On TTRPG Supremacy

With thanks to the excellent Primeval Patterns

This post from

RuleOfThule

got me thinking about a few different topics, at greater length than seems justified to share in a comment. It’s very well written, absolutely worth a read. This post is explicitly a response to his thoughts, so if you don’t read it this won’t make much sense.

Consider:

[I]f we lived in a lawless land, the bank has no chance of successfully protecting currency regardless of their (pragmatic) efforts. We are relying on the fact that outlaws are few to contextualize our bank heist as a (meaningfully) criminal act. This is a rule about the array of perspectives that actors collectively hold in the gameworld, akin to politics or world-lore or setting.

Emphasis mine. We are prone to separate matters of mechanics and rules from those of “fluff” and setting, but in a proper game that truly tells of some other world, they are ultimately indivisible, two sides of the same coin. ACKS’ market and hireling availability tables are one of the games more unique mechanics, and yet they’re entirely setting dependent, essentially a construct of the setting itself. To call them “cultural” is only slight exaggeration. And yet, they’re a core set of rules that shapes gameplay across all levels and tiers of play, seeding whole adventures by imposing elegantly simple constraints. Likewise, a high level priestess of Mityara can pardon convicted criminals. Is that cultural, or a class power? In a game where abstract hijinks can land a thief in prison, it is both.

Traveller does similar things in random planet generation, in the Imperial approach to psionics, and in equipment availability by TL, among others. Playing in a setting where psionics are legal or even admirable would be a dramatic shift, as would a setting with almost nothing available over TL8.

The implication of this is profound: worldbuilding is itself an act of game design. Some settings are better or worse for certain types of gameplay; some hypothetical setting might be imagined that is a poor choice for gameplay in general.¹ It is hardly novel to imagine that games using an otherwise identical ruleset, but set each in either Eberron or Birthright, would hardly turn out the same or have similar gameplay. And the same at the discrete level of an individual encounter or dungeon — different layouts and types of opposition will naturally lead to different gameplay, and it’s well established that there are better and worse ways to do this.

So why does the illusory divide between fluff and crunch persist? I can only suggest that it is because of the decline of simulationism itself, yielding systems that instead advance dissociated character abilities (a failing of both strongly narrativist and strongly gamist systems). It is good then to see such champions as have emerged to bear up this banner, to remind us that character powers have setting consequences and settings have character consequences. ACKS II addresses this point explicitly, with an extensive discussion of every step in the process of building a setting to enable the Adventurer-Conqueror-King progression. Everything I’ve seen of BMD indicates it does the same, providing a general setting framework and then procedures to build out a sector in detail. Every game should do this.²

A second point then, on which I would suggest a nuanced extension:

If we turn to the Diplomacy and Negotiations section of the game rules and it says “The referee decides the NPC reactions to diplomatic offers,” then we have problems. This is not a system even though someone might call it one. It does not offer a consistent, structured way to answer these questions because the answers will change dramatically from person to person. This will not provide the conceptual anchors necessary to support in-world reasoning.

Consider as a contrasting example Free Kriegspiel, a Prussian wargame that is the earliest direct antecedent to modern RPGs that I’m aware of. Action resolution is decided by the referee, himself expected to be an experienced military officer. And it’s a highly diegetic, highly simulationist game despite lacking the rigorous framework similarly missing above — it has to be, considering it was played as a military training exercise rather than a hobby.

And it’s that last point that makes it work. The third sentence above identifies the real problem that can emerge: “It does not offer a consistent, structured way to answer these questions because the answers will change dramatically from person to person.” From that, we can derive that the things for which we don’t need rigorous rules, namely, those things that the Judge is expected to have enough experience with to rule rigorously on. Explicit rules for combat are virtually mandatory, given that the vast majority of DMs have never been in a firefight or cloven their foes’ shields in twain. Defined rules for diplomacy may or may not be needed, depending on the parameters (characters of superhuman persuasiveness demand rules; interactions like people engage in every day may not).³ Rules for not falling through stable floors or passing through walls generally don’t need to be enumerated, because every Judge is familiar with such things, though that is not at all to say that because they’re unwritten they do not exist.

As an interesting corollary to the above, some games may require certain expertise to run effectively, and more obviously, that in adjusting and expanding their game, different Judges should lean into their own experiences.

And then we come to this interesting diagram, most notable to me for the differences in how it’s organized from how I’d be likely to have done it. The clusters that present themselves to me perhaps fit as the planes stacked along the z-axis of the above, with layers for Character, Ship, and Circumstance.

Character includes timing ability, reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and hardiness/resisting death. Ship includes engine, thrusters, weapons, and hull/shields. Circumstance includes environment, navigation (which also is driven by ship computers), targeting (again, overlapping with ship computers), and sabotage. Where his framework is procedural, mine is ontological, and framed in that light perhaps the action-oriented process-driven approach above can be seen as a preferable starting point. To avoid the problems of “Model Everything,” starting with necessary processes and then enumerating and sorting the factors that contribute to them ensures that everything focuses towards the same conclusion.

I think a probable caveat here is that of a system that doesn’t have a single unifying thread. A racing game naturally should build towards the race itself. ACKS should naturally focus on dungeoncrawling, and then phase-shift into wilderness play, campaigning, and domains (with a single primary focus at any given time, but a transition in the overall game that shifts that focus at different times). Something like Traveller can probably be more explained as a game that has multiple gravity wells that interrelate, such that no individual Traveller game will necessarily focus on any of them, but rather it might center on one, or flit between them, etc. These phase-shifting and multi-phase designs are certainly more difficult to build, and more advanced extrapolations of the concept, but I’m sure they’d be familiar concepts to the author — his own BMD displays elements of phase-shifting, as it progresses from small strike teams to sector-wide rebellion.

That sort of dynamic development of gameplay seems underutilized in the game design sphere, particularly in contrast to the growing trend of games where 20th level is much the same as 1st level, only more complicated and slowed down by extended attrition. It’s one of my favorite experiences as a player to see the game evolve around me and have to adapt and roll with it; it is likewise one of the great archetypal stories we tell, that of a character who excels somewhere moving out of their specialty and coming to understand and master a broader sphere. Let us hope to see more of it. Primeval Patterns, indeed.

1. Or perhaps not-so-hypothetical, given the existence of the Forgotten Realms.

2. Even those that use an existing setting (e.g. the various Middle Earth games) don’t offer a fully fleshed out world that can be run without making new content, so I think this stands.

3. Though as a general guideline, they seem a good inclusion given the average DM’s status as a social adept.