The RPG theory ship sails on unbidden, even as RPG networks of practice seem to be drifting apart. In November, there was a great post over on The Dododecahedron which bucked the trend and pulled theory work from outside of the author’s primary discipline, the OSR. Starting from a description written by Vincent Baker about the PbtA ‘conversation’, Dododecahedron author Rowan describes OSR play as an onion with four concentric layers: Character on the outside, then working inward to Mechanics, Procedures, and finally Adventure. Adventure is in the middle as the diegetic ‘fiction’ that the players are engaging with is the source of truth for OSR play. From there are Procedures, which describe the rules for how to go about play; that is to say, what travel looks like, or when random encounters occur, or how to track consumables. The next layer out is Mechanics, which describe the “rules” as most RPGs understand them; this is where initiative, ability checks, and all those specific bits live. Finally on the outside is Character, where elements like attributes, experience points, and skill ratings, all the things that make characters unique, sit.
Continue reading Coring the Onion: OSR structuralism and non-OSR gamesCategory Archives: Level One Wonk
noun
: a person preoccupied with arcane details or procedures in a specialized field
broadly : NERD
: a TTRPG wonk
: a game design wonk
The design decision which won narrative gaming
Last week, Apocalypse World came back to crowdfunding, with the Bakers seeking funding for a Third Edition of the game. Apocalypse World was first released back in 2010 and it took the indie RPG world by storm; by the time Dungeon World was released in 2012 it was already all but certain that ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’ would be a phenomenon. It’s easy to forget that there was another indie darling riding high in the hobby in the early aughts. Fate was arguably the other big indie game, and it even made its way into the ICv2 bestseller list after the success of its 2013 Kickstarter, an honor typically reserved for D&D, Pathfinder, and a few other corporate games. The ICv2 data point is particularly interesting. Fate outsold Apocalypse World; not only did the game peek into commercial sales charts as late as 2020, Fate even holds the statistically dubious honor of being one of only three games to ever outsell D&D in the ICv2 rankings (the other two being Pathfinder and FFG Star Wars). Commercially, Fate was an indie juggernaut.
Fate has clearly not maintained the degree of impact and influence it once had. Hell, the last three Kickstarter campaigns run by Evil Hat Productions, publishers of Fate, were all Powered by the Apocalypse games. The literal keepers of Fate have, thanks in no small part to John Harper and Blades in the Dark, seemingly seen the writing on the wall in terms of salability and influence of PbtA over Fate. Why is that? To start, there’s an obvious disparity to the degree in which unaffiliated designers took the respective systems and ran with them. That said, it’s fairly clear to me that this is a symptom, not a cause. While it’s hard to beat the Bakers’ approach of ‘sure, just don’t literally plagiarize us’ for licensing, Fate was licensed under the OGL and later Creative Commons, which were both used by tons of creators in other contexts. No, the difference in third party support and expansion has to do with the design of the respective games, not their shepherding by their respective creators. And I think I know specifically which design elements made the difference.
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Cultures of Play, Quanta of Play
The assumptions, intentions, and design of tabletop roleplaying games are infamously broad; seeing eye to eye on how to play is as primary a challenge as finding a time on the calendar for four to six people. Back in April of 2021, the blog The Retired Adventurer published a post called Six Cultures of Play which still sees reference as a succinct overview of distinct play traditions which have evolved over the last fifty-ish years of structured tabletop roleplaying. Between solid analysis and the author’s own admonitions not to see bright lines between the cultures where there aren’t any, I see the article as a useful model to start thinking about how people game and what they want.
Of course, the gaming world hasn’t stayed still, and from the publication of the original post to the renaming of Twitter to “X” in 2023, fragmentation was the word of the day. Since then, we’ve seen continuing fragmentation joined with an upswell in interest in fairly specific playstyle differentiation, driven by migration away from Wizards of the Coast products and strong take-up of “D&D alternative” products including not only Pathfinder but Daggerheart, Tales of the Valiant, and Draw Steel. The core ideas in the Cultures of Play post still hold true, but the consistent signpost in my mind is in the introduction, where the author describes a culture of play as equivalent to a ‘network of practice’. A community of practice is a group which forms around something they collectively do (or practice) which they have a passion for and want to do better; a network of practice is also that but doesn’t assume the same consistent strength of relationships, therefore being a more appropriate term for a larger, more nebulous group. As broad as a network of practice can be, I don’t really think it aligns with a ‘culture of play’ anymore.
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Big groups, small games
For the most part, the ideal size for a gaming group is five, four players and a GM. This is driven by group dynamics; researchers wrote in the Harvard Business Review back in 2018 that the ideal group size for meetings is between five and eight, at least if the point of that meeting is to have a productive discussion and get things done. Roleplaying games skew to the lower end of this mostly just due to the fact that in addition to the actual ‘meeting’ of a game, there is also the need to manage that many characters, their contributions, and their stories.
Ideal doesn’t mean only, and an experienced GM can run games anywhere in that 5-8 range without too many problems, at least as long as they’re realistic about how long things will take. More and more, though, games are being written towards a specific group size, usually a smaller one. In some cases it’s obvious, like Fiasco: the number of turns in the game, and therefore the amount of time the game will take, is directly proportional to the number of people playing, and even playing with five people, the maximum number recommended by the rules, the game begins to sprawl and the story begins to sag. In other cases, the restriction comes from a clear place, but the question hangs in the air about how to subvert it. A good example of this is DIE: There are six roles, six dice. That’s how many there were in the comic, therefore that’s how many there are in the game.
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TTRPGs and fandom
The genesis of fandom as we know it starts and ends with communication. Sports fandom began evolving from the 19th century to today as radio, TV, and then the internet all brought access to more and more people. Literary fandom wasn’t too far behind: Jane Austen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle both inspired fan movements with intensity rivaling the most fervent fandoms of today, famously doing things like publicly mourning the death of Sherlock Holmes.
There’s always a spectre behind fandom, though. Sports has seen a sea change from live attendance to broadcast as team owners can charge more and more for tickets and extract more and more money out of their audience. A massive subsection of the fandom factions collectively referred to as ‘nerd culture’ are owned by Disney, engineered to extract money from the existing audiences of Star Wars and Marvel. The strong feelings of identity and association associated with fandom can easily be weaponized, and the history of nerd culture brings along with it a whole other level of making spending choices feel very personal.
So what of role-playing games? The RPG hobby and RPG fandom are often seen as one and the same; traditional RPGs are high-commitment and there isn’t much of a casual following. Beyond that, RPGs, specifically licensed RPGs, are vehicles for other fandoms, taking advantage of the fandom overlaps implied by that phrase ‘nerd culture’. When we look at RPG fandom, though, we do see things falling out in a few different ways: Those who focus on the act of playing RPGs as a whole, those who are fans of their one chosen game, and those who are fans of the chosen game, Dungeons and Dragons. Just like fandoms of all sorts of other hobbies and media, the RPG fandom is driven not only from the enthusiasm and engagement of its members, but also by the companies who capitalize on those feelings of association and belonging in order to make money.
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Hit points: A cyberpunk case study
Are hit points meat? Does the answer to that question even matter? Hit points are an old mechanic, ported into RPGs at the beginning from wargames, where they made the assessment of unit health more granular than ‘alive’ or ‘dead’. D&D took the concept and applied it to player-characters and monsters alike, and from there it became profoundly common. Measuring damage taken and time until expiration is one of those things where the simplest approach is often the most fun, even if it’s hardly the most realistic.
Hit points as a mechanic are not a monolith. Not even D&D still uses the original mechanic where you have a number and when it’s reduced to zero, you’re dead. Death saves, critical wounds, damage thresholds and any other number of modifiers to the hit point schema make the act of bleeding out after being stabbed a lot more complex than it necessarily has to be, but sometimes more fun, too. Of course, a lot of the relationship that a game has to how its characters get shot and die has to do with genre.
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On Specificity
Why is Mothership, well, Mothership? Put another way, why isn’t it Basic Roleplaying, or Call of Cthulhu? The core mechanics are all very similar; basically everything in Mothership that isn’t specifically about starships is adapted from Call of Cthulhu in one way or another. And that little starship aside does point to the answer: The reason Mothership is Mothership, Call of Cthulhu is Call of Cthulhu, and neither of them are BRP has to do with the specificity of their missions. Both Call of Cthulhu and Mothership frame their ideal game experience as horror, which lends itself to specific mechanics in the designers’ eyes. Mothership more specifically is science fiction horror, so the designer adds rules about spaceships and space travel. Specificity isn’t limited to genre, though. Mothership is also intended to be light on mechanics; famously the game has no mechanics for things like stealth which means that the adjudication of things like hiding and following are circumstantial and entirely in the lap of the GM. Whether you agree with this mechanical decision or not, it is deliberate and it is specific.
While specificity of game outcomes is produced by having more and more concrete rules (Mothership’s take on stealth is completely non-specific, while a game with one or more stealth skills and a laundry list of modifiers would be much more specific), specificity of game design is much more interesting, especially as there’s an entire class of games that deliberately avoids it. When I looked at QuestWorlds, I saw a game designed to try and do everything, at the expense of doing anything in a particularly interesting or engaging way. It’s hardly the only generic game, and one could make the same complaint and direct it at Fate, or GURPS, or Savage Worlds.
But hold on. If we go back and look at Mothership again we have, broadly, a fairly non-specific game. Yes, it’s about space horror, and the character options are tuned to space horror. The GMing advice is very good. The layout is very good. The game, though? It’s, outside of the space horror part, stripped down Call of Cthulhu. So where does that Mothership ‘vibe’ come through besides the design ethos? A good part of it is the modules (hardly a controversial opinion), but I think a specific and interesting point is that the modules bring with them hyper-specific mechanics. While GURPS has mechanics meant to be at the level of physics and D&D has mechanics which reinforce genre, Mothership has a good chunk of its mechanics corpus supporting specific stories, designed for and included in the pages of modules like Gradient Descent and Another Bug Hunt. And this is kind of important: While Mothership clearly takes inspiration from the DIY and hack-and-borrow ethos of the OSR, it’s presented a bit differently. The modules, in addition to providing the setting and conflict and everything else for a solid few sessions of adventure, also provide the hacked/modified rules to make that adventure feel different or play different than the base game. It does make me think, though: If you’re hacking the rules (or using the designer’s hacks) for every module, how truly different is that from using a generic game? Put another way, what really makes Mothership different from BRP, really? It’s not rules, after all.
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Are fewer rules actually less complicated?
The debate about rules density in roleplaying games is a bit of a mess, frankly. What should be a relatively simple continuum (more, more detailed mechanics to fewer, higher-level mechanics) is conflated with story-first versus gameplay-first, indie versus traditional, and even in some cases old versus new. Actually pulling together a comparison where you’re actually looking at rules density and nothing else is difficult; controlling for these factors is hard because while they aren’t causal, they are correlated.
When it comes to actually running games, though, I’m going to make full use of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines here. Running light games can be very complicated indeed, for the simple reason that anything the rules aren’t laying out for you, you have to do yourself. Now…is that a simple reason? One of the reasons we have seen rulesets trend lighter over time is that the number of ‘things’ that players consider necessary to track or perform in a game session has gone down as games have become more specific. Furthermore, one of the reasons that more narrative driven games often have lighter rulesets is that the number of elements that a ruleset needs to codify in order to maintain fairness and consistency can often be much lower. But, if we’re looking across games of roughly similar style and intent, then we often see that more rules-dense, ‘crunchy’ games can be more approachable. That is for one broad reason.
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A (snarky) review of every RPG mechanic
When I reviewed QuestWorlds last week, I came away from the game concluding that everything was centered around one basic mechanic: A character must roll under their ability rating while the GM tries to roll under the ‘Resistance’ rating of the challenge at hand. It is the character versus the challenge, and everything is defined in that way. And sitting with that, it kind of made me realize that a lot of TTRPGs define everything or almost everything in terms of making a check, only broadening the mechanical palette in specific circumstances.
Does this matter? Well, it depends. If you’re the sort of person who sees RPGs in terms of what exists and what people are already playing, then it’s natural to see the baseline mechanics of the TTRPG as something that’s been refined since the original release of D&D and is therefore fit for purpose. If you’re thinking about role-playing game design broadly, though, you may note that this sort of quasi-simulation of using probabilities to determine when a character overcomes certain challenges is a very limited sphere of the design space, barely larger than the sphere created by making quasi-simulations of using probabilities to determine when characters kill each other. You know, wargames.
For now, though, I’m going to stay in this design space taken up by the traditional roleplaying game (coming up with something starkly different will likely be the topic of a future editorial). There are many things which RPGs try to do, some they’ve arguably been trying to do for decades. For all of these tasks, do the mechanics help or hinder? And, because this is certainly the primary discourse around this topic, do mechanics make the task better?
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QuestWorlds: Who wants a generic game?
Generic RPGs are designed to accomplish a goal that many say they want. The ability to write anything, make any genre fit together, and theoretically never have to learn another system again all sound great. The reality usually ends up being something different, though. The entire reasoning behind generic RPGs even being possible has forever been couched in very narrow assumptions about what an RPG actually is. Once you expand those assumptions a little bit, a generic game starts to look impossible.
QuestWorlds, originally called Hero Wars (and HeroQuest in between those two), is a game that came out of a post-TSR, pre-Forge era of the early 2000s much like the first edition of Fate. Both of these games have the same essential objective: build out a set of mechanics that can take any character on one side, any challenge on the other, and adjudicate that character standing up to that challenge regardless of the specifics. Add in some balancing rules for character creation and advancement, and you’ve got a game that’s ready for anything. Kind of. Both QuestWorlds and Fate make very similar disclaimers about only working with genres with capable and proactive heroes prevailing over larger-than-life challenges. The disempowerment of horror doesn’t really work, nor do the continuous drags of hunger, thirst, or wound management found in survival games. These generic games, and many generic games, quickly reveal themselves to be “roughly the way we think people play RPGs” games.
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Cannibal Halfling Gaming 