complicated Than That. Roleplaying games as a medium work about as differently from other media as, say, sculpture and songwriting. And despite essentially just putting bells and whistles and protocol on top of possibly the oldest human artistic medium--storytelling--RPGs have a lot of weirdness they introduce for analysis and critique.

For example, my reservations on Death of the Author! Specifically: taking "in-character, in-game events and narration" as the work of interest, and "the other players at the table" as the audience, what happens when you describe your character Doing Something Cool--based on a mistake? We need a teeny bit of "creator as arbitrator of meaning", so we can at least say, literally, "oh, no, that's not what I meant"! Otherwise, the other players' "freedom of interpretation" leads to your character doing something nonsensical and now they have to have their characters respond--they have a worse work to create within.

This gets at something pretty foundational in treating RPG stories as art: almost any other medium has a creator create a work as a finished thing, and only then does an audience ever interpret it. Whether plural creators collaborate or not, whether the work exists as apocryphal oral tradition and mutates through telling, whether some audience members take it up as their own with flourishes (such as with a joke), there still exists this two-stage process of "author creates" and then "audience interprets". Except in stories within roleplaying games as generally practiced.

In RPGs, the creators almost always constitute the entire audience (I'll ignore things like "RPG podcasts" and novelizations of someone's DnD campaign here, as they make up a vanishingly tiny minority). The audience of the work not only creates it though--they experience the work almost entirely before you could ever call the work 'completed'. Even if we falsely grant that every game concludes on purpose rather than just kinda petering out because people get bored, leave college, have other things to do, or whatever else killed your last game, players experience the story in installments that don't exist until the end of the session. So "interpretation" gets . . . weird.

Basic Hermeneutics

On a surface level, the story of an RPG usually doesn't demand a lot of depth and analysis: some protagonists, inciting incident, various conflicts, faffing about as the PCs fail to get the hint, some amusing or tense or infuriating whiffs and failures along the way, and charitably, some kind of resolution to the main conflict and dramatic and character arcs. Usually metaphors tend to be explained straight up ("my character's ability to 'blur' things reflects her own weak personal boundaries and over-empathization"), and motifs often even moreso ("guys, seriously, what happens every single time your characters see spiders?"). A lot of this comes from necessity of that very immediate, improvised, as-we-go nature of the medium! You have to make sure your audience gets what you intend them to get--because in mere seconds they'll create some more story that depends on the bit of story you just created. And back and forth.

But, quite without realizing it or meaning to, we can't really help but inject other chunks of meaning into stories we help create. Maybe even chunks of meaning that contradict others' contributions at the table. Spoiler alert: I do not have a theory or framework to address this. The Queen Smiles kind of digs into this, but this goes beyond my current depth. So, what can we conjecture or say, what scaffolding could we build, to build a more robust "literary theory of game stories"? I have some basics as I see them:

Auteur theory (creator arbitrates meaning)

This can only apply to one player's contributions, not across plural players.

Necessary, for both basic clarification and because perfectly conveying the ~*~intended meaning~*~ frankly just doesn't work as a thing you can do off the top of your head when your turn comes to say what your character does.

GMs (where applicable) shouldn't use this to defend poor description or ill-considered presentation of "cool things for PCs to care about and cool things to do about it"--just because the GM intended the cop to be sympathetic doesn't make him so, and if he's not sympathetic . . . the protagonists will not treat him so.

Dead authors (freedom of interpretation)

Players can try this out on their own characters, and should, but should ask other players about their characters if something seems odd, confusing, intriguing, or otherwise. "You keep making a point of meticulously describing your character's weird nervous tic. The exact same way every time. How come? What's it mean?"

Players of course can answer engagement like this any way they please, including stabbing themselves with the quill: "you figure it out, if your character were to ask mine, mine would supply her answer which I may or may not know".

GMs (where applicable) should really lean on this: improvise, throw ideas and themes at the wall, and frantically build on top of the audience's ideas, since those ideas clearly resonate with the audience.

Code-switching (deliberately modifying interpretation)

We all do this all the time: the dragon is not telling you to roll for your attack, after all. The GM is, by switching between narrating the world, and communicating with a player.

More subtly we do this when switching between "what our character believes" and "what we players reasonably expect". Your costumed superhero might think of herself as righteous vengeance incarnate, but you hope everyone at the table knows you think she's conceited and delusional at best, and a full-bore psychopath at worst. This hopefully doesn't mean you play your psychopath superhero any less sincerely, but it does require a bit of ironic detachment, you know something about her that she can't know about herself (beyond that she's a fictional character, of course).

Even more subtly, sometimes weird game interactions (of the rules, other PCs, other players) imply things we wish they wouldn't, but can't quite control, and often everyone knows this. "Why can't you muster up your courage one more time?!" "Because I ran out of Fate points," your character doesn't say. Instead, your fellow authors share a look over the table, and gingerly tiptoe around an obvious, character-appropriate thing, and seize on some other thing to say or do, hopefully just as obvious and character-appropriate. But, everyone switched codes, from "characters doing things for reasons" to "the rules inform our story, and we follow them because they help".

Prepaid analysis (game-specific themes or arcs)

A lot of games have some baked-in themes right off the shelf, and provide good starting points and directions of inqury for interpreting a story born out of playing them. Monsterhearts deals with teenage cruelty and queer sexuality. Succession deals with faith, one's place in the world, and how these relate to morality. Bliss Stage tumultuous coming-of-age and taking care of one another, or failing to. If you use eg Lovesick to tell a story that you can't approach or interpret in light of "dangerous, unstable, desperate romantics"--you probably picked the wrong game. You should pick a better game.

Besides these themes, many games also have more abstract ideas--arcs or processes--that they really enshrine. Exalted gives Solars (mythical heroes patterned after ancient folklore) a mechanic called "Limit Break" which mechanically funnels a Solar toward destroying themselves with their own virtue. Likewise, even if you somehow excise Monsterhearts' focus on teenage cruelty and sexuality, you really shouldn't play if you want to avoid social stigma as a theme, because most of the mechanics hinge on it.

We players often deliberately bring in some themes and ideas we'd like to play with, too. "I want to play a character whose determination will be her own undoing--and probably everyone else's." Or even just "I really like themes where physical strength is tragically and stupefyingly unhelpful". Those make for great starting points and prompt good questions to interpret stories!

I know someone with more literary theory and less sleep deprivation could add a few basic givens, but I think this at least goes to show we have ground to stand on and territory to explore. And probably more importantly, it points out some useful kinds of questions we can ask about the story of a game and how to interpret it. So, why did I ever bring up Undertale back there?

Audience Awareness

The following works have something in common: House of Leaves, Funny Games, This House Has People In It, The Cry of Mann, The Shape on the Ground, Undertale, and Deltarune. Besides "being very good", they all explicitly pose the audience as an entity within the story--but, they do it in a very unusual way.

See, the story of a Mario game is about Mario even if the player controls Mario--and though it's a subtle distinction, this also applies to eg Doom, where you play as an explicitly nameless faceless protagonist, intended to be your avatar. Even in the most plot-free abstract game, if we can salvage out a story (if perhaps an extremely degenerate and rudimentary one like 'how this game of chess played out'), the 'story' happily accommodates the audience within it.

That's not how the list I gave does things. Not at all.

Instead, the works I listed single out the audience as something else: in House of Leaves, unreliable narrators call out the unreliable interpreter reading the narrative. In Funny Games, the audience doesn't participate--but the audience watches, and the film knows this, and singles the audience out as complicit in the horrible events that unfold. This House Has People In It casts us as the prying NSA subcontractor watching hours of security footage and reading dozens of e-mails, and makes it clear that even our Panopticon of surveillance doesn't give us a complete account of reality. The Cry of Mann casts us as gibbering voices from an eldritch plane of cosmic horror. The Shape on the Ground poses as a disinterested and clinical psychological test, but it clearly has some ideas about what would lead us to take such a 'test'.

And then there's Undertale and Deltarune. Last warning, I'll say whatever I find convenient about Undertale and probably '''spoil''' something about Deltarune in the process. I do not care.

Hostility to the Audience

If Undertale itself had a personality, one could fairly describe it as "wary of the player": it plays jokes and tricks, but it knows the player is a player, of Undertale, which Undertale also knows is a videogame. It gives you ample chance to have a fun, funny, and sometimes disturbing game, with a lot of tempting and tantalizing unspoken-s hiding juuuust offscreen. But Undertale's point as a work involves giving you the chance to not do that while still, technically, engaging with the game.

Namely, the Genocide Run. By killing literally absolutely every single thing in the game that the game can possibly let you kill, the game very purposely unfolds entirely differently--and on multiple playthroughs, the game will outright take notice of multiple playthroughs, and challenge you for--in effect--torturing the narrative it can deliver by forcing it to deliver every narrative. Let's think about that for a moment:

Most videogames have some kind of excuse of a narrative, and lately, many have really good, nuanced stories to tell--and many of those even go to the (mindbendingly grueling) effort of delivering a plurality of good narratives that honor your agency as a player--maybe even a creator, as best a videogame can with its limitations.

But, what can you say about a story that has multiple endings? Or multiple routes to them? And what can you say about a story that, in some of its branches, simply goes to entirely different places as narratives? It strains the usual literary critical toolkit, to say the least.

Now, a game like Doki Doki Literature Club! approaches this exact same idea of addressing its story as manipulable by the player, of the player as an agent in the story, but in a pretty straightforward way as far as "a narrative that works this way": the narrative already describes "and then the player came along and messed everything up". All of the player's different routes serve this one overarching narrative: the game has an obsessive fixation on you and wants you to play it forever (which, given its nature as (roughly) a visual novel . . . perhaps asks quite a lot).

Undertale takes a step back from even this level of abstraction, though: the implicit and often hidden events of its world and narrative unfold / have unfolded / will unfold, and a given player's "story" consists of "what the player does to this multi-branched narrative-object". The game judges you to your face for contorting its weird timeline-multiple-universe meta-story . . . but lets you do it, to prove the point it wants to prove.

And without much controversy, we can conclude that point roughly summarizes to "playing games just for accomplishment and mastery doesn't give as rewarding an experience as immersing in the story and characters". The subtler point under that, though, comes out through multiple playthroughs: "immersing yourself in a story and cast of characters too much will harm your life and your enjoyment of other things". Undertale, were it a person, would probably look nervously at you after several 'completionist' playthroughs to "see all the content", and it explicitly describes this exact behavior to the player's face as something objectionable--even calling out people who watch someone else play on streams and video hosts.

"Just let it be a story"

Which brings us to Deltarune. I've no doubt dozens of cross-indexed internet-vetted analyses and fan-theories will arise in the next few months (and I look forward to them), but on a once-over the game seems to have one specific thing to say to the player's face: "you are intruding on a story that isn't about you". The game opens with an elaborate character-creator (well, for a retroclone computer RPG), then tells you "discarded, you can't choose who you are, and you can't choose who the character is either". It has fun with giving the player dialog options--then timing out and ignoring the input. It even tells the player in in-game narration that "your choices don't matter". The story itself doesn't even care very much about the player's character, instead hinging on the development and growth of an NPC, following her arc, without much concern for the player's thoughts on the matter. And at the very end, after playing mind-games with the player's familiarity and recognition of Undertale characters--the close does something both inexplicable and disturbing. This is not your story: it's not about you, your choices don't affect it, and it doesn't care what you think.

As an aside, it seems like quite a good game--but I think that comes in part because of this very drastic intent and the skill with which it executes that intent (ie, bluntly at first, subtly enough to almost forget, and then slapping hard enough to prompt a flashback).

And holding this alongside Undertale's stark (even literal) judgment of the player for 'forcing' the narrative to contort to accommodate the player's interaction with that narrative, it seems clear to me that where Doki Doki Literature Club! has fun with the idea of "player as complicit in something gross, and as motivating something cool", Undertale and Deltarune seem much more interested in making the player take an uncomfortable look at how they engage with narratives.

Defensive Hermeneutics

On one hand, Funny Games, The Cry of Mann, and Undertale and Deltarune stare back at the audience, judge them, treat them as an intruding, invading, even corrupting force from outside the work, criticize the audience for enjoying the work, and even call the audience out for engaging in detailed critique, like some kind of cognitive logic-bomb, or a cake laced with just enough ipecac to punish you for eating more than a slice.

But on the other, House of Leaves, This House Has People In It, The Shape on the Ground, and Doki Doki Literature Club all want the audience to participate, to scrutinize, to interact with the narrative and question it, as well as themselves. What does that first camp have in common besides wariness and hostility to the audience, and what does this second camp have in common besides treating the audience as creative of the work's meaning? I'll call it "a defensive hermeneutic".

Notionally, the audience has hermeneutics: ways of understanding a work. But, a creator can't help but have some understanding of the likely mental state and view of a(n imagined) audience, approaching the text in some way. A creator can thus bake in or favorably treat some approaches over others, and can even use this to guide criticism about their work.

That first group, which I'll call "defensive", has one striking common feature: the 'surface level' plots either don't matter, or have very simple outlines. Funny Games' plot is exactly as follows: two psychopaths terrorize, torture, and eventually murder an innocent family. The Cry of Mann shows us what looks a lot like a small child trying to mimic a melodramatic soap-opera, before Things Get Weird (and any extant 'surface level' plot goes under the waves). And Undertale and Deltarune give us the stock "hero appears in strange land, arbitrary puzzle-quests ensue, climactic final confrontation restores peace to the land". This serves as the set-dressing and vehicle for the actual plots--or sometimes simply cognitive messages--to get into the audience's minds:

"What, exactly, do you get out of slasher torture-porn movies? Why do you create the market for things like this?" "Are you sure about where your sense of empathy and identification points you? What makes you think you have a grip on reality enough to judge who's right and relatable, and who isn't?" "Don't just passively consume games like they were kernels of popcorn. But don't gorge yourself on the same dish, either--there's more out there, but you have to look for it."

In short: these works don't want you to nitpick the works themselves. Their entire message consists of second-or-higher-order interpretation. To put it another way, they want to make sure you don't pay attention to the handwriting, because the gaps between the words spell out a poem and the words themselves only create those gaps.

Participatory Hermeneutics

By this same token, I'll call the second camp "participatory": they treat the audience as a kind of creator in their own right--Borges did this a lot and with relish in his later years, and Doki Doki Literature Club! makes it a game mechanic. A creator using this "participatory" hermeneutic essentially doesn't consider their work 'finished' until the audience interprets it. This should sound familiar. The audience contributes meaning to the work, by interpreting it, and a "participatory" work counts on it. And, to contrast with the "defensive" camp: they use complex (sometimes even overcomplicated) plots, which matter and inform interpretation, and tie into the second-order meaning that the work attempts to convey. The "surface level" plots don't solely carry a tangled "interpret this" into the audience's brain. Instead, the surface plot has enough complexity to have a plot-hole, enough character depth to have problematic characters, and enough weight on its own merit to have unappealing implications. In other words: even without convoluted postmodern hoity-toity highfalutin' hermeneutic jibberjabber, a member the audience can find a story they can just enjoy on its merits.

Before anyone angrily starts defending the characters in Undertale or complaining about the directionlessness of This House Has People In It, I hope I've made it really clear, I lumped these works into these two categories based on an overall tendency and commonality, in approaching this one really abstract concept, and as with any work, any binary you can think of will have gradations if you look among "all works, ever". And, even more importantly:

I really love all these works, and I love what they do and how they do it. They all also have flaws, because flawed humans made them, and flawed humans enjoy them. That all said: the "participatory hermeneutic" has everything to offer for my purposes, while the "defensive hermeneutic" . . . might get a post of its own someday.

So What Now?

In aeons past, I wrote about feedback and criticism, and this seems like a good time to dust off that idea with a new application. In particular, that old post talks simply about players (and GMs where applicable) helping each other to contribute their best, and get the most enjoyment out of a game. Here, we'll look at some basic questions players can pose each other as creators of a work, rather than participants of a game or members of an audience.

So let's take that 'player survey' and repurpose it for Dark Humanities and getting a toehold on literary criticism:

Can you describe your approach to your character?

What do you want to convey about your character?

What was one thing you want to make sure we all understand?

How do you interpret my character so far?

What theme or motif do you think our characters express together?

What misconception or misunderstanding would you like to clear up or prevent?

What themes do you want to explore?

And just like the 'player character questionnaire', everyone should update and refine their survey every few sessions. As a given game goes on, for example, you might get to know one of the PCs so well that you never need to worry about "misconceptions or misunderstandings", regarding that character's motivations and personality and thematic implication. But, that character's connection with eg themes of parental abandonment might change, and when that topic comes up, you can devote a question or three just to asking things like "might your character be treating this person as a surrogate mother-figure?" Maybe the player never thought of it that way! Maybe the player thinks that would be a great idea! But neither of you will think about it without pausing a moment to consider things like this.

And once everyone has shared a bit about their characters' themes and clarified everyone else's, you can discuss deliberately pursuing an idea, through your characters. Obviously your characters have no motivation for this, but your characters don't even exist, so they don't have any say in the matter.

For example, cyberpunk naturally deals with corporate oppression, alienation, dehumanization, and technological obsolescence. But, when one PC regularly takes recreational drugs, and baits another into joining them, a third concocts elaborate revenge fantasies, and a fourth picks up broken people like stray cats and tries to parent them into being functional . . .

Maybe they all share a more specific theme of "dysfunctional coping mechanisms". The drug-user is nice and obvious--and their partner joining them in partaking perhaps has a need to belong. The vengeful obsessive might be compensating for feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability by hurting or preparing to hurt others. And the self-styled Good Samaritan and would-be Guardian Angel might be doing the opposite--just as unhealthily.

Importantly, everyone keeps playing their character, the character they made, the character they want to play. But, with some good chewy discussion about story, everyone can also look for spots where, indeed, their character might just so happen to--do something to further this sub-theme of "dysfunctional coping mechanisms", on top of the background of alienation, obsolescence, and dehumanization.

Academic, critical, literary discussion of roleplaying games as games seems like a sadly underexplored subject. But critical discussion of the stories themselves, the ones happening at each table, might as well be completely unknown--so here's hoping someone can build on this!

[consilium-games]

Something Heartfelt This Way Comes

Greetings, to the few of you who read this but don't have any other contact with me (why not stop by sometime?) I come bearing a new title! It's called Lovesick, and you can click that link to take a look. You can even buy it! You can also not buy it, that's permissible for now.

So What Is This Lovesick Thing?

I'm so very glad I pretended you asked! Lovesick is another in my line of Ghost/Echo-derived games. Rather than pursuing the One Red rabbit-hole however, Lovesick keeps it simple, sticking basically to the general skeleton of Succession. But instead of swords and sorcery and fantasy, Lovesick has something . . . different behind its back.

Specifically, the focus in Lovesick, the reason you'd play it, is stories of desperate, dangerous, and unstable people, each with some manner of obsession or fixation on another person. This can be romantic (and is kinda assumed to be, but doesn't have to). It can be on a fellow main character (with some guidance on such, as well as for NPCs). And it can be as dark and messed-up as your group has an appetite for.

The setting is plain old fashioned modern-day Earth, the main characters (ie, the ones a group will play like player-characters) are just ordinary (if abnormal) people, with school or jobs or other occupations, and the bare mechanics care a lot more about social interactions and conflicts than anything else. No lightning-bolts, no ray-guns, no vampires, just seemingly regular people and their seemingly regular lives.

Wait, This Is About Romance?

No. Lovesick is about messed-up people with sincere but unreasonable desires. Whether this tickles any given person's sensibility about "aww, that's romantic" or not is incidental, and frankly a little unnerving. The idea behind the game (rather than explored in it) is this: not many RPGs even acknowledge that "a person caring deeply about another person" deserves any weight of mechanics. Sure, these games might let you roll Charisma, or Manipulation+Persuasion, or Influence, to sway someone, potentially toward liking you. But after you get what you want from your mark, the game washes its hands of them.

Those games which do distinguish the relationships characters have tend to use those relationships as modifiers on some other mechanic. For example, Exalted will give you an Intimacy for "mom and dad", and this Intimacy can help you resist persuasive efforts--or can amplify those efforts when "mom and dad" would help provide leverage. But that relationship itself? Sure, it's a thing you can bring up, in roleplay, if you want to.

So, "romance" in RPGs is pretty unexplored territory, not a lot of work in this conceptual and genre space, pretty much just tumbleweeds--

What About Monsterhearts?

Yes. Good question. What about Monsterhearts? Ignoring some nerd quibbles I have with it, it's a fine game I deeply value and have learned a great deal from. It's also . . . Monsterhearts. It intends players to play as, primarily and specifically and explicitly, supernatural monsters with supernatural powers and supernatural problems. This is cool! And does not at all have to conflict with relationships and character-driven drama and messed-up people doing messed-up things for (at least potentially) understandable reasons! But it does mean the main focus isn't any of those things.

There's also the subtler but more important fact that even more than romance, indeed even more than any single relationship your PCs could get embroiled in, Monsterhearts actually cares a lot more about social standing. Pecking orders. Gossip and rumors. Reputation and slander. Those also are cool things, but that is where Monsterhearts puts most of its mechanical horsepower: what the neighbors will say. Yes, you can turn someone on and manipulate an NPC, but the results of doing so will either be "the same as other games' Charisma / Persuasion / other generic social diceroll", or else "currency to use for Monsterhearts' social-standing economy". Cool as Hell, but not the same.

So Lovesick Is Better How?

By damaging the main characters--specifically, giving every PC two "Damages"--negative Edges, if you're read up on my other games. If not, just know that they're mechanical hindrances other players can single out to make a given PC's life less pleasant. Whenever your character does something relevant to the rules, if that something happens to scrape against one of your character's Damages you chose, then another player can bring it up. When these Damages take effect (which isn't always, but might be often), it derails your character's intended course of action in any of a number of exciting ways! Freezing with anxiety, sobbing with guilt, having a nervous breakdown--even whisking someone off for 'alone time', whatever your character's particular way is of being hung up on this particular hangup.

More pervasively though, creating a character and playing the game not only doesn't give you cool mutant powers or spooky supernatural traits, it doesn't give you much at all beyond ways to interact with basic challenges, and any two out of four distinguishing social tricks. These four skills (Charm, Convince, Plead, and Study) do quite a bit of work: besides setting your particular infatuated lunatic apart from the others, they give you ways to wrangle and leverage social problems, and risks of creating more social problems for yourself as you go along. The rules don't stop you from getting into a fistfight, or a car-chase, or a burning building--but only because the rules want you to instigate those situations, through your interactions. And indeed, getting out of a nasty, tangled piece of drama is a rule-governed act--it's a whole big thing for your character to ditch a toxic friend, or put a drama-hound behind them. A thing that they, in fact, can fail at if the dice land bad. In short, you get an assortment of blunt instruments and a world of suspiciously spike-like objects, so most of your characters' activities will involve hammering, or at least be hammering-adjacent.

Lastly, Lovesick stakes out right upfront the kinds of characters that will work best for its kind of story. Three archetypes, with vivid detail on what makes them tick and what makes them broken, will give you a good solid footing with which to leap into disturbing psychological horror. And entirely distinct from Monsterhearts, these archetypes do not have any mechanical weight whatsoever! Everyone in your group can pick the same one to play, and that's a-okay. Or all pick different archetypes--even make one of your own, as long as that archetype is broken in the same direction as everyone else: obsessive, disastrous entanglement with someone else, a dependency or fixation or vendetta so overpowering it will make the character ruin their own life and that of everyone around them.

In particular, once you pick your favorite archetype to follow, if you decide "hey, Studying looks neat, and I like how Plead sounds", great! Likewise if you look at the provided Edges and think "'Comfort' and 'Technology' seem good, and Damages for 'Lies' and 'Abandonment' tug at my heart", excellent. All the distinguishing mechanical traits will work for any archetype. Each archetype even features some tailored guidance through the book on how they best interact with different things: inciting or precipitating events, conflict with other characters, friendships and rivalries, and even taking Lovesick into a few different genres if your group is so inclined.

Didn't You Just Say--

Yes, Lovesick is written for our boring old modern Earth and normal people living here. That doesn't mean it can't do other genres--it just means it's a different approach to fit this kind of story into another setting or premise, as opposed to your usual genre stir-fry.

For example, "Post-Apocalypse Lovesick" sounds honestly pretty rad, if you keep the emotional entanglement front and center: everyone is some measure of desperate and dangerous, yes. But not everyone is unhinged in the same way, and seeing a handful of exceedingly emotional people bargaining with scarcity and catastrophe would make for some very vivid stories. Vanilla Lovesick starts with the question of "what would your character do for love?" and gives you the incentive to answer with some very drastic things. Putting up "the safety of the enclave" or "the last hospital in a hundred miles" as stakes can only ratchet tensions and conflicts to even higher drama.

Or, try Spacesick: trapped aboard a rusted sparking hulk of a space-station or colony base, nothing outside but the frigid vacuum and lowest-bidder walls separating it from you, and the one person who lets you keep your sanity in this expired tin can is . . . off. Is someone sabotaging the ship--or something? And who or what, exactly, is to stop you from taking any matter you want into your own hands if it comes to that? Very fun, disturbing stuff!

I could even see Lovesick, with its focus on social influence, manipulation and deception, and claustrophobic personal psychology, offering a lot to a story of spies and political intrigue. Operating in hostile territory, brokering uneasy alliances with hidden agendas, and becoming all too compromised as you lose sight of the mission--or, pursuing that mission with a fervor and intensity that hopefully never sees the light of day. LOVEINT is an unofficial term in the intelligence community, after all.

This All Sounds Pretty Intense

It is. Or at least, it can be. While you can spice the mechanics up with Book of Sand, Substitute Reagents, or even One Red, by default there's no rules for death, injury, "sanity meter", or anything else but what your main characters do or try to do, and the narrative consequences that come out. If it suits your group's style and comfort zone, Lovesick needn't go anywhere darker than "alone on prom night" or "ignored at the office party". But the rules are geared and the guidance is tailored for anything from blackmail to kidnapping to murder to worse.

Lovesick isn't interested in fun as such. If you have fun playing it, great! But the rules aim to provide drama, tension, and pathos. My own ideal while playing would be feeling a little bit sick at what my character is willing to do--and morbidly curious enough to see how much more they have the nerve to do. Not to mention, seeing the other unhinged romantics with their own desperate schemes informed more by sincere and deep emotion than little things like reason or empathy.

But I fully realize this isn't everyone's cup of arsenic-laced tea. Lots of people have nasty trauma in Lovesick's neighborhood, and lots more just don't have the stomach to enjoy such a spicy and bitter direction of story, and that's entirely okay. I make the games I feel inspired to make, and I have the most fun making games that do something I've never seen or heard of, or at least that I think I could do successfully.

Which is to say, if you're on the fence about Lovesick, find someone who might like it better and then nab their copy, because I also make games so that others can make better games, with my own work as duct-tape and superglue. If any of the preceeding paragraphs sounded neat despite reservations about "nasty, realistic psychological trauma", give the book a look when you can, and make a game you'd like to play--and tell me about it!

[consilium-games]

A New Offering

It has been entirely too long since my last post, and likewise, since my last title, so let me rectify that right . . . now!

In The Queen Smiles, I played with a new mechanical embellishment, on top of my usual Ghost/Echo-inspired framework. The 'One Red' system gave me a surprising amount of interesting design space to play around in, and as I said in the previous post, I found enough to make a fair supplement!

That supplement is here: One Red explores a wide range of different mechanical conceits and additions and minigames and subsystems, all intended to make even the most routine roll of two six-sided dice into as much of a workhorse as your group could want. You can put mechanics onto "unnatural mental effects on your main character", or "terrifying (or beneficent) being sharing your character's body", or even "procedurally generate the world or play an NPC no one should directly control". You can even play around with time itself, telling a story out of order, and zooming in or flashing back (or forward) to the causal connections between the key moments of a story. Whether you use this for Rashomon-style conflicting events, or creation-myth exploration of a people's defining tale, or even use it as a meta-narrative device, in which some mysterious sequence of events requires investigation, you can do things few other games can survive trying.

That's Great, But Why?

Mostly, I like exploring design-space in RPGs. While no one could ever hope to exhaustively do this, it has always fascinated me just how much you can get even a simple system to do, especially when that system really does the intended work. By that, I mean that while a game like Dread really does lend itself to feelings of dread . . . it doesn't lend itself to anything else in particular. It's not a system, it's a mechanic--like "roll two or more dice, one determines success or failure, all others determine complications or costs". And systems allow all the cool interesting exploration.

In particular, I had fun seeing just how detailed, or how abstract, one could be in figuring out the Queen's values, priorities, sensibilities, and attitude. One minute, She Smiles on you putting one of her emissaries in your rear-view and flooring it, and narrowly escaping. The next, She Smiles your getting pulled over and taken to jail. Why send that emissary after you if She likes that you escaped? If She likes that you escaped, why should She approve of you going to jail? These contradictions require some kind of resolution, whether it comes from the Queen having elliptical, corkscrew logic, or some simple, clear, but unexpected priority. Perhaps the Queen sends emissaries to provoke you to drastic action, and whether you succeed or fail, She wants you to become a champion, hardening through hardship. Or, maybe you carry some kind of contagion, and She never intended her emissary to kill you, because then you can't spread the lilting melody from Arcadia--but you can certainly spread it in a jailhouse.

But as I quickly saw, I'd created a mechanic and then built a system around it. So I began to ask, what else could I do with this mechanic now that I had it, and what other systems could I make with it? And that was before realizing, I'd actually made two mechanics, and only used one in The Queen Smiles. Clearly, I had to remedy this.

The first mechanic in the 'One Red' elaboration is the one that The Queen Smiles actually uses: adding a special significance to one of the dice in the roll, without changing its mechanical meaning. The rules don't care what you tack onto the Goal or Danger holding the Red Die, only that you tack on something. And given that in all of my Succession-derived games, the dice you roll have a hard and tangible link to the narrative, this means that the One Red die projects a narrative meaning on top of an existing narrative meaning.

But the other mechanic I realized I'd made, as ideas started to congeal and extrude, is adding a special value to one of the dice, layering a mechanic on top of a mechanic. This shows up more One Red, perhaps more than the former. In this approach, the story or narrative may not directly notice or care which facet of a roll you assign your Red die to. But the rules themselves, the ones that say when to roll, and how to interpret the dice, directly care about the added layer of value on one of your dice.

The former gives us things like "portraying a character that no one should directly control", whether that be an incomprehensible being from beyond, or a collective entity that players would have incentive to bias, or even a character that should seem unpredictable and unstable, at all times. You're using the same machinery for creating stories, but you've done something a bit complicated in tying the story back to the machinery.

The latter gives us things like prompts to cut forward or backward in time, defining parts or features of the world around you as you move through it, even nominally very mechanics-heavy things like a form of wild magic you only barely control at all--but that you still do, yourself. The same machinery, but tied to itself in a complicated feedback loop.

So What to Use This For?

As far as One Red goes, most of its verbiage relates it to Succession, rather than The Queen Smiles, for a few reasons I want to get into here.

First, amazing as the scope of Cool New Mechanics might be with One Red, the nature of One Red makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to sensibly use the Red die for more than one thing. The Queen Smiles, as a game, really can't also use most of the ideas in One Red--while one or two could work, it invites confusion and doesn't directly aid the game's core intent.

Second, since publishing Succession, I've had a few readers describe the book as anything from "hard to read" up to "impossible to understand". I also have had readers describe it as a really great game, and say that its unique style and approach adds a lot to what kind of game it plays, and what way to tell its stories. I knew during writing that I wanted to try for the latter, and if I got it then it would come at the expense of the former.

But, I've also gotten better at writing rulebooks for public consumption--funny how repeatedly doing something can make you better at it, right? And while I still consider Succession a fine game, maybe better than anything I've made since, that 'expense' above is steep. Steeper than I want to pay again. So Chamber+Circle has its blunter, more direct, rule-focused style, and The Queen Smiles prattles on for a decadent twenty pages when its source material is literally "take Horror and Fairytales from Book of Sand, and rub in a novel mechanic".

So in making this latest supplement, by addressing the rules directly to Succession as a starting frame of reference, I hope to make Succession, retroactively, a bit better and more valuable. The book still has the same cryptic, sphinxian delivery as ever, because the book hasn't changed. But, someone getting Succession, or who already got it, has one more supplement that immediately speaks to making this cryptically-written game into something even more unique, and without any obfuscatory delivery. That's definitely not to say that One Red can't enhance Chamber+Circle, or indeed any Succession-related Ghost/Echo-inspired game. Just put a Red die among the ones you were already rolling, and see what you can do with that distinction within rules! But artistically, I wanted to tip the scales more for Succession, as the darling I made that has the most objections.

And as for future offerings, I have a book very much in mind. I haven't seen a lot of RPGs that deal at all with romance. It's almost a taboo topic, judging by the reception of Monsterhearts (now with a second edition!) And while Monsterhearts is a fine game for what it wants to do, it has some rough patches, and even if you sand those off, it wants to do some very specific things. If you don't, Monsterhearts has a lot for you to navigate around. So my next title will present my take on heartwarming, sincere, passionate romance stories, focusing on madness, tragedy, and personal loss. It's gonna be a fun one and I look forward to publishing it this year!

[consilium-games]

The Queen Smiles: let me tell you a story

In the eleventh hour of the eleventh month (or, near enough to it), I've managed just barely to publish my second title this year. And to start us off, I'll plug it here, in all its darkly gleaming glory: The Queen Smiles, a cosmic noir horror fairytale game. If you like Cthulhu and Azathoth, Philip Marlowe, or the Grimm brothers and Celtic lore, you'll find something to love here. If you like none of those things, you might at least enjoy this post.

The Queen Smiles grew out of a lot of things. If you like to analyze art (like RPG rulebooks) without having statements from the author to influence you, save this post for much, much later, after digesting the book and even playing it a bit. After all, that would perfectly fit the spirit of the game: making one's own interpretation and meaning out of something ambiguous and hard to explain.

However, if you like seeing the foundations things sit atop, or wonder more generally where ideas come from, read on. I won't get especially personal here, but topics will get political--and the personal is political. That also fits the spirit of the game.

Lots have noted that 2016 . . . did not exactly treat many people kindly. Not even the Republican Party of the USA (in which I live)--no, not even winning the election served them well. In full disclosure, my own biases are unabashedly liberal, progressive, left-wing and socialist, but it never failed to impress me that everyone stands to lose under a delusional, incoherent populist and crony not only of the dystopic cyberpunk corporate fiefs we've gotten accustomed to, but outright foreign nations. Times have gotten no less dark than strange.

Initially, most of the imagery and psychological space of The Queen Smiles came from the isolation of my current job. Without many details, know that it involves very nearly all my waking hours during the working week, in a place very remote from where I actually live, and without a lot of time to just get to know anyone else--a lot of time to spend in one's head when not beleagured with the actual job. So, the mind tends to wander:

What if the GPS box that keeps me from getting lost between home and work and back suddenly . . . got spooked? What if the increasing absurdity of our world really went off the rails? What if the ominous politics we now have turned . . . really weird? That, and doodling with a new mechanic snapped it all into focus, as I read about Celtic folklore at work in between actual work. And thus, the Queen took shape.

America has no real experience with confronting an outside hegemon: America has instead always done the hegemony. During World War II, Germany posed a threat--to allies, very far away (if you forget about Americans vocally and publicly sympathetic to Germany--America nearly joined the Axis, lest we forget). During the Cold War, fears of Russian spies infecting good honest Americans with Communism never materialized into anything but witch-hunts and opportunities for personal vendetta--the movie Red Dawn never became a documentary. And even today with the 'war' on terror, America defends against a tiny number of disorganized plots and spree-killings with fleets of unmanned aerial weapons platforms. These attacks on America shock the conscience and have no excuse or justification . . . but the gulf of disparity between "what America defends itself against" and "its actual defense" simply boggles comprehension.

So America has no conception, no framework for understanding, of the seven-league-shoe strapping onto the other foot. Of an outside force having more power, of an invader taking over, of falling to an occupier. The Queen Smiles, at least in part, tries to get at this: what is it like to lose not just a war, but your entire world? And, much closer to our world: what is it like to watch the things that make your world sane simply erode, under the influence of madness you can barely describe?

'The Queen' of the eponymous book is not intended as a stand-in for our current elected official, however. Or, not quite: that new mechanic I mentioned exists solely to define the Queen and Her values, through play, by prompting the players to associate unrelated outcomes to the Queen's favor--'The Queen Smiling', on different outcomes of the dice. In short, it's a way of creating a time-lapse inkblot and projecting it, a bit at a time, onto the towering figure of otherworldly power and caprice of the Queen.

But, for that reason, The Queen does serve in another way as a proxy for this administration: it 'is' whatever the players want it to be. However, the 'conventional' way to do that consists of coded language and subtle innuendo, interlaced with vague sentiment-laden surface rhetoric, giving the listener an excuse to read a sympathetic interpretation into anything--if the listener has such a motivation. In The Queen Smiles, the process works in reverse: players have their characters take action, and roll dice for it; every dice-roll then singles out one element of the current scene and its action, and says unequivocally, "the Queen Smiles on this". And then it falls to the players to infer what that inarguable fact means in any larger context.

The Queen can Smile on your success, or failure. On your setbacks and suffering, or on your safety. On your wavering and stumbling through a confused and confusing ordeal, or on your swift and direct progress to a clear and compelling goal. Which events, and which facts of these events She Smiles on will give you the means to conjecture what She actually values, what She wants, and most specifically, what She wants with you. The Queen doesn't craft a platform or message to appeal--instead, She shows in hints and tells what She truly favors, and leaves it up to you to figure it out.

The Queen Smiles plays into modern times in another way, however. Namely, this outside force invading our reality might benefit us--or, some of us. Our society rests on foundational and institutional unfairness, the kind we probably will never fully uproot--if only because our most influential citizens don't want to. Toppling these unjust and corrupt pillars would hinder those who have benefitted from them most--and so, these same pillars become enshrined as right and good and moral and identified as the core of a nation's and people's identity.

Which also means that for those most harmed by systematic, pervasive injustice, knocking it all down poses a tempting proposition. If the Queen will cast down the mighty and crush our world as we know it--might She not also lift up the lowly and establish a world better for the oppressed? The game explores this idea--but, it's a horror game . . .

Which means that in The Queen Smiles, the Queen does not offer a fair deal in any event. Instead, She offers, at best, a chance to side with the oppressors in a new regime, which stands poised to crush the old regime in splendor or wonder or horror, but crush it utterly and without remorse. For me, the real horror lies in the fact that this still could make a very compelling offer. That peaceful, humane reform could be so remote and unlikely and at-best-partial that having an eldritch horror from beyond our puny understanding step in and sweep it all aside seems--pragmatically--like a better bargain.

Of course, the underpinnings of source material that go into a work don't ever fully define it--or else I'd not have made The Queen Smiles with so much influence from Lovecraft. Just as this work doesn't cower in a racist panic over the horrors of "people of different ethnicities having children", it likewise doesn't wallow in post-truth despair. You can tell a huge array of stories with it, provided they fit with the core, kernel idea of uncanny beings imposing their world on ours. And forthcoming, I intend to play around more with the 'One Red' alteration that The Queen Smiles uses, to project and embellish the Queen, putting the notion to other good work.

So regardless of where you live or what you believe, I hope you'll find more good gaming from consilium games, and at the least, that you'll get something you can use yourself. Happy holidays in general, whatever those might be, and let's all hope the next year goes better.

[consilium-games]

New opportunities for consumerism!

At long, long last, I've published both Chamber+Circle and the pay-what-you-want supplement, Substitute Reagents! Go read up there, but to whet your appetite, Chamber+Circle is a standalone game in which you play as magical women with implausible weapons, fantastical vehicles, and a lot of ass to kick. Aeon Flux, Bayonetta, Witch Hunter Robin, Ultraviolet, and Underworld were big influences on the style, focus, and tone.

Substitute Reagents is a supplement with added rules and lots of detail on how to use them, together and singly. No real verbiage is put toward combining Substitute Reagents with Succession, or for that matter, Book of Sand. So, I'd like to get into that a little bit with this post.

First, What's Chamber+Circle (in five paragraphs or less)?

A GMful game with much the same framework and DNA as Succession, of no particular setting, in which one of the main foci is building the setting together as the group plays, while having action-packed, fanservice-laden scenes in which scary, competent women wield mystical power to defeat evil (or just anything they don't like).

The game doesn't come with Quests, like Succession does. Instead, it asks the group to answer questions together about the world at large, via 'Districts', 'Groups', 'Others', and 'Fixtures'. These serve much the same purpose as the 'Lots' page in Succession, but where 'Lots' is intended as a palette, and you have the assignment of painting a picture of the PCs' Adversaries (and scenery around them), the oracle page of Chamber+Circle is a bit more like a collection of concept clip-art. While a reader's (presupposed but likely) grounding with the trappings of Western fantasy will make things like "The Valley of Teeth" seem fairly straightforward to imagine, things like "so, the 'deuscientists' are a Group of some kind" will probably give less guidance.

This is intentional, and singled out right in the mechanics: where Succession gives each Adventurer two Skills, and gives everyone the means to Supplicate to their chosen God, Chamber+Circle gives every Witch the exact same Moves, across the board, lets them single out one as having a nifty side-effect, and gives a couple of narrative niceties (ie, non-mechanical, but asserted as facts of the game-world, making them relevant even if they don't directly reference dice and vice versa). And one of these Moves all Witches have is a pretty unique one: Remember or Cut is triggered by in-game events that differ for each Witch, and signal a kind of 'aside' scene, a flashback or jump-cut elsewhere, narrated by the player of the Witch who had Remember or Cut trigger. And almost the sole purpose and intent of Remember or Cut is to have a player take time to describe some of the setting, its history, and current events, outside of the Witches' immediate presence.

From the outset, Succession uses the Adventurers like mirrored balls, reflecting the world around them as much as affecting it. It uses Adventurers to explore the world. Chamber+Circle uses the world as a projector, to shine light on the Witches in all their glory. It uses its moments of worldbuilding mid-session to show how awesome are the Witches who bend that world over their collective and singular knees. This makes sense, as Succession took a lot of inspiration from Dark Souls, while Chamber+Circle took its cues from Bayonetta. (Maybe I should try to actually play one of them someday . . .)

And Book of Sand fits in how?

Short version: generic Western Tolkien-inspired fantasy isn't the only genre that Succession's engine can drive. Other genres work at least as well, depending on what one construes the genre to mean, and how one wants to explore and play in (or with) that genre.

Long version: Book of Sand is as much about teaching how to rulesmith as presenting prepackaged genre toolkits. It aims to pack a brief course on (very narrowly-applied) game design, into about a dozen pages, and give the reader something worthwhile even if they don't get anything out of the purported course. And I'll have more to say, probably in a future post, about the genres in Book of Sand and what you can do with them (spoilers: my next game is not really inspired by a video-game!)

So, Substitute Reagents?

Where Book of Sand gives you a kit of nice things just for Succession, and then some kits to turn Succession into something entirely else, Substitute Reagents gives you eighteen basically-isolated rules and subsystems, and guidance on what each can do. It's a bit like the difference between a gallery of model-kits (that so happen to have standardized fittings), and a gallery of tools with booklets on each for how to use them as tools. The nice thing about the former approach is that as long as you 'get' Succession, you get six very short RPG books, basically Batteries Included, No Assembly Required. The nice thing about the latter approach is, if you 'get' Chamber+Circle (for an even more forgiving definition of 'get'), you get a bundle of things you can use for most any game like Chamber+Circle (basically, any game using Ghost/Echo's framework, which Succession and Chamber+Circle both just give a more rigorous treatment of).

So what can you do with Substitute Reagents, say in light of Succession? Quite a lot, though as stated above, Substitute Reagents internally only refers to Chamber+Circle, with no real mention of Succession. Hence this post going into a little more meaty detail.

Firstly, Succession has some unavoidable gamespace overlap with games more to the tune of Dungeons and Dragons (though a lot more overlap with, say, Dungeon World). But, unlike either of those games, its combat minigame is . . . not a minigame at all. It's 2.5 Moves, and Misfortunes to juggle, and maybe Quests ticking toward Fates. No HP, or health-mechanics at all, no notion of range or cover or even numbers: on first principles, the rules don't know the difference between your desperate, wheezing, cowering tinkerer staring down an army, and your warcrying veteran leading a horde of vengeful berserkers on a felled and briefly-mortal necromancer. Succession, as a book, mostly aims to teach you and your friends how to make the rules care about the difference between those two scenarios, without feeling like you're puppeting the system, or fighting it, or having to ignore it and play Magical Tea Party.

Suppose you added one or more rules that distinctly, intentionally handle combat, as a discrete event? You have your choice of several, now! Each focuses on a different thing you get out of 'combat'. One deals with "combat as a good excuse to make everyone look really wicked cool", and does this by letting PCs work in close concert to curbstomp opposition, at the expense of quickly wagering their asses. Another deals with "combat as a genuine Undecided with repercussions everyone disclaims ownership on", and that system does it by stopping a moment to frame the stakes of the conflict or crisis, and having everyone involved (ie not necessarily every PC) have to roll for these stakes to finally settle the conflict. And a third focuses on "combat as an exercise in itself, the planning-out and execution of it being as important or moreso than the outcome", and this plays out with simple but usable rules for tactics, positions, ranges, weapons that play into these, and so on.

Or, suppose instead the main deficit you find in Succession (or games to be released later) is they don't acknowledge very well the idea of learned skills a particular PC would bring to the group. There's a 'blank skill' rule and guidance on how to put it to work. Now, you can take that 'Post-Apocalypse' genre kit from Book of Sand, and make it less drastic, with a 'Hacking' skill and attendant presumption that there exist things to hack, and benefits to reap by doing so. And more naturally, you can posit a 'Medicine' skill someone else has, that lets them patch others up perhaps with a risk of exhausting valuable supplies. It's a small, simple tweak, one a lot of readers of Succession will probably have intuitively come up with on their own, but now it's official and has guidance on how to do it.

Or, for a big shift in style, suppose you want a mechanical advancement system, and possibly concrete 'stat-like' numbers you can twiddle with? Substitute Reagents gives a simple, malleable menu of things a PC can 'level-up' into, and a choice of XP systems, so you can decide what should grant experience and improvement, since that will strongly incentivize some things and discourage or ignore others. And of course, in tandem with some specialties in Substitute Reagents such as 'Powers' or 'Implements', and a bit of modification, you can craft a good catalog of "things a PC can get via experience", and not just "how they would get any mechanical improvement at all".

How about Book of Sand?

No verbiage exists at all for applying Book of Sand toward Chamber+Circle, for a few reasons. One, economy of prose: in order to have the most utility-to-wordcount ratio, every word that doesn't contribute a useful rule or guidance is suspect. And, more pointedly, two, genre focus: while "gunwitches" isn't quite a genre, it's like a genre. It comes with some implicit statements about a world, and possibly something to say about our world; it expects certain allowances and interests from the audience that, if not met, will consistently send the audience to the door; it fits itself to enough of a mold of beats, arcs, and microdramas that the Ghost/Echo Move structure can pretty well encapsulate "gunwitches" the way it can encapsulate "Western sword-and-sorcery dark fantasy", which is significant for my purposes. So, welding real genres atop the quasi-genre of "gunwitches"--ie, Chamber+Circle--would dilute the focus of purpose.

But that doesn't begin to make it a bad idea. And you can even see some shades of this in certain rules in Substitute Reagents which slant more toward horror, or specifically-fantasy, or that help with supporting more sci-fi trappings. So let's look a bit at Book of Sand informing Chamber+Circle!

First, setting your Witches down in any setting will guide you a lot on that whole "build the world as you play" agenda. Having an acknowledged starting point and a single page for everyone to be on (or at least, a rough chapter) means that when someone chimes in about the deuscientists, it won't come out too jarring in juxtaposition with demons or ghosts--there's some cohesive, in-setting understanding of what those three things would or could be.

More pointedly, applying genre 'model kits' on top of Chamber+Circle will, largely, mean adding "things that make Witches different from each other". Chamber+Circle pointedly makes Witches differ mostly in "what happens when they do something cool", rather than "what cool things can Witches severally do?" But, most people will come at the game from a background that posits PCs as substantively distinct in mechanics, and while that's neither bad nor good, having to fight a habitual lens while playing isn't fun. Thus, the rule/s each genre has in Book of Sand that distinguish PCs will make Chamber+Circle feel more like other games--again, not bad or good, but possibly desirable for some, especially when still getting settled in.

Lastly, simply bolting one or two specific, well-chosen bits out of Book of Sand in, like "Chamber+Circle+New Gods" for example, or "somehow adding Milestones to Witches' lives", can turn your story in a radically different direction. Where you would ordinarily have "Aoi, Boumei, and Chie beat the literal tar out of a coven of crime-lord demons", now you have "Aoi, Boumei, and Chie are chosen priestesses of a quasi-pantheon of lost gods, and beat the literal tar out of a coven of crime-lord demons threatening to unmoor the gods from Creation". It's the same 'genre' of gunwitches, the same intended playstyle and themes, but one added bit of direction can change everything, and take a good but generic story to some really unique, personal places that perhaps only your group will ever see, if you don't share it with others.

In conclusion:

Turns out, using a mostly-uniform mechanical system, with very few moving parts, means you can hotswap a lot and keep things basically coherent! Next time, I'll probably discuss my next standalone game, and probably muse on what would make for a good supplement after it. It probably won't be "a supplement specific to the standalone game", unless unforeseeable fortunes prevail. It might though, as the Next Big Thing uses one very specific alteration to the core that Succession and Chamber+Circle hew to, and exploring what else you can do with this One Weird Rule might make for an interesting exercise.

[consilium-games]

Varied Rulesets

Say What?

Last time on this blog, I prattled about variant rules, what they can do well, what they can do poorly, and how to use them best. Having scraped up enough time in aggregate to think of something more substantial, and so as not to let this blog languish in neglect, I've put some thought into deliberately variant rules. In particular, a hypothetical game (one I might flesh out more fully someday), in which no two players have any mechanics in common.

Let's posit a game, with a GM, using rules that loosely follow after the rules of Succession and Book of Sand. A short fixed list of in-character actions that trigger dice-rolling, which consists of rolling two or more dice, and assigning to different aspects of the in-character action. Most saliently for us, these IC actions break down into one die that must go into "do you succeed, or do you fail?", and all other dice (at least one) go into "what external cost or complication happens to you, whether you succeed or not?" These costs and complications can be--well, complicated, but suffice to say you always need to address at least one with every dice-roll, and they can hang around for you through plural dice-rolls (hence, you may roll more dice, and this often bodes ill).

For our hypothetical, we'll only keep track of "what this diceroll can do when it succeeds" and "what can go wrong (independent of failure)". And for those just tuning in, we'll call these 'Moves', as a whole, after Apocalypse World's handy terminology.

So our Moves consist of the following:

Run after or away from something. Success: catch someone/something; don't get caught by anything. Complication: get lost on the way; lose something important on the way.

Brace against danger or harm. Success: don't get harmed by a threat; don't get shaken or rattled by trauma. Complication: get caught flatfooted and defenseless by some other (lesser) danger.

Talk someone into or out of something. Success: persuade a person without threats or violence. Complication: they demand a bargain or bribe of some sort; they demand proof of your argument before they'll buy it.

Hide from someone or something (rather than Run). Success: concealment and time to act undisturbed. Complication: entrapment in your hiding spot, such that you can't safely leave hiding.

Fight someone, barehanded or with a weapon. Success: you leave them beaten and bloody. Complication: injury or damage to things you care about.

Flow over, around, and through obstacles with improvised acrobatics. Success: obviate a barrier or get a better position than someone else. Complication: suffer an injury; leave a trail, possibly of damaged surroundings.

Focus your finesse on a delicate or dexterous task. Success: hit what you aim at, solder a motherboard, suture a wound, and similar. Complication: it takes a lot of time; get caught offguard by some other threat or event.

Pry at someone's secrets by getting them to talk, or just reading them well. Success: learn information someone else actively or passively would hide. Complication: reveal something you yourself would keep secret; arouse the suspicion of others as to why you'd Pry.

Stealth your way through observation and detective measures. Success: pass a crowded area, hide from pursuers or cameras, and otherwise go unnoticed. Complication: find something nasty on your circuitous route, which will likely alter your plans.

Disable or distract a direct threat. Success: stun or misdirect someone, or otherwise deflect a physical danger. Complication: lose something important in the process; run into an obstruction or barrier against leaving.

Hustle against a deadline or time-limit. Success: make it to your destination or accomplish your task in time. Complication: incur a hassle you'll have to face later.

Block harm or danger from befalling someone else. Success: the would-be victim suffers no harm or injury. Complication: you suffer the harm instead, or suffer some lingering effect from proximity.

Advise someone who asks your opinion on the best course of action. Success: you get through to them, with the genuinely best advice possible. Complication: they may overreact or carry your advice too far; they may cling to you or over-rely on you.

Conceal the truth from someone else, passively or actively. Success: they don't know a thing about what you've hidden from them. Complication: they may misinterpret what you do reveal to mislead them; they may pry or question, knowing you've hidden something, if not what.

Avenge harm or injury to someone else. Success: you harm or disable the aggressor at least as much as they inflicted. Complication: you suffer injury for it; you reveal a weakness or vulnerability of your own that will haunt you.

(Game design lifehack: I came up with this list by thinking up archetypal characters, whose lives tended to five of these actions apiece, and then built the list out of those five Moves per character. If I do something more elaborate with this idea, it'll come in handy as an approach to build the full list of Moves.)

Terminology Roundup

Move: each of those things in that list, and anything fitting the pattern there. For our purposes, a Move is "a thing you can do, in character, that will make the rules care" + "the rules that apply once they start caring".

Goal: for our purposes, "the desired end-result of a Move", like the 'success' clauses there.

Danger: the cost, complication, or other badness you risk by just making a Move at all. Expressly cannot countermand success, but can color a success or failure.

That should do us for now, we won't get into the particulars of how these become fully-fledged playable rules (but again, I might make this into a full game, someday, so just take it for granted that a list like this goes a long way toward "a fully playable system").

So What?

Suppose we have the rest of the rule-goo we'd need to make these useful. Rules for dice and how to roll and read them, attached to each Move up there. Rules about when and whether characters can die, rules about when and how characters can improve, rules for all that stuff you'd need to run a modern RPG. But here's the thought-experiment part:

As character creation (or the bulk of it), players choose five Moves from that list, write them on their own sheet, and then cross them off of the main one. Only one PC can Avenge, and perhaps a different PC can Block, but by the time it's done, no two PCs share any common Moves. Meaning, aside from any genericism of "how do you roll dice and what do they mean", or "when do characters die or get better", no two PCs have any rules in common.

Why even do this, and how could it work? Let's tackle the second one first, as we so often do here: it could (and ideally would) work pretty smoothly, really! Five rules, basically, for any player to have in their head. Even assuming a central GM (instead of the GM-ful-ness of Succession, or Chamber+Circle which I'm still working on), that's not much, especially if those rules exist on someone's readily-available sheet of paper. Players keep watch on their own sheets (likley about the size of a post-it note, the ideal size for a character-sheet), and when their character does something appropriate, that triggers one of their Moves, they do whatever dicey things the rules generically call for. The stated results happen, along with whatever consequences, and life moves on. In other words, it works like an RPG with rules. And if the game does have a GM-ful structure, in which no single person has to track any rules they don't have in front of them, the total rule-burden during play comes down to "know five rules or so and apply them yourself". Very little, for a starting point of a long list of rules, and "no two people have any rules in common".

So why? For now, mostly as an experiment and thought-exercise: how similar do PCs need to be, in terms of the rules that comprise them? Some games, like Don't Rest Your Head, give PCs essentially identical rules, across the board. Others, like Apocalypse World, tend to have just a few basic rules in common for everyone, but each PC will, guaranteed, have a bunch of stuff unique to that character.

Some games, like FATE, might seem to make PCs that tend, mostly, to have a lot of difference from one another. But in terms of rules in common, FATE characters actually have only two real areas of difference: Aspects (which just name open-ended facts that matter about a character, and have more or less uniform rules for what that means), and Stunts (by definition, deviation from the core rulebook). The Skills which make up the bulk of a character's mechanical definition in FATE all work, basically, the same way for everyone. Some characters just have better odds at certain Skills.

Over in Succession, PCs have six Moves like the ones you saw earlier, that everyone has in common. They then have two Moves they choose--from a list of four, not exclusive with anyone else. If a game of Succession has three or more players, then even those 'elective' Moves will have commonality, between at least two PCs. PCs can even have all the same Moves, if they want to.

In Chamber+Circle, PCs have almost no mechanical distinction, whatsoever. In one case, of one Move, per PC, something different happens (involving the results of a different Move). But players still use all of the same Moves, in the same basic ways. Yet, the Moves and the rest of the rules strongly encourage players to play PCs as unique, distinctive badasses in the world, who don't need fancy rules to permit their coolness.

So, what happens if you go the exact opposite way, where characters have nothing in common, mechanically, besides perhaps "players always roll dice, in this basic way"? If those dice always mean something different, that hardly makes for any commonality at all. So what kind of gameplay might grow out of PCs whose main actions will differ like this? What kind of story would benefit best, from rules where my character simply doesn't haul off and punch someone--but she does knock someone out if she has to. Your character will punch just about anyone and win--but she's boned, if punching doesn't fix it.

Okay, Really, So What?

Most RPGs make basic assumptions about what they intend to model - smarter RPGs tend to know when they make assumptions, poorer ones . . . don't usually realize it. Ultimately a rule itself boils down to "an assumption about what to model and how". But, RPGs have 'meta' rules, rules about their rules, patterns their rules follow. FATE characters consist of ranked Skills, Aspects, and Stunts. Stunts consist (generally) of "do Skill X better under some circumstance or when using it in some way". Aspects really just consist of "when this fact about you or the world matters, you can pay a resource to improve your dice". Don't Rest Your Head implicitly assumes any instance of real uncertainty can work just fine with its framework of increasing Exhaustion and spiralling Madness. When those don't quite apply, DRYH tends to suffer more, sometimes to the point where avoiding the rules makes more sense. And Apocalypse World makes a few assumptions, but often as not, tells its players and GMs "hey, just make up something that fits, if nothing else does".

The hypothetical system we've posited, built on that list of one-per-customer Moves, also would make some assumptions--mostly in that "all these Moves involve dice, and involve them in a standard way". Which amounts to, at most, as much similarity as the different Skills in FATE have, or the different stats in Apocalypse World. Ultimately every Move up there is a rule unto itself, the 'meta' rule simply saying "and you use these rules like so".

So, it might make for a fun testing-ground for the idea of meta-rules, both as a design framework, and as a lever for players to crank, when modifying a system. For example, take a look at that list again (I'll wait). Notice something? Quite a few of those Moves do very similar things in their Success, but have pretty different Complications. A few have similar Complications, but not quite parallel Success clauses. Some even work really similarly but seem to trigger on very different in-character events. But they still have those broad similarities: three have to do with hurting others; three have to do with moving or acting quickly; three have to do with hiding yourself or what you do, et cetera.

So what if you added three Moves about, say, hacking a mainframe, or casting a spell? Or romancing someone, or atoning for misdeeds? What if you removed the three about violence, so that all conflict handled by the rules requires talking, or underhandedness, or anything but force? These count as meta-rules too, and if you really understand what kind of story you want to tell, looking at these points of action and moments of drama as categories might help. Most RPGs assume combat will happen, for example, because combat has high stakes, short time-frames, and sometimes involves scratching that "winning a game" itch in a nice, direct way--reduce their numbers to zero before your own hit zero, and you win! So, nearly every RPG has a combat system. Quite a few even have pretty good systems there! But, does your story really need that at all? I've played a few games where no combat system existed, or no interaction with it ever, ever came up. These games had fun, tense moments, high-stakes conflicts, even quite a bit of tactics at points--but for different reasons, it never made sense for one character to direct lethal force at another. Or, in one game, the couple times it did, the character directing the lethal force planned far enough in advance that her lethal force amounted to "a successful assassination" and "winning a quick-draw".

So, here we have maybe the last (as in, ultimate) thing that variant rules and homebrew and houserules can give us: new ways to look at stories, themselves. By making us break a story down into "what kinds of actions and microdramas happen in scenes, and what kinds of scenes happen in acts, and arcs", by making us find and form categories (beyond "this test involves your STR" or "you need at least Good in Fight if you don't wanna get hit"), we can play around with those categories, and see what value they really give us. Obviously violence and combat (for example) won't ever go anywhere. As long as we have RPGs, we'll have RPG combat. But considering a game where none of the rules even conceive of violence, we might find some really interesting kinds of stories that can't coexist with "I pull out my gun and shoot them". Likewise, stories where--for whatever narrative reason--neither the heroes nor the villains can flee to safety, but must face down any conflict they encounter, tells a very different constellation of stories.

At this point, I definitely think I'll play more with the game born out of that list up there. I don't know what I'll do with it yet, but hopefully I'll learn something!

[consilium-games]

Rule Variation (Part .5)

I said I'd try to post more frequently, and though things have gotten fairly nuts on the home front, I can at least try. Next post, extenuating circumstances notwithstanding, I'll try to have some good material on an idea I wish I had more time to really play with, but for now, this.

Varying Your Rules (And Not Burning Them Down)

As I said back here, houserules are great, if approached intelligently. I cannot and will not attempt to make a comprehensive universal field-guide to houseruling an arbitrary system into an arbitrary fit to an arbitrary purpose. But I will point out a few basic things that you'll want to have in mind when you go to actually houserule.

First, know the territory. That means firstly of all, know the game you want to run, as if you already had the ideal system. What would that really look like? What kinds of characters do you want to focus on? What challenges do you want them to face? What do you want them to do, most of all, in facing those challenges? This does not mean "write a novel", but it does mean "have a clear idea of the genre and tone of your game", before trying to enable it.

Tone

Weirdly, even moreso than genre, some people I've seen have profound difficulty with tone. Tone often has strong subjective elements: things I find bleak and disturbing, someone else might consider hopeful - and weirdly, vice versa. Know exactly what overall tone you want to cater to. Yes, you'll have cheerful scenes, and dark scenes, and flat-out weird scenes, but overall, you'll have a running trend. What running trend do you want? Your rules can help you get there and stay there, or they can keep you from ever getting there.

Keep in mind that tone and tension don't always correlate. I've seen goofy, fluffy, lighthearted games with intense and serious action throughout--the stakes never got very high, no one faced a risk of dying for example, but the characters engaged in these low-stakes conflicts and challenges still cared, and gave it their all, and thus--showed different sides of themselves, made moral choices, and grew as people.

I've also seen unremittingly dark, bleak, unsettling games where . . . no matter what anyone did, nothing would get any better, and everyone had suffered such terrible things, they could feel a sense of justification no matter what they did in response. Why not stab someone unprovoked? Why not risk a friend's life for precious little reason? Everyone will die like dogs for no good reason, so go nuts. Needless to say, these characters may have changed a lot, but it hardly had anything to do with choices they made, or aspects of themselves showing through. And in a way, though the fate of the world hung in the balance . . . they didn't care a whole lot about it.

You can screw up (or do weird things) with genre and source material and story emulation, but if your group can't keep steady on a good tone, and vary it in just the right ways to make it really matter, you probably won't enjoy the story that comes out.

Genre

Things get clearer and easier here. While you can blend and remix genres (space opera and western, or magical girls and vampires), you still have to understand your genres, and what you want out of them. Mixing noble, grandiose high fantasy with the style and trappings of a noir crime drama might work, for instance--with careful shepherding and thought, to bring out what can fit together in both.

Make sure you communicate your genre ideas clearly, outline what matters most to you, whether you're writing an RPG intended to serve that genre, or just running a game and have a particular genre in mind. You probably aren't The Definitive And Authoritative Arbiter of that genre, or indeed any genre, but even if you get some parts flagrantly wrong--if you then communicate what you mean, who really cares if your pitch on "classic bank-heists" seems to involve an awful lot of hacking, and is set in the future? If everyone knows to expect that out of your story, and finds that interesting enough to contribute more of it, you can call it grilled tuna if you want.

Genre gets tricky when you conflate it with tone. It gets even trickier when you conflate it with tone, and go for a tone, and grab the RPG (or design the rules) that seem to favor that tone but do nothing for the genre, or worse, actively work against it. An example:

Someone once pitched a cyberpunk game, with a lot of background lore and setting context (and most of that landed under the couch, never to be seen again). They wanted politicking and scheming, they wanted flashy shootouts, and they wanted 'quick and deadly' fights. I didn't know then what I know now. They found Technoir, a fine game that could use a little polish, and a lot more love.

Things went swimmingly for awhile, but it gradually became more and more clear, the GM wanted amoral darkness in which principle and decency did not even begin to exist. The more the PCs attempted to live out the punk part of cyberpunk, in anything but visual signals, the more the GM pushed back, threw outright busted mook-mobs at the PCs (in a game where each dice-roll changes things and often not for the better), and squirreled the key antagonistic NPCs away behind impenetrable plot-barriers. Not to say the GM wanted the PCs to fail all the time--only that they ought not actually, you know. Make anything better for anyone.

This GM didn't fully understand cyberpunk, and no one else thought to come to a clearer and more transparent understanding of what tone the GM wanted. Honestly the futuristic trappings may as well have consisted of wizards and magic--the story didn't focus in the end on alienation, on the choices imposed by economic and government forces, bartering away humanity and whether one should--not really. The GM really wanted something to the tune of Reservoir Dogs or Training Day, a neo-noir crime tragedy. So playing to the revolutionary and political tunes of cyberpunk didn't fly well, and that combined with a lot else going awry tanked a promising game and turned it into a chore.

Know your genre, at least enough to really get someone else excited about what you intend to actually do (in your rules, or in the game you run). Match it with your tone, which you will also explain and communicate clearly--right? And the rest gets easier.

Characters

The more specific and concrete, the less subjective, usually. Which means we'll need to look at the RPG designer hat and the GM game-running separately. Both have some common threads though:

Different characters lend to different genres and tones. In that earlier example, one person played a careless, nonchalant, sociopathic murderer, who just really didn't care what happened if her immediate friends and sex-partners didn't get hurt, and she could get trashed on illegal substances paid for with blood money. This kind of character can work great in a certain kind of story.

Another player played an honest, noble, but hard-on-his-luck detective, wounded physically, mentally, and professionally from a betrayal, but utterly determined to do his job by the numbers, to not lie, cheat, steal, or abide or abet those who do, and to help his friends find redemption. A fantastic character for a radically different kind of story.

Tension and contrast and in-character drama can work marvels for a group and a game. Too much tension and contrast and in-character drama can make for protagonists who--very rightly and rationally--will never willingly enter the same timezone, unless they intend to end one another. While that can make for a thrilling few scenes, it would tend to bring most games to a sudden end.

For RPG designers: make it painfully clear what kind of protagonist you intend your rules to model and support. Of course you'll allow for variation and divergence, rather than a few more-or-less indistinguishable cardboard cutouts--but some kinds of characters will work and some won't. In one playtest of Chamber+Circle, one of the playtesters (somehow) got it in his head to play an apegirl ripped from pulp sci-fantasy, with a raptor mount and embroiled in a deadly war with the Pterodactyl People. I have no doubt that in his head, this was the coolest thing imaginable. And in strict terms, he made a "flashy, fanservicey badass" just like the rulebook recommended.

In more meaningful terms he utterly failed to see, or care about, the more numerous words recommending source material like Aeon Flux, Bayonetta, Ultraviolet, Underworld, and Witch Hunter Robin. Which all have a severe deficit of apegirls, raptors, and time-travel. He justified his PC's presence alongside a gentle blood-witch with strong death themes, a haughty weather-sorceress and heiress, and a girl who fought evil with a powered-up super-soaker full of angel blood and enough grit to make that work, by saying his character fell through a time portal and here she is!

Things didn't work out hot.

Obviously if people don't read or listen to your pitch (as a game design or a game to run), you can't do much for it. But make sure everyone gets on the same page as far as characters. Rather than enumerate attributes, or list off examples, try to focus on what a character needs to bring, and shouldn't do, in order to fit. This boils down to just a more concrete and focused understanding of genre and tone, but you have to phrase it in terms of characters who'd fit or not, and what makes those characters fit or not.

For RPG designers: point out which parts of your rules lean especially heavy against stoic killers, which parts especially suit smooth talkers, how your relationship map highlighs past tragedies, how your XP model makes failure (and thus, determination and perseverence) a good thing. Spotlight just the things that interact with "what kind of person should I play, as a main character in a story supported by these rules?" Sell readers on the archetypes, trappings, and traits your game and its genre bolster most, and give a few gentle pointers for rectifying a character idea that won't fit, so people can repurpose and adjust their hopes toward something you can actually fulfill.

For GMs running games: you may have to do some of the designer's work for them, if they haven't read the previous paragraph. Then, describe the kinds of characters you feel motivated by. The sorts of characters who get your motor running, the kinds of things you want to see those characters face and respond to, the kind of world you want them to screw up and rebuild, and how you will support all that. Then, if the players pitch a character idea you don't like, ask them to sell you on it. Name the parts that don't sit well with you, and especially what changes would improve the pitch. Make sure to make it clear why you can't do their character idea justice in a game. Sure, it might sound like a truly stupid character idea--we all get those. But the player (likely your friend) thinks it sounds cool as Hell. So stay polite and supportive, while making it clear what kind of raw material you need to work your best magic.

Now For The Houseruling

We'll need examples here. Posit a bronze-age mythology-themed game, with really grim and barbaric tones, murder is a common Plan A, but the world still hews to a sense of honor and justice--just a very different sense of those things than we'd dream of in our cushy modern lives. It has some sorcery, some monsters, and some divine intervention, but mainly as setpieces and challenges for really important mortals.

Pick a starting point

Did you go take a look at Technoir? Here's another link. You can see where this leads: though it probably won't burst into flames on Treat, Coax, or Fight, some of the Verbs (things you can do and roll dice for, not unlike Moves in Apocalypse World or Deeds in Succession) don't make a lot of sense. Maybe the game won't burn down if you cross out Hack, and replace it with Enchant. Where does that leave Operate? Can we cross that out, and replace it with something for basic subsistence and survival? Do these rules work at all for reflecting the gulf of difference between a slave and a priest or a princess? Does the game's idea of harm and injury respond at all to things like curses or blights?

Of course we can probably tweak any game into doing anything, if we put in the work--possibly enough to end up just making a whole new system with some reminiscent mechanics and terms. But as much fun as you can have making a new game from scratch, let's avoid unnecessary effort. That means focusing on what our PCs need to do in our desired genre and theme and tone, and which of those things will need rules, support and guidance to answer "now what?", and what bits the group can figure out on their own without a book to help.

Rather than dig out my copy of Technoir and cram several hours of game-development into a blog post, let's look at one really, really simple game you might have, or have heard of: FATE Accelerated Edition, or FAE. Cheap, short, and very pick-up-and-go. Best of all: simple enough to store all the rules and conceptual objects in your head at once. But we won't even look at all of FAE's rules here. We'll just look at a few basics, as a segue into something broader.

A toy system

The salient thing about FAE for us lies in how it reflects "what characters do". FATE has Skills, a closed list of stuff your PC can do with varying competence, and it has Stunts, which bend the usual corebook rules for a PC, in some specific way (only under some circumstance, or only when using some Skill or in some way, or rarely, only when spending a resource to do it). No stats though, nothing like attributes or ability scores--no abstract, generic, 'objective' "your character runs this fast, and can lift this much" numbers--not except how those tasks show up in the existing short list of Skills. FAE has Stunts, certainly, but no Skills (and still no stats or attributes). I told you it had simple rules.

Instead, FAE has Approaches--ways a PC can face a problem. So here they are: Careful, Clever, Flashy, Forceful, Quick, and Sneaky. Often, the book uses these adverbially--a PC does something Quickly or Carefully, and Stunts usually match (ie, "when Anne Attacks Carefully, she deals 1 less Stress, but adds 1 to her roll"). And aside from Stunts, ie bending the corebook rules, these six things comprise the only rule-governed and specified measure of what PCs can do, and how well.

You hopefully can see why this makes a good basis for houseruling: you kind of have to, to use this for anything more specific than the generic pulp action it took inspiration from. But, with so little there to get in the way, you'd have to try in order to add a rule that makes it catch on fire.

Playing with it

So rather than the difficulties of taming Technoir, let's look at suiting this skeleton to our gritty brutal bronze-age idea. Our PCs will likely want to use all of those Approaches by turns, favoring some more than others, according to the situation and the PC. Looks like we haven't done badly so far. And Aspects and Stunts already come entirely from players' brains, with GM guidance and approval, so we'd budgeted on making those up anyway--they'll suit us if we want them to (and we do).

But what about our sorcery, our mythological creatures, our divine intervention? We intended those as mostly special obstacles our mortal PCs will engage with--but what rules can support us here? And what if we want PCs to dabble in these things after all? Do we just cook up a new Stunt? And does this really support our game, or just not get in its way? Can we do better?

Let's suppose we do, in fact, want some magic and some mythological monstrosity and some divinity. Maybe one person wants to play Hercules (or Gilgamesh), someone part divine or part (or mostly) inhuman. Maybe people can learn sorcery if they try and the stars line up right. We can model this in a few ways:

Suppose we add a new Approach, let's call it Mystical(ly). Our PCs can assign it a rating, like any other Approach--but we'll need to massage the rules here, because creating a character in FAE has you rank six things on a kind of pyramid. We might not quite want that, and--hey, with our gritty, hard-bitten themes, maybe 'Flashy' doesn't fit, as a way someone can face a problem. Sure, PCs can have panache and flair--but that doesn't solve problems.

Fair enough, swap Flashy for Mystical. Can everyone roll the dice to do something Mystically? So far--yeah, anyone can. They'll have varying natural competence at it, and some days the not-at-all Mystical barbarian will punch the actual ghost out of someone, if she tries, while on that same day the spooky hedgewitch just can't fling a curse to save her life. Maybe this works fine, maybe not, but FAE's dice and its narrow range of competence make these events fairly certain in the long run. The only real way to prevent them amounts to telling the barbarian's player, "don't ever have her do something Mystically".

Suppose we don't want the barbarian to have a shot at solving problems Mystically. Fair enough--and if we want to get rid of Mystical, since we want six total things so we don't have to rework character creation, let's instead replace Flashy with Noble. The kind of myths and stories we want to draw from and reiterate have lots of cool scenes where, yeah, the hero/ine does something violent or manipulative - but they pull it off because they say or do or reveal something that makes everyone else stare in awe at how this one person embodies the virtues of the time. (Remember, bronze-age virtue still does not match our own ideas of good, or just, or admirable. But suppose we have a really good grasp on what bronze-age Noble would look like, here.)

Now anyone can do something Nobly, not specifically Forceful or Quick or Sneaky, but impressive and majestic and heroic in the original Greek sense of the word. So how do we get our hedgewitch or seer to do something magical? We do still have Stunts. We can use Stunts to describe the our hedgewitch Carefully or Cleverly concocting a potion, our seer Forcefully prophecying to her people, while our barbarian just knocks people over the head with her club - and she can do it Nobly, no less.

But Stunts in FAE have a very tight limit on them, and we want our PCs to really feel unique and special in their world--the kind of people you'd expect to hear legends about. Maybe another avenue exists.

What if we have Careful, Clever, Forceful, and Quick as Approaches everyone has. And then we make a list, Lucky, Mystical, Noble, and Sneaky, of which players choose two, such that each PC has six Approaches--but not all in common. (Why Lucky? Because a lot of heroes of antiquity really do just get a deus ex machina from no real effort or talent on their own part. Maybe you wanna play that kind of hero in this game.) Now, the choice of Approaches sits orthogonal to considerations like having Aspects (to spend a resource on for a bonus to an otherwise normal roll) or Stunts (which as we saw can warp the rules for a specific PC). By choosing two of your 'elective' Approaches, you also don't choose the others, and thus cannot ever roll dice for doing something via one of those Approaches--you've agreed that your character exists in a certain plane of competence, and not those other ones.

Of course, we could go whole-hog, if we don't mind ignoring things like "the barbarian has Forceful as her highest Approach, because she's strong", versus "the hedgewitch has Clever as her highest Approach, because magic or no, she's crafty above all else". We can replace these Approaches with more abstract ideas, a bit like we did with Noble. Perhaps we'd benefit more from Approaches like Fury, Mercy, Guile, and so on--match as closely as we can the virtues and shining moments of the stories we care about, and use those as our template of "how do PCs do things" - which will shape what our PCs do. Just like we'd prefer if the barbarian just cannot do magic, at all, we can apply that kind of benefit to all our PCs, and all that they do, if we make rules that carve our type of story cleanly at its joints.

The Takehome

Like I said earlier, I plan to post more about this, especially to the tune of "make rules where no two PCs have any exact commonality in the rules" - rules where each PC consists of a different constellation of rule interactions, including some PCs simply having no way to do things the other PCs can do easily. This doesn't really depart far at all from other RPGs - shockingly often in fact, games allow and encourage or even expect one PC to have and do things that other PCs can't do at all. But with more time to kick the idea around, I'd like to see how far that notion can go, and what implementation might take it there best.

For this post's purposes though, if you take home one thing, just keep in mind that tinkering intelligently and transparently on your games' rules can make a tolerable experience into a great story, and a great experience even better. Look first at what you actually need, then look for the games whose rules actually do what you need, and finally hammer on the bits that don't quite fit, ever mindful of that first point--what you need, what tone and genre you want, what you want PCs to do, what you want to matter in your game and what you want to specifically undermine or ignore (or at least, not allow enough focus for the rules to really address).

[consilium-games]

Disparate Rules

As promised, more updates! A bit of admin first: one of DriveThruRPG's featured reviewers recently checked out a review copy of Succession, which I only found out about when I saw a copy sold for $0.00. That doesn't mean they'll actually review it by any means, but I sure look forward to finding out! I've also started rounding up people for my next game to publish, to get some more feedback on the book and some more playtesting in, to see if it plays well with more or less 'normal' players, and since I've done all the actual prose and most of the layout, it hopefully won't take six months to put thirteenish pages up for sale!

Now, on to the topic

Awhile ago, I watched this video from Extra Credits, a really informative YouTube channel on game design. They mostly focus on video games, their design and approaches, the wider game industry, and "how to make your own game, or just make it in the game industry", but I've found a lot of good stuff for RPG design, and if nothing else you definitely should check out their Extra History videos, if you like fascinating and often moving expositions of historical figures, events, and even entire time periods. But enough free advertising!

The video in question centers on World of Warcraft, and Blizzard shutting down a pirate server running a pure vanilla instance of the game, no patches, no new content, nothing but the original release, and though incredibly obscure, this pirate server apparently had a respectable playerbase - people who wanted the Original WoW feel. I've never played WoW and probably never will, and the video sums up far better than I could the arguments for and against the server, shutting it down, and - most importantly for us today - segues into a bit of a discussion about 'fractured games'.

Fractured, not broken

Many larger RPGs--large in terms of 'content in the corebook' as well as 'number of players'--have houserules. Some games have lasted so long that some groups play their own, heavily-houseruled game and have played with those houserules for so long, the group may not even rightly remember the original rules when asked. Some people knowingly and purposely compose houserules, even intending others to use them: "hey, this spell as-written doesn't work well in games; try my rewritten version, it works great for my group!" And of course through inattention, unfortunate wording, or plain unclear writing, some people come to a very different understanding of 'the rules as-written' than the writer ever intended--an automatic houserule.

Houserules can help or hinder, depending entirely on whether they work. But what about the existence of houserules? The fact that many players play under a very different set of rules from one another? Does that help, or hinder, or just 'depend'? Of course the answer is "yes and no", and I wanna dig into that today.

Contra houserules

Put down your rotten tomatoes, there exist some good arguments against some approaches to houserules as a cultural feature, but also one big argument against houserules themselves--of course, houserules won't go anywhere, but that argument bears mention, to stay aware of, especially if you want to make new games (and I sure do).

Individuals

Bottom-up: individual houserules and groups. You might have had the great good fortune, dear reader, to never find yourself sitting with a group who really, earnestly, ardently insisted on a few really terrible houserules that 'make the game more fun'. Perhaps you personally lack the design savvy to even notice when one specific rule always seems to screw things up when it gets employed, or even screw up other rules because of the shadow it casts: "it's more realistic for people to just get up, when knocked prone! But this class uses a lot of knockdown effects . . . better not use it."

I've weirdly seen a few people talk as though houserules, 'homebrew' systems, and just rolling your own game from scratch, belongs in the hallowed halls of Real Designers. Obviously my own philosophy in making games differs sharply from that idea, anyone can make games if they put in some work. But it does take some work, and slapping dice, attributes, and some weird effect together does not generally suffice. Look closely at houserules, and seriously ask "what will break this rule, and what will this rule break?" And if you find yourself joining a group with a broken houserule, ask them to sell you on it: it might break things, sure, but it might also do a lot of useful work, and that group may just not find much use for the things their houserule breaks. And if that group genuinely can't see that their weird rule really doesn't help, and really does hinder--just have what fun you can (perhaps including 'not playing with them').

Communities

A bit higher up: often I see players, commentators, and even designers (even myself to an extent, years back) proposing something to the tune of "it doesn't matter if the rules don't really work well, ~the GM can houserule it~". This doesn't work for a lot of reasons we'll save for the next section, but one element deserves special focus: offloading on the GM.

GMs have to do a lot, to make a game work at all, in the best cases on the best day with the best systems and groups. Some people seem to not just ask, or even demand, but blithely expect the GM to also pick up a designer's slack and fix a broken game. Nearly any game has 'some assembly required', work that goes into making it work, but when a GM or group has to change the rules of a game just so it will do what it says on the tin, something has gone very amiss. "Oh, yeah, these couple classes make it meaningless to play any other class. We just don't use them / we radically alter them / we only use these classes, and use this game as if nothing else really existed."

I'll not go on an extended tirade, but when you buy most any product, you rightly assume you'll get the product advertised, and that it will at least attempt to do what it says. You definitely don't assume you'll need to remove a vision-obscuring 'extra seat' from the hood of your car, nor that you'll have to detach the 'decorative live fishbowl' from your kitchen toaster, nor that you'll need to look online for patch-notes just to use a basic program on your computer. RPGs don't deserve any more lenience or latitude than that.

The Hobby as a Whole

RPGs work in an inherently communal way. They bring us together and expose us to new ideas and things (and people) we'd never have encountered otherwise! They also require us to work with those other people just to play a game at all (excepting 'solitaire games', a niche so tiny this parenthetical seems excessive). When you go looking for an RPG to play, you also have to find people to play it with, if your own circle of friends doesn't bite. A pervasive presumption of houseruling means that even if you do find such people--you won't really get to play the RPG you wanted to. You'll play the RPG that group has made, with your chosen RPG as a basis. Whether that game compares favorably or not, you don't get what you looked for in the first place, and if everyone uses different variant rules, what assurance do you have that you'll ever even play the same game twice?

This fractiousness punishes big games, with huge communities that don't agree on what the rules even mean, much less how to use them. It also punishes small games, with disparate communities who practically can't come to any real consensus together. Ultimately it means that you can only get the game you (think you) bought by running it yourself, with an assumption by the rest of your group that your interpretation of the rules trumps everything else . . . see where that leads? When a community treats the rules they buy and invest the time in learning as 'polite suggestions', it devalues those rules. And rules can only have the value people place in following them. A presumption of houseruling means that a community around an RPG has less of an RPG centering it at all.

Pro houseruling

All that doomsaying aside, we houserule for good reasons. Let's take this top-down: since rules only have what worth people accord them, hidebound and slavish devotion to The Sacred Book means that that book can only ever have as much worth as its worst rule-interaction. No more than that. And no one can make a truly flawless game with no awkward, kludgey, fumbley bits, hairy corners of interaction, or just poor wording that leaves something unclear or worse, leaves an important question entirely unaddressed. By reading at all, humans interpret what they read--impose an interpretation on the text--and until we unify into a single cohesive post-singularity hivemind, this means people can and will come to different interpretations of the same rules.

By allowing for that, we can make and use rules that suit humans to follow. "This says anyone you can see--what if I use a telescope?" Different groups will find different answers useful: emphasizing the deadly nature of a magic spell (and implicitly, of magic in general); focusing on immediate, personal presence as of paramount importance; saying different things about the subtle, un-rulebound workings of the world. The right kind of ambiguity or optionality in a rulebook can make that book much, much bigger, by letting the rules do different, meaningful things for different people--without making anyone look for the rule that suits them.

This takes a very fine touch, and leaves rules open to 'abuse', but we'll discuss that next section. For a 30,000-foot view however, the salient point comes down to this: informed and shrewd variations on rules, with conscious awareness that you've changed the rules (or made a choice in interpreting them, a choice others may not make), can let a community grow far larger and still have common ground in the game they share. People who want un-serious action can play the same game as people who want methodical politicking, and while perhaps they may not want to play together--in the same group at the same table--they can still tell their stories to one another, share ideas, and invite and include more people who'd never have heard of this game these people keep gushing about.

Communities, redux

Within a single RPG community, the fanbase and playerbase of a given game, advised and transparent houseruling serves as a surprisingly good starting point for getting prospective players of a given group or story on the same page. "These Skills don't exist. I want a bronze-age game, so here's some Skills that do fit that premise, while the banned Skills don't." Not every game can work for sharp departures from the (perhaps unconscious) intent of the designer, but supposing you see how an RPG could really work for this other kind of story too, making some adjustments to improve that fit means that the community now has two games (or more) where before it had one. If you share your adjustments, show others how they too can play a bronze-age adventure with just a few adjustments, everyone gets more than they even bid for. And this encourages that whole kumbaya 'encountering new ideas and things we never would have found otherwise', gives us more stories to share, and even attracts people who might never have cared about this one RPG--but find the idea of playing in the bronze age fascinating.

And by taking a transparent and deliberate attitude to houseruling, a community fosters and encourages its own game designers. Those designers may well make games that the rest of the community won't care for, but they still created something. And having a lot of subtly different takes on a given rule, or interaction, or just 'a thing that happens in some games sometimes' rendered into rules or approaches, lets everyone hone their designer skills. "But wait, if a telescope would work, and it works on someone I can just barely see, what about someone I don't know I can see, like someone crouching on a hillside who looks like just a rock?" No one answer might prevail, but everyone involved will develop the crucial--even life-changing--capability to pick out not just which ideas sound best, but articulating exactly why, and awareness of why not.

Which brings us to 'abuse' alluded to in the last section. One criticism of houserules I intentionally left out boils down to "but what if it's Unbalanced or Abused?" I've posted repeatedly about these questions and won't address them here besides saying that the best rules can't make up for bad players, and that numerical balance isn't the most important thing. If a rule works poorly, it needs polish. But if a player misuses a rule, they'd misuse the ones in the book, as easily as ones someone else came up with.

Groups and games

Which segues us into the small-scale. Someone advocating for a given houserule also advocates for a particular kind of game that that houserule would support. "Everyone has half their normal HP" probably has no issues in balance, and in most games, wouldn't have any overtly abusable exploits (or at least, not any that didn't already exist). But it certainly leads to a kind of game very different from what the rules intend, where combat ends a lot faster, and accidents hurt far more.

These changes don't always even have to appear in play, in order to change the game. I mentioned an informatively bad game, long ago. One relevant (and good) part of that game involved a rule that in essence allowed players to gain a resource from any NPC (with ~GM permission~). This resource never mattered in our game, but the designer clearly meant it to matter a lot, because it also featured one of the only actual pieces of GM guidance, or rules on what the GM can do: one particular NPC could never, ever grant this resource, because of their 'alien emotions'. The game posited this NPC's role as standard and required, every game intended to feature this kind of NPC, with this one exception to the rule that we could harness NPCs for this spendable resource.

We got this selfsame resource from people utterly warped beyond sanity by sorcery. From centuries-old eldritch beings. From abstract, sapient concepts. And the GM of that game realized the absurdity of the exception, and did away with it. My character then got a tiny bit of this (for us purely decorative) resource, from our 'alien-minded' NPC friend. Because that NPC was the one pillar of sanity and bulwark of reasoning, an understanding and patient influence, and that resource keyed on, allegedly, our PCs' ability to relate to and empathize with others. This never had any influence on any dice or results, but having that restriction lifted said a lot about the world our characters lived in, and honored our characters' relationships.

Good houserules help you hone your game to your group's and story's needs, and though they definitely mean you won't play the same game as everyone else, they can give you a good story to share with others, and definitely a good one to tell with your friends as you play.

Conclusion?

As I started this post out, houseruling and homebrewing won't go anywhere. But online forums where people share and discuss houserules, and participating in those discussions, even building entire games out of them, can make our hobby a better one. But, blindly applying--or worse, presuming--any body of houserules or a general practice of using them, can make games weaker and ultimately worse. Of course, that can happen anytime someone does something blindly - it happening as an institutional Thing in the hobby makes it worthy of this huge post.

But after all this thought on 'pros and cons of houserules', I have in mind something a little more fun, which I'll save for a future post, when I have something more concrete to say about it. But in summary, "what if a game designedly gave different rules to every PC?" Hopefully something good, with the right framework!

[consilium-games]

I have yet to decease

Holy crap I haven't updated in ages. Hopefully this won't mark the first of a chain of "I haven't updated in ages" posts!

First the good news: I've secured grown-up legitimate employment and it actually pays reasonably well! The bad news: more than I want to mention here, but most saliently, the job plus the commute eats easily thirteen hours every weekday and leaves me needing all of Saturdays to just forget the prior week. But that's still a few hours every day, and a weekend, when I can focus enough to use it.

Second, I finally managed to use that time to make a supplement for Succession. It's called Book of Sand, under a Pay-What-You-Want pricing, it has thirty-two pages, and I think I did a good job with it, for having mostly created it at work. If you've played Succession at all, get this. If you get it for free and have ever bought a product through OneBookShelf (owners of DriveThruRPG), then Book of Sand may show up in an "also bought" list, which helps. Buying at all helps keep titles near the front page. And if you decide to buy it for more than $0.00, that helps even more.

Why Release For Free?

Well, technically not free--but "contributions appreciated" may as well mean free. Still, why? Mainly, Book of Sand only works as a supplement to an existing, paid-for game. Unless you can find a pirated copy of Succession (and if you do, tell me where--no, I don't want to sue, I wanna see how far that thing got). But barring bootlegging of really obscure indie RPGs, you can't really use Book of Sand without buying into Succession, and it feels wrong to charge for something that I've released in large part to drive sales of Succession.

So why charge at all? Because it took a lot of work, honestly. From figuring out how I wanted to handle each genre (and which genres to handle), to expressing them clearly, to the lists of Lots, to the artwork, to shaking editorial critique out of whoever I could find, Book of Sand did not just pop into existence. If someone wants to express approval of this by way of sending me currency, I won't turn that down.

I'll probably follow this basic model in the future: one game, solid as I can possibly make it, at rates that compete with other similar DTRPG titles; one supplement, versatile and complete as it can get, for $PWYW; repeat until dead. And for the moment at least, though I've not mentioned it here before, one other part of this model: no monetary investment from me. Free fonts and tools, stock art assets (or made by me), and marketing that consists of whoever I can tell.

Anyone can make RPGs. With some practice and study, and a lot of good criticism, well-taken, most anyone can make good RPGs. Not everyone can make a commercial success. I probably won't, but I'll try--using the bare minimum resources that most any customer of mine will have. A computer, a word-processor, some knowhow to use it, and the patience to make the best product I can. If it ever somehow became an option to operate like Evil Hat, or even Apocalypse World, enough funds coming in to work like A Real Business--

I might start hiring out for artists, because they'd make better art than I can. I might start hiring out for editors--but I'd probably do so by way of paying my current amateur friends enough to just focus on that editing, because I need substantive, game-design-focused critique way more than I need improved spellcheck. And I can't imagine having enough commercial success that I'd produce better games by hiring someone else to write them than by making them myself. Not that no one could make a better game than me--but they wouldn't do so for me without serious compensation. Besides, I like making games.

So What Next?

Don't expect it anytime soon at this rate, but I'm working on getting another game into a publishable state. I actually made it long before I made Succession . . . and it kind of shows. It has a lot of similarities in the rules and design, and Succession benefitted a lot from lessons I learned making and testing prototypical takes on this game, seeing what I could get away with, what helped most, what didn't make a difference.

So when it comes out, Chamber+Circle might still not be better than Succession, but I'll try to make it at least as good for what it does: over-the-top fanservicey action in the style of Ultraviolet, Underworld, Murcielago, or Aeon Flux. In some ways, its design makes that a little clumsy, over-mechanized, more moving parts than it really needs, but in other ways, if it worked as simply as Succession, it would rely a lot more on player creativity--moreso than Succession does.

Succession comprises my best effort at making one game really well-designed: it has just as much of a system as it needs to, and that system works in just the way it needs to, with guidance on what to do with that system when using it for just the thing it does best. Book of Sand capitalizes on this good design, by showing ways to modify that design to different purposes. You could have used Succession for cyberpunk (to use an example from Book of Sand), but without a little guidance on how to change it best, you might end up with something like Shadowrun Souls--and leaving aside the merits or flaws of that notion, it may not give you what you want.

Chamber+Circle, in its current state, seems to do its job pretty well! But I wouldn't call it well-designed--it has extra kibbly bits that don't necessarily serve its stated premises at all, and the bits it does need most take some massaging, a little greasing, to flow smoothly like Succession can. You could consider Chamber+Circle sort of the prototype, almost there, but not quite ready for the big time. I've worked on it a lot since, polished and sanded, but without a fairly foundational overhaul--without basically making Succession: Gunwitches instead of the genres I put into Book of Sand, Chamber+Circle will publish, with a slightly clumsy, overbuilt core. I intend to release a supplement for it too in good time, rules to expand the game, and to use more of that overbuilt core so you get more of your money's and effort's worth, but for me that makes up the difference between "designed well" and "does something well" - Succession in its central intended use might benefit a bit from some of the content in Book of Sand, you'll gain a few new things you could do a little less gracefully before. By contrast, Chamber+Circle needs a little handholding to do the thing I made it for, and though it'll include instructions on just how to do that handholding . . . the eventual supplement will mostly consist of "ways to do what you came here for, better than you could with just the core book".

This isn't to say I don't have faith in Chamber+Circle, or think it deserves publication! Far from it, I had a lot of fun playtesting it, and for its clumsiness, it does things Succession can't do naturally. I think the two make a good compliment, and future designers might learn something seeing them side by side--including myself. No, I take pride in Chamber+Circle (and I definitely don't say that about most things I make). But that also goes with seeing just where it has flaws I don't quite have the chops to correct. Hopefully as I keep making games, I'll get better at doing things right the first time.

[just-tabletop-things]

Whether the fighter is balanced with the wizard is balanced with the thief is balanced with the cleric demonstrates a mentality that still thinks roleplaying games are tactical combat simulators with Monty Python jokes thrown in for fun. No.

John Wick, “Chess is Not a Roleplaying Game”; creator of Chess: the Roleplaying game. (via just-tabletop-things)

The problem with quoting John Wick on anything is that he frequently says really brilliant things, punctuated with really stupid things. Just scroll down in this interview to "The Official John Wick Review Policy". Now read this review of the review, if you want a hearty laugh. Our hobby desperately needs reviews, smart ones that engage with the material, and that delve into actual criticism. The bulk of RPGs as an industry seems to have followed the template of comic books: a medium now primarily of, by, and for nerdy white dudes, that doesn't quite want to grow up or mature, but doesn't want the stigma of immaturity either, resulting in some really weird, over-the-top, you-can't-be-serious games and features of games, meant in complete earnest.

But that's big and complicated and it's late and I have a supplement I need to get up and finish, so let's just look at this pullquote: Wick criticising an overemphasis on game-balance.

Uh-oh, here we go:

Firstly, a hopefully obvious observation: different games have different focuses, and different needs. In Monsterhearts for example, how well you can manipulate or sway other characters is enormously important. This means the 'Hot' stat is actually really useful, if you know how to use it and play a character who does too. Your ability to hurt others (via 'Volatile' usually), or intimidate others (with 'Cold' most often) may not matter nearly as much, and 'Dark', most often used to 'Gaze Into The Abyss', is of fairly narrow use unless your Skin uses 'Dark' for something entirely different. But different Skins do focus on different stats! Does this make those Skins unbalanced? Let's put a pin in this and come back to it.

DnD has a particular focus and set of needs. I'm not the most qualified by a long-shot to analyze or critique the many issues in DnD's mechanics, but I think it's fairly objectively clear, DnD focuses on tactical combat, and needs its tactical combat system to work efficiently, legitimately, and above all, fairly. A character in DnD who cannot contribute to the tactical portion of the game has little to contribute at all, because that character lives in a game that focuses on tactical combat.

(Caveat here: if you don't use DnD primarily or even significantly for its tactical combat--well, probably there are simpler games out there that support whatever you do use DnD for, but the rest of this is not really relevant to you, so carry on.)

But 'balance' is tricky, especially in an overabundantly complex system that strives to legitimize as much as possible within its tactical combat system, and that tries to make that system effective and fair. But in any roleplaying game, of any kind or description, no matter its focus, there is one crucial and inescapable axiom the game has to meet, at a bare rock-bottom minimum, or it already fails as a game:

It has to serve the purpose of giving every participant a good time. That's what it means to be 'a game'. An enjoyable or engaging diversion or activity. Failing on this is failing on 'being a game', and no matter how intricate the world-building or how detailed the mechanics--it either works as a game, or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, then it simply doesn't work as a game.

Balancing Fun

I've often played characters in games very other than DnD, who in strict mechanical terms were far worse off than their peers. I've mentioned playing a scheming politicker in FATE a few times. She's very Good (+4) at reading others, knowing their intentions, and making others like her, if not always trust her. She has a few tricks up her sleeve that help her be a bit catburglary, and that let her more easily survive a fight long enough to escape it. Her colleagues have things like Physique (+6) that lets them uproot full-grown trees, Lore (+8!) that lets them Sherlock Holmes others, and one can just call lethal storms at whim.

We all generally have fun, and while only a few of us really engage with the game to the point of having agendas we really eagerly pursue, no one ends up feeling short-changed. We don't often have combat, but when we do, my schemer and the Loremonster sit back, use the opportunity to learn about opposition or pursue a side-agenda, or prepare for after the fight. When we have to investigate someone or negotiate with a new group, us brainier PCs step forward to negotiate (and the muscular nun with the +6 Physique? Also plenty of Rapport, the 'like me' Skill!) The more combat-focused characters find other less-tense things to do--they relax for a bit, in short.

In any sort of fight, my scheming tailor would get broken like a twig and used as a toothpick if she had to stay through two rounds or so, and while on a good day she can incapacitate even a really beefy adversary . . . she needs three or four turn-equivalents to set up an unfair advantage to use, just to level the playing field for herself. But we don't have straight-up fights between the PCs (yet, anyway; I'm a bit excited what might happen if her colleagues learn some of the horrible things she's done and have their fists have words with her).

It doesn't matter that we're not balanced combatants, because our game doesn't focus on tactical combat. It includes combat, and it includes political intrigue, and it includes investigation and exploration, and all of us are good at those in varying degrees. We're good at what our game focuses on, which means we have opportunities to do things that matter and that we care about.

Equqal Opportunity Entertainment

And here's the beating heart: a game has to bring a good, engaging time for everyone involved. Some people will naturally have more fun sometimes than others, some will only be a little engaged throughout while others are super invested--but everyone has to at least get something positive, on the balance, or the game isn't working. And ideally, everyone needs the same amount of opportunity to enjoy themselves. A lot of games make this harder than it has to be, offloading a lot of work on the GM to give everyone scenes and screentime tailored to make their PC shine; asking players to make PCs that won't unintentionally obviate or undermine one another; and expecting everyone to fully understand the focus of the game and how to use the rules to explore that focus.

DnD isn't very good at doing any of these, and furthermore has a number of features that make these jobs more difficult. Things like not coming to terms with its own focus (by billing itself as not having a focus); by presenting players with options that the system pretends have equal merit and weight but which provably cannot; by giving GMs monsters that are immune to mundane attacks or don't have to make saves or that are impossible to engage with up close or any of the other dozens of ways the system cuts unevenly through classes and what those classes can do.

In a game about robbing banks, you'd expect to be able to contribute to robbing a bank. But if the hacker can rob a bank from their own home with relative impunity, and a con-artist can rob a bank with total immunity and only a little more prep-work, do you really, really want to put any resources into 'shooting a gun' when that precludes you from hacking or conning? And before you answer, remember that this game about robbing banks strives for realism, so your odds of walking into, and out of, a bank with a loaded gun and a sack of cash and living to spend any of it are . . . dismal, to be generous.

This conjectural bank-robbing game is badly made, not because it's "unrealistic", but because it tries to sell players an option that isn't an option at all. The gun-wielding smash-and-grabber will not have nearly the opportunity for engagement that the hacker or con-artist will, and they objectively won't matter as much or for as long. While their non-combatant fellow robbers retire in the Cayman Islands, the shooter will be in jail if they're alive at all. Doesn't sound fun to me.

So Wick is only half-right here: strict mechanical balance of numbers-against-numbers often isn't that important. And to unpin that Monsterhearts example from earlier: sometimes that isn't even desirable. Some games focus on the imbalances between PCs, and on the PCs failing and running into adversity. These games rarely punish the PCs in permanently-disengaging ways, however. They don't kill PCs, or put PCs into prison for life. They may kill PCs' loved ones, they may make PCs into hated pariahs, they may level all kinds of permanent punishments--but none that permanently remove a PC's engagement with the game. So in Monsterhearts, if the GM does everything they're told to, and the players are all bought in and along for the ride, a Skin that gives absolutely no meaningful supernatural powers can be incredibly fun in contrast to a Skin with crazy nonsense powers. Your PC might have an awful time, but everyone will be looking at you as you struggle and fail, and rooting whenever you get your day. That game focuses on character drama, and unequal ability is as good a route to that as any. So just because your PC can't pursue their personal, in-character agenda, doesn't mean you the player can't have fun watching them strive and fail and get back up for Round N.

This won't work in DnD or games of its ilk. The tactics in DnD don't care about plot, or narrative, or character arcs, or development. They care about when a character hits HP 0 or lower. They care about whether a character can reach a given hex. They care about whether a character is allowed to be targeted at all by others. So playing a close-range Fighter with no magic items? DnD doesn't care about trying to give you an engaging time. You're going to get smeared into a fine paste, while the Wizard hovers over the fight and goes off to do the plotquest alone. If you don't use DnD for its primary purpose (that is, if you use the rules wrong), this may not happen. But it's definitely designed to happen, and just like that bank-robber game, it's not designed to keep you from choosing things that will diminish your opportunity for engaging with the game.

But I Had Fun!

Awesome! I see this a lot, especially when balance and DnD come up in the same timezone. "I haven't seen the glaring and foundational problems you mention." I've noticed that as bad as my own understanding of DnD's mechanics are . . . often the people making this rebuttal have an even weaker grasp on DnD's rules as written. The rules they paid for. The rules someone made on purpose and sold to that person for money.

They play homebrews that no longer resemble DnD; they play under objectively incorrect understandings of what a rule says; they pointedly ignore entire mechanics and seem to assume they're supposed to do so; they rely on the GM simply ignoring what numbers the dice say, regularly, and still say their system works. This in no way qualifies as even playing "DnD". It may be a roleplaying game of some sort, one that isn't quite written down, it might even be fun, but it isn't "playing DnD". Or whichever other game you choose to put there, if this description fits you or your group at all.

We're all here to have fun, but there are better ways for us to do it, and we all can improve, as players, designers, and critics. Ignoring problems doesn't stop them from being problems, it just moves the blame around when things go awry. GMs everywhere, under a common defense of DnD's poor balance, need to have ~more skill~ in order to make a broken system act like one that works. That's not critique, or even understanding of a game, it's indefensible.

But balance for the sake of balance is likewise blunt and often misapplied, and it usually comes from a misunderstanding of what a game's focus is, or could be, or should be, and how to use that focus well. Treating every game as if it were DnD is as misguided as treating every class in DnD as if they were equally useful. They aren't, and in the case of games, they shouldn't be.

[just-tabletop-things]

Ideas?

How would you design a recursive magic system?

[consilium-games]

For a brief moment I felt a temptation to (jokingly!) answer, “I wouldn’t”. But really, I just wonder what ‘recursive magic’ would look like! Or maybe you mean ‘a magic system that is recursive [in some way]’? As a programmer with a lot of love for functional high-level languages (Lua and Lisp especially), recursion is deeply fascinating to me, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything quite recursive in RPG design.

Though I can think of a few things that definitely come close, at least in spirit: FATE has the 'FATE Fractal’, the design approach that says anything can become a character if need be. For those less familiar with FATE, here’s what that looks like without too much mechanical detail:

The GM never rolls dice, all contests consist of a PC rolling four Fudge dice (numbered -1, 0, +1), and adding their ranks in a Skill. Different games have different lists of Skills, or approaches to using them, but the jist is you probably have ten Skills total (but can use Skills you have no rank in–just add 0, your rank!), and your ranks will generally vary from 0 to +4. The dice (equivalent to 4d3-8) center on zero, so most often you get a result equal to your rank.

When the GM wants to challenge a PC in some way (say an attack, to keep things simple-ish), the GM tells the player which skill to defend with, or at least describes the form of the attack and lets the player pick a relevant Skill–sometimes more than one might apply. The GM picks a Difficulty (a target-number to roll at least equal to, ideally better than). If the player’s Skill ranks plus their roll meets this Difficulty or better, great: they defend against the attack! But where’d this attack come from?

It really could have come from anything. A fire can make physical 'attacks’ against PCs, and surviving through a fire would probably involve 'defending’ against these attacks. The fire might not have the Shoot or Fight Skill, but it doesn’t need to: it could have a Skill for Burning, and the system can handle it. It can also have Aspects (like “really hot” and “smoky”), and Stress boxes (like hitpoints, but a bit different). It might even have Stunts, such as “water is the only thing that deals Stress”, if that would help.

Likewise a creepy hospital can make Provoke attacks by just being creepy, which other games might handle with a SAN-check or a Will-save. In FATE, anything can be a character, even parts of things, if somehow that helps.

It’s not quite recursive or formal, but I’ve always liked it as an approach to designing and using rules in FATE: even absurdly complicated scenes and conflicts can often happen really smoothly, if you can see which things are 'characters’ to FATE, and what those 'characters’ are doing. A huge media campaign, for example, can use rules similar to a fight or argument, and often something like a curse or a disease makes a great pseudocharacter, modeled in the rules with an Aspect or two, possibly a few Stress boxes to model a process of gradually curing or breaking the disease/curse, and that can make attacks on the person suffering from it. Lots of RPGs spend entire chapters talking about diseases, poisons, harsh environments, and then treat curses as an entirely different animal, often without noticing that as far as the rules care, they’re not. FATE just treats anything that interacts with the PCs as a character, if needed, and moves on.

On the note of magic though, and to bring this back to 'recursive magic system’, if you can cast a spell in FATE, and anything in FATE can be a character and have Skills … what stops you from casting a spell that casts spells, besides common sense and self-preservation? If you wanted to put a limiting factor on it, so you don’t end up with infinite Fantasia Brooms, you could forbid a spell from having 'Skills’ that equal or exceed the Magic Skill of the caster.

So a Great magician with Magic at +4 casts a Fireball–no, not just a ball of fire, they cast a Furious Fireball: malevolent balefire that seeks out targets. But this Furious Fireball is different, instead of having Burn at +3, it has Magic at +3, and can create more Furious Fireballs - just smaller ones.

This seems like a really blunt, crude example, and not necessarily fun without applying some other things (who controls this malevolent spell, or the spell-lings it makes?), but maybe it gets in the right direction!

[just-tabletop-things]

It would make an interesting  adventure if this new kind of magic suddenly entered the world. The PCs would be running around trying to stop recursively self improving spells from taking over/destroying the world.

A whole council of powerful wizards would have to be assembled just to deal with this problem.

You could have a spell that improves to the point where it literally becomes a god.

You could have a spell that spawns a pocket universe containing pocket universes all the way down.

Recursive spells could carry disadvantages such as an armor spell that constantly puts more armor on your armor so you can defend while you defend would eventually result in rather restricted motion…

Oh boy, now I have all kinds of ideas.

[consilium-games]

See Ra, which - without giving any important plot away - features magic as a programming language, and someone un/wisely creates a magical Quine. The situation escalates quickly.

[just-tabletop-things]

Ideas?

How would you design a recursive magic system?

[consilium-games]

For a brief moment I felt a temptation to (jokingly!) answer, "I wouldn't". But really, I just wonder what 'recursive magic' would look like! Or maybe you mean 'a magic system that is recursive [in some way]'? As a programmer with a lot of love for functional high-level languages (Lua and Lisp especially), recursion is deeply fascinating to me, but I don't know if I've ever seen anything quite recursive in RPG design.

Though I can think of a few things that definitely come close, at least in spirit: FATE has the 'FATE Fractal', the design approach that says anything can become a character if need be. For those less familiar with FATE, here's what that looks like without too much mechanical detail:

The GM never rolls dice, all contests consist of a PC rolling four Fudge dice (numbered -1, 0, +1), and adding their ranks in a Skill. Different games have different lists of Skills, or approaches to using them, but the jist is you probably have ten Skills total (but can use Skills you have no rank in--just add 0, your rank!), and your ranks will generally vary from 0 to +4. The dice (equivalent to 4d3-8) center on zero, so most often you get a result equal to your rank.

When the GM wants to challenge a PC in some way (say an attack, to keep things simple-ish), the GM tells the player which skill to defend with, or at least describes the form of the attack and lets the player pick a relevant Skill--sometimes more than one might apply. The GM picks a Difficulty (a target-number to roll at least equal to, ideally better than). If the player's Skill ranks plus their roll meets this Difficulty or better, great: they defend against the attack! But where'd this attack come from?

It really could have come from anything. A fire can make physical 'attacks' against PCs, and surviving through a fire would probably involve 'defending' against these attacks. The fire might not have the Shoot or Fight Skill, but it doesn't need to: it could have a Skill for Burning, and the system can handle it. It can also have Aspects (like "really hot" and "smoky"), and Stress boxes (like hitpoints, but a bit different). It might even have Stunts, such as "water is the only thing that deals Stress", if that would help.

Likewise a creepy hospital can make Provoke attacks by just being creepy, which other games might handle with a SAN-check or a Will-save. In FATE, anything can be a character, even parts of things, if somehow that helps.

It's not quite recursive or formal, but I've always liked it as an approach to designing and using rules in FATE: even absurdly complicated scenes and conflicts can often happen really smoothly, if you can see which things are 'characters' to FATE, and what those 'characters' are doing. A huge media campaign, for example, can use rules similar to a fight or argument, and often something like a curse or a disease makes a great pseudocharacter, modeled in the rules with an Aspect or two, possibly a few Stress boxes to model a process of gradually curing or breaking the disease/curse, and that can make attacks on the person suffering from it. Lots of RPGs spend entire chapters talking about diseases, poisons, harsh environments, and then treat curses as an entirely different animal, often without noticing that as far as the rules care, they're not. FATE just treats anything that interacts with the PCs as a character, if needed, and moves on.

On the note of magic though, and to bring this back to 'recursive magic system', if you can cast a spell in FATE, and anything in FATE can be a character and have Skills . . . what stops you from casting a spell that casts spells, besides common sense and self-preservation? If you wanted to put a limiting factor on it, so you don't end up with infinite Fantasia Brooms, you could forbid a spell from having 'Skills' that equal or exceed the Magic Skill of the caster.

So a Great magician with Magic at +4 casts a Fireball--no, not just a ball of fire, they cast a Furious Fireball: malevolent balefire that seeks out targets. But this Furious Fireball is different, instead of having Burn at +3, it has Magic at +3, and can create more Furious Fireballs - just smaller ones.

This seems like a really blunt, crude example, and not necessarily fun without applying some other things (who controls this malevolent spell, or the spell-lings it makes?), but maybe it gets in the right direction!