Category 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

Articles, Level One Wonk

On Specificity

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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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Articles, Level One Wonk

Are fewer rules actually less complicated?

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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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Articles, Level One Wonk

A (snarky) review of every RPG mechanic

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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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Articles, Level One Wonk

QuestWorlds: Who wants a generic game?

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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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Articles, Level One Wonk

Confessions of a “realistic” GM

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I feel there is a certain arc that you see among tabletop gamers, especially those who get their start with D&D. D&D is, like anyone’s first RPG, the gateway to a new world, a new mode of expression and imagination. While lots of people enjoy games, some end up enraptured, vibrating at the thought of what they can do and create. So they become a DM and start writing, start doing as much as they can with the game. And they start hitting walls. Some of the walls are from the game; the sort of ‘game logic’ of D&D only tells a limited palette of stories no matter how much the marketing says otherwise. So they try another game. And another game. In most cases, game logic still prevails. Some of the walls, though, are from the other players. Even if the DM wanted to try another game, the players wouldn’t necessarily go along with it. And from the perspective of the person who was most excited by the game, it certainly looks like the other players aren’t taking it seriously enough. The stakes that our aspiring writer sees in their worlds, the other players…don’t. So how do they fix this? How do they make everything feel serious to everyone at the table? How do they make the players feel the way they feel?

This story is a familiar one, and I know that because it’s my story. I was the one who was vibrating out of my chair with excitement at the idea of creating worlds in D&D, and my disenchantment with how D&D actualized those stories led me to Cyberpunk. And when it seemed like the intrigue of the stories wasn’t resonating with my players, I tried to make the game more serious, more internally consistent, more “realistic”. And years later, when I found a literal generation of heartbreakers and retroclones dedicated to making D&D more lethal, making wizards less powerful, and generally making the game more difficult, I finally realized two things. One, there is a nearly universal desire for grounding and meaning among those who tell stories, whether they do so with TTRPGs or something else. And two, for those of us working in the TTRPG medium, making the game ‘grittier’ is usually the answer to a different question than the one actually being asked.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

The funnel and beyond: Pre-play character creation

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In RPGs, character creation methods abound. You can create characters mechanically with point and option spends, build them alongside a backstory with a lifepath, or just roll some dice and see what comes out the other end. When it comes to actually aligning the characters with the game you’re about to play, so much so that you need to bring the GM along for the ride, I think I’ve found one of the best options. Now, one reason you’ve likely never done this before is that it’s time-intensive and it can be a lot of extra work for the GM if not all of the players. Another reason, though, is that to really play through character creation, you need mechanics to do so. Precious few games have these mechanics, but after giving one such system a spin I’m pretty comfortable saying it should be more of a thing for campaign play.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Do games need a reason to exist?

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Last week I puzzled over my “review” of Lovecraftesque. The game is certainly well done, and it is an improvement over earlier games like Fiasco in terms of how it is structured and how it uses board game elements like a game board and cards and tokens. It’s also a Mythos game that uses themes and structure from Lovecraft’s work instead of literal elements of the Mythos, and so I was fairly critical in how it didn’t go deeper to some of the underlying themes below the surface-level stories of horrors from beyond comprehension. But the question in the back of my head while I was writing was “So what? The designers don’t owe me a deeper game.” This is true. And I’ve been thinking about it.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Lovecraftesque: Shadows Over Story Games

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As I’ve been consuming more cosmic horror, I find that my relationship with games set in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos mirrors my relationship with licensed games. I think there is so much room for them to be great, and then I’m inevitably disappointed nearly every time I read one. In the case of licensed games, this is often because they’re pretty bad; the relationship between licensed games and money is inextricable, and the best licensed games borne out of love and fandom are often from a time in the hobby’s history that’s long gone. In the case of H.P. Lovecraft, it’s a bit more complicated. Lovecraft is a divisive figure, both having essentially invented cosmic horror and changed science fiction forever while also being a known racist, even beyond the conventions of his time. The biggest problem I have with the Cthulhu Mythos in pop culture is twofold: First, the xenophobic roots of Lovecraft’s works are rarely examined or critiqued in games, an omission made even more galling by designers’ desires to hew to a 1920s setting for their games without asking more serious questions about it. Second, the continued sanitization of Lovecraft creations in pop culture (the ‘Cthulhu plushie’ phenomenon) makes it that much more difficult to have conversations about xenophobia, cosmicism, and even New England folklore and dissect how these factors all influenced Lovecraft and his work.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

What actually happens when your group switches games?

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It’s known that table dynamics affect play as much as (and some argue more than) what game you’re sitting down to play. And although both game and player are important, player aims often get talked about less or even disparaged through ‘taxonomies’ which typically valorize the playstyle of the author instead of providing objective analysis. Games are simply easier to discuss and critique; even movements which seemingly downplay the primacy of mechanics end up spending a lot of time discussing written material in the form of modules and settings which rarely if ever lead to the best gaming experience (because of, once again, player dynamics).

I started puzzling over this a few weeks ago, and wanted to return to the discussion at hand because I think it’s an important part of figuring out what you actually want to play. Needless to say, the ‘what’ in this sentence must necessarily be broader than what book you aim to pick up and puzzle through, but that’s always been the case: Even within a single game, editions, supplements, and pre-written material would always enter consideration before a single person sat down at the table. And, of course, the play outcome is still wholly dependent on the group even after the material choices are made.

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Gaming groups and the social ‘system’

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Moreau Vazh wrote an excellent post on their blog Taskerland, entitled “System Matters, Explicit Mechanics Less So”. Framing the debate on rules density historically, the post points out that gaming groups end up behaving in patterns similarly seen in many groups of people who have come together to do something creative. Of course, given that the norms of roleplaying are a great deal younger than, say, the social conventions of playing music in a group (an activity which is highly delineated and has many, many titles associated with said groups), there’s still a lot of push and pull in terms of figuring out how everyone actually wants to roleplay. Many of the norms we do have were developed either from prior art (often wargames) or came up simply because they were written into D&D back in 1974 (or perhaps a few years later, depending on the actual rule). Either way, these norms are still evolving, and as Vazh correctly points out, the hobby spends way more time agonizing over mechanics than attempting to understand the social dynamics which lead to game preferences and styles of play. And this leads to the core thesis of the Taskerland post, that ‘system’ is so wrapped up in the social norms and conflict resolution approaches of a group that the way a group plays games often transcends mechanics.

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