ars ludi

Framing scenes. Conflicts. Story arcs. Main and minor characters (or PCs and NPCs if you prefer). The characters don’t see it but the audience does. Fade to black.

Roleplaying games imitate media. More and more they model themselves after movies, television and (to a far lesser degree) books. The thing of it is, movies, television and books are themselves imitations of reality — sometimes reality as it would be if there were romantic vampires and magical middle schools, sometimes reality that looks just like ours.

Like it or not, when we game, we’re imitating an imitation. We’re twice removed from our source material, which is life.

How many people have you watched kiss in real life? I’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that you — along with everyone else in the world — have seen far, far more people kiss in movies and television than in reality. You probably saw long lines of people kiss on the big or little screen years before you ever put the playground moves on Chris in the third grade (yep, gender neutral name, fill in the blanks as you see fit — no angsting, late bloomers!).

Lacking firsthand experience, we model our behavior after that great secondhand experience, the media.

You learned to kiss from watching movies and television. So did Chris.

Hold off being disturbed about that for a moment, because here’s where it gets weird: you learned to kiss from watching an imitation, a staged re-enactment, but the directors and actors creating the fiction you learned from went through the same thing back in their own youth: they learned from an imitation as well. So it’s an imitation guided by watching an imitation of an imitation of an imitation. Cue the rabbit hole.

Who’s having an original experience, untainted by this media training? Anybody?

How far removed from the original does this spiral of imitation get?

What does this have to do with gaming? I could launch into the whole roleplaying games => video games => roleplaying games feedback loop and drag poor D&D 4E into the mix, but I won’t, for now. That’s later.

I will say this: aggressive scene framing, building conflicts, and razor-focused story arcs all make really fun games. When it’s done right, it feels tight… but that’s because it’s successfully imitating the media we know and love. It’s like we just made a movie, which is pretty awesome, because we like movies. But to the exact same degree that it’s an awesome movie, it doesn’t model real life. Not really. In real life we don’t cut when a scene becomes disinteresting, we just keep moseying along.

Here’s a simple maxim:

Competitive games need clearer rules than cooperative games.

The reasons should be pretty obvious: in a competitive game, the participants are motivated to interpret rules differently, because each person wants to interpret the rules in their own favor. In a cooperative game, the participants are motivated to interpret the rules the same way because they share the same goal.

If the rules aren’t clear in a cooperative game, you can get along on good intentions, but a competitive game will (and should) grind to a halt. A competitive game with fuzzy rules doesn’t have a long life ahead of it. Look at successful games like chess or Monopoly: there’s nothing to debate.

Many competitive sports have referees, but you almost never see the ref interpret the rules. They don’t stop the game to discuss whether the rule about the ball needing to land inside the line makes sense. Their job is to judge reality. They watch and see if the ball was in, whether the runner touched the base before the catcher touched them. Once that physical fact is decided, the rules are crystal clear on what it means. You might not agree that the pitch was in the strike zone, but we all know what a strike means and does.

It makes sense that computers are excellent platforms for competitive games: no need to interpret rules at all. The computer enforces the rules for you. It’s the referee and the rule book, all in one.

This should also tell you something you already knew about D&D. Yep, rambling, confusing, inexact, fuzzy, wonderful, mysterious, “why can’t elfin chain mail be magical?” old school D&D was never competitive, or else it would never have been as enormously successful as it was. Sure, somewhere in our teen years we passed through the crucible of making it competitive, pitting players vs GM, but hey, we were kids with kid-powered egos.

We also learned (the hard way) that the players can try to compete with the GM without definite catastrophe, but if the GM decides to compete with the players and puts any effort into it, everyone loses.

Remember that game five months ago, when you met that guy who got you that forged visa? Y’know, during that adventure when your ship was smuggling medical supplies past the blockade? Shifty little guy? Wore a monocle?

He wasn’t an important character, and he wasn’t the interesting part of the game, so maybe you remember and maybe you don’t. You’re more likely to remember if you were playing the character that talked to him, and you’re much more likely to remember if you were the player who said “hey, instead of blasting our way through, let’s find someone who can sell us a forged visa!”

Games only live in your memory, and memory has a nice way of tidying things up and conserving space. You remember the good (and the really, really bad). You remember the exciting parts but the boring parts fade away (except for the really, really boring parts, which may also become legendary). You remember the clever things someone said, the dramatic moments, and probably the broad arc of what happened.

Maybe everyone remembers the overall gist of the game, and then on top of that each individual also remembers the parts that were really interesting to them. I remember escaping the yeti in that Tibetan temple, because my adventurer guy was super-cool in that sequence, but a year later nobody else remembers that part because it just wasn’t that interesting (“Yeti? Uh, I think I remember something about yeti…”).

All of that is fine and natural — which is good because it’s also inevitable.

Sure we try to fight it. We write lavish game summaries to try to capture the moment in amber (And make other players jealous. And to impress teh internets.) but that becomes a thing all its own, a particular person’s perspective on the events. Even the most factual “actual play” isn’t actual play, it’s one point of view of what happened at the table, selectively edited. A creative interpretation. A biased report. It’s already one step removed from the game.

But when you’re playing and you don’t remember that guy with the visa from five months ago, well heck, it’s not the end of the world. Because so long as someone at the table does remember what happened they can remind everyone else (and let’s face it, if _no one_ remembered it wouldn’t come up in the first place — if everyone forgets it deserves to be forgotten). It can be the GM, another player, whatever. After a short refresher for the collective memory, everyone is ready to go. The necessary ingredients from the past have been encapsulated and reinjected into the present. The players can decide what to do and the game moves on.

Games are enriched by their history, but if they forget the past that’s okay, because they’re concretely in the here and now. What is your character like now? What is the situation now? What do you do now?

Not unlike the real world.

Why am I dwelling on something that is a) pretty obvious and b) pretty much inevitable anyway? Because microscope is making me.

In microscope, everything that has ever happened in the game is accessible, now. You can jump to any point in the history and start playing.

It’s all on top. It’s all fair game. There is no comfortable “oh well that happened a while back and it isn’t pertinent right now, so I don’t have to think about it.” The past is never closed.

While this is super cool (and super fun), it radically changes how you have to store game info. Instead of a nice serial stack, where the old stuff is way at the bottom somewhere and you only have to think about what just happened, a microscope game is a big flat random access platter. It’s a DVD, not a cassette tape. You can jump to anywhere.

Once you do decide where in the history you’re looking, you focus there and it does become “now” for all intents and purposes of play and excitement. When you are playing out the scene where the civilian cargo ship suicide-rams the alien dreadnought during the last attack on Earth, you are playing in the moment, live or die. But then a minute later, when the scene is done, you step back ten thousand feet, look down on all creation, and decide where to look next. Zooming in and out and then in again. Like, um, a microscope.

Building a structure for that kind of game — even thinking about it at the table — is a whole different ball game. The normal rules don’t apply, so I’m trying to figure out new ones.

(for the curious, I’m generally talking about microscope development over in the Lame Mage blog, but when it has interesting implications or broader game theory I’m putting it over here)

Years and years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I did a psychological study that looked at the relationship between gamers and the characters they played.

I had two phases of questionnaires, one asking a lot of standard personality index questions and the second asking what kind of character the person played, how their character would handle different in-game situations and so on.

My theory was that if you compared self-acceptance (how much a person liked who they were) versus character similarity (how similar the character they choose to play was to their personality in real life) you would find an arc.

On one end, the people who didn’t like themselves very much (low self-acceptance) would choose to play characters that weren’t like them (low character similarity), because they would want to escape or (more productively) practice a different personality to arm themselves for switching in real life. I want to be a bolder person, so I practice being bold in the game.

In the middle we have people who were moderately happy about themselves (medium self-acceptance), who I predicted would play characters that were a lot like themselves (high character similarity). For them roleplaying was really just more practice being themselves. They weren’t comfortable enough to expand their horizons with radically different roles, nor were they unhappy enough to want escape from their personality.

On the other end, people who were very happy with themselves (high self-acceptance) would play characters that were different (low character similarity). Why? Because they could experiment with different roles without the risks and sanctions of being (for example) an evil dictator in the real world. They were comfortable enough with their current personality to try new things and learn from those experiments.

Fear my ancient bitmapped graphic!

After all the data was compiled and the numbers crunched, I found… well, not a lot. I didn’t have a ton of subjects (less than 50), so while there were hints of the curve I expected the results were not, as they say, statistically significant.*

The real question is: years later, do I still think this theory makes sense?

Probably. I haven’t thought about character vs player this way in a while, but it still seems to shed light on what I see in games now. Agree? Disagree? That’s what the comments section is for.

Funny story: shortly after I finished, I sent a copy of my research to the editor of Dragon Magazine. I never got a reply, but shortly thereafter came an editorial (Dragon #164, “What you are in the dark”) that was pretty much a “nothing to see here” summary, without ever mentioning the existence of my research. Go figure.

* Complete tangent: I want to see a game that uses statistical significance as a mechanic:

“I hit the ogre!”
“Yeah, but not by enough to be statistically significant. We can’t say confidently that your swing was the result of your warrior’s skill and not just chance. This fight isn’t a big enough sample size.”
“So is the ogre dead?”
“Maybe, or it might just be an artifact of the data.”

I’ve been playing a lot more indie games lately, which is great, but I’m finding they have one big problem: boredom.

Not boredom during the game — the games are fun. But lots of indie games follow a model where the GM (if there even is a GM) doesn’t prepare anything ahead of time. Everything is created at the table, during the game, usually with all participants acting as more equal contributors in the creation of the game world.

Neato, and terribly convenient too, since it means you can just sit down and play whenever you can get folks together.* If you have three people and two hours you can blast off and explore the mysteries of space without ever having the GM say “well, I really don’t have anything prepared…”

But there’s the rub. Ask any serious GM: preparing game material is half the fun. Sometimes more than half the fun. It’s a creative process all in itself, even if the game never gets played. Lots of GMs would sit around and make worlds all day, even if they didn’t have a group lined up. Because let’s face it, if you don’t like prepping games then traditional GMing is not going to be your cup of tea — if it’s not fun, it’s a huge burden.

I admit it: I miss prepping games and building worlds. Sure it’s frustrating when your golden idea is smashed to bits by contact with the players, but that goes with the territory. But I’m also consistently surprised by how awesome the ideas are that are born at the table, in the moment, as a reaction to the hodge-podge of ideas everyone else is throwing in. It’s one thing to be able to shape a nice clean idea in a vacuum, but it’s a far greater mental challenge to come up with ideas on the fly that genuinely click with everything else other players are tossing in. I would never have come up with the some of the ideas that emerged organically in the chaotic consensus of play.

If you look closely at that last paragraph you’ll discover something interesting: what I’m describing sounds an awful lot like, y’know, gaming. That thing where you all sit down at the table and react to each other and see what happens. No matter how much the GM has prepared, when the player running Carlos the Dwarf says something rude to the Duke’s daughter, what happens next is just improv. Everyone at the table is reacting and coming up with something on the fly. That’s gaming.

The no-prep game just shifts the bar, taking what was once the GM’s prep and making it part of everyone’s play. Making it just like the rest of the game.

There’s a serious danger in becoming all grown up and brainy, getting overly-analytical about games and what you want from games, thinking too hard about what’s right and wrong in gaming. Chasing perfection.

It’s the kind of over-analysis that leads to GMs strangling the life out of the game by preparing too much, by thinking they have to control the game for it to succeed and (gasp) thinking they’re storytellers and their players are the audience. It leads to GMs that fear the unexpected, which is like a fish fearing water. The unexpected is the game, dummy! It’s why you’re playing with other people and not writing a book.

It also makes players who doubt their own instincts, who hesitate and analyze when they should just jump in with both feet and (you guessed it) play.

Do you remember what is was like when you gamed when you were a kid? Did you think about that stuff? Do you remembering GMing those games where you were totally making stuff up on the fly and it went great? Do you remember doing totally crazy stuff as a player like you were a young revolutionary Dave Arneson?

All of which is to say: try trusting your instincts again. Don’t get so hung up on doing it right. Let go and see what happens. If you goof.. big deal. It’s a game, remember?

It is entirely possible that there are so many indie game designers because they have nothing else to do: they would be preparing adventures like traditional GMs, but since they can’t, that between-game time and energy has to go somewhere. That’s pretty much what I’m doing so I can hardly criticize.

But don’t let the risk of being sucked into game design scare you away from trying no-prep games. There are lots, but I’ll throw out In A Wicked Age, Shock, Geiger Counter, and InSpectres — I’m specifically picking games where the premise is made at the table, not games that include a premise, module-style.

Will playing no-prep games help you get back to trusting your instincts? Will it make you a better more interactive gamer, a more fluid GM? It’s a trick question. What you should be asking is will it be fun.

* kind of like Promised Land, but in a way that actually works…

Games don’t always work. A game might be too ambitious to really be feasible, or it might just be too much for the people involved. In the middle is the range of games that work, the successful game, the fun zone.

There are two ways you can widen the fun:

1) you can push the boundaries of gaming, going into dangerous territory and making new and exciting game techniques possible

2) you can lower the barrier to gaming, making it easier for people to play and have fun

These are really measures of what the players at the table at the time can handle (GM included). The successful gaming zone is different for every group, perhaps different for every single person at the table. If you invent a bold new roleplaying technique some people will find it fun and exciting, others will cringe in its cruel embrace. And if you lower barriers to make it easier to play, some people will leap for joy but others won’t even need that help (at least not most of the time — some days even the best gamers need a booster seat).

…

Despite the experimental stuff you may have read about in these very pages (dirty tricks like NormalVision or postcognition), I find a lot of my activity revolves around the second case, lowering the barriers. I write and publish adventures to (hopefully) make it as easy as humanly possible for a GM to mount the hot seat and run a game that lands squarely in the fun zone.

When I run games, I do all those clever things I talk about here to embrace players and draw out their best game. Of course I’m not made of pixie dust. There are days I’m a cranky, fed up, and ready to grind the players into chum if they won’t stop being so goddamned stupid. But that’s not what I’m shooting for. It’s not what I’ll call the _ideal_ case.

My ideal case is not to impress them with my GM craft, but to get them to play so well that afterwards they walk around thinking how awesome they were. That’s victory, me bucko.

…

This division is a pretty fundamental one, philosophically speaking. Forging ahead or lowering the bar, experimenting or inviting, etc. Whichever your inclination (if you have an inclination), recognize that both are good for gaming as a whole. Both.

The natural question is: are they mutually exclusive? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that yes, in a particular moment in time, something that promotes one is unlikely to simultaneously promote the other. Different facets of the game may do either, but a technique that does both, that pushes gaming into new territory _and_ makes it easier to play… well that’s the holy grail isn’t it?

For many, many years I ran games as a way of expressing the worlds I had built.

I ran different campaigns, with different groups of people, all in different places or different times, but the vast majority were all on the same world and in my mind all connected. Not connected in plot, just connected because they were part of the same setting.

Even if I wasn’t running games, the world existed in my mind. I was constantly refining and revising it, though it would be more accurate to say I was exploring it, because as any serious world-builder will tell you it often feels more like you are discovering rather than creating. Just a trick of the brain? Probably.

But now I’ve noticed that I do the opposite. Now I run games, and if I need worlds to provide a context for those games I whip them up.

Game => world, not world => game.

As an experienced world-builder I can build a setting that feels detailed and fleshed out in a very short time so to a certain degree I can make the difference invisible to the players, but the root motivation is still entirely different.

For extra credit extend the concept: it’s not just the GM making the world and running the game, it’s also players and their characters. Is your character a tool to play the game, or is the game your vehicle to play the character you envision?

Naturally you’re asking: which one is the right way? That’s the wrong question. The right question is: what drives each? They may look the same on the surface, so much so that some people in the same gaming group may be doing one and some the other and never realize it, but I think they are intrinsically different activities. Understanding that difference can tell us a lot about why we game.

Which one are you doing?

When I’m struggling to decide whether a new game system is worth trying out, there are lots of different things that can influence my decision. But when in doubt, I find I fall back on the character sheet test:

1) Open the book
2) Flip through it until you find a character write-up
3) Read

If your eyes start to bleed, you feel a faint nausea or dizziness, or you just get distracted and start thinking about more interesting things like getting flu shots or doing your laundry, then the game has failed the character sheet test. It is not the game for you.

On the other hand if the character sheet seems vaguely interesting, comprehensible, or if it arouses excitement or even a faint sense of curiosity, then the system is probably one that’s worth your time to try.

Don’t think about it too hard. Just ask yourself whether you like the way the character stat blocks look. Your brain will take care of the rest, consciously or not.

There is nothing scientific about this test, nor should there be, because the kind of game I like may be quite different from the kind of game you like. Do you love long lists of skills, three sub-flavors of dexterity, numbers in the triple digits? Great, than that’s the game that will speak to you. Prefer minimalist stats, prose stats, characteristics described as animals and colors? Rock on.

A roleplaying game really has just two parts: the way characters are defined and the mechanic for resolving actions.

The mechanic for resolving actions is usually something like “roll a die and add X” or “roll a handful of dice and count successes” or “roll a pile of dice and group them into a pyramid of matching primes.” Most games have one unified core mechanic, unlike the good old days when there were separate systems for every single thing you did (roll percentile dice to bend bars/lift gates!).

The method for defining characters is something like “three physical attributes and three mental attributes, each with a number between 3 and 18, and a profession ranked in class levels” or “a zodiac sign, one dominant elements, two minor elements, a favorite color and a patron god.” Class-based, skill-based, point-buy, prose, whatever.

When you do the character sheet test, you are getting a glimpse at the character definition system. Even if you don’t understand all the terms, you are getting an idea of what the system thinks is important or unimportant and how much detail it thinks it needs to define a person.

What’s that you say? You think examining the core resolution mechanic is a much better test of whether or not you’ll like a game? You really want to know if you’re going to roll a bunch of dice or just one + X?

The first critical step in gaming is relating to your character, your duly-elected representative and looking glass into the fictional world. If the character definition system doesn’t sit well with you, if it doesn’t click with your mindset, you’re going to have a harder time getting into your character. It can be even worse if you’re the GM, because even though the characters aren’t your looking glass, you have to write up and handle a ton of them.

The two parts are actually surprisingly independent of each other. Pick your favorite core mechanic and you can probably graft it on to your favorite character definition system without much fuss. It sounds crazy, but try it and see. Play your next D&D game using dice pools or play Dogs in the Vineyard with a d20. It’ll be a different game (of course) but it works.