New Simulationism

A manifesto.

1. The fictional world is supreme.

In everything you do, ensure that the fictional world is first. If, at any point, any aspect of the game begins to clash with the veracity and truth of the fictional world, change it.

In every ruling, every rule, every encounter, every moment—the fictional world reigns. It cannot be overcome.

2. Restrict the non-diegetic means by which the world can be changed.

Characters and systems can, obviously, affect the fictional world. As they move through and act upon the world, the world changes to reflect those actions. These changes can occur as a result of both the players’ characters and the GM’s. Likewise, diegetic systems of the fictional world—law, magic, weather, economics, and so on—can change the world, too. Let these run wild! Embrace the unexpected, the unpredicted, the unknown. Allow your world to shine in its transience!

Outside of diegetic in-character actions, players cannot change the world. The world is sacred: it is apart and cannot be altered except by those forces from within the fictional world. At no point should the world change simply because the rules dictate it so.

3. The GM is a referee, not an author—they too are subservient to the fictional world.

The GM is a player. Accordingly, they are restricted in their non-diegetic ability to change the world, just like every other player.

If the GM is also author, designer, and creator of the fictional world, they must adhere to the fictional world created before play begins. Once at the table, the world cannot be changed except by purely diegetic means.

When you as GM are struck with the urge to alter the fictional world outside of your diegetic methods, resist the temptation! As you change the fictional world, you deny the other players at the table their chance to play and have genuine impact on the world. Grant them the trust and dignity to make their own decisions.

4. Rules, systems, and mechanisms are abstractions of the fictional world, not structures or orders for players.

All rules are abstractions of a larger, more complex fictional reality. They exist to ease complicated processes into something that can be more easily played with—and nothing more.

Rules are not directions for play. They are not orders. They are not codifications of some external system, such as a narrative arc or erstwhile genre trope. All story is post-hoc.

When the dragon reaches 0 HP and dies, it does not die because it reached 0 HP: it dies because it has suffered so much damage it cannot endure further. Your game’s abstractions are representative, not authoritative.

5. All abstractions must justify their existence against unabstracted play. Many abstractions are justified.

The fictional world is vast and complex. Each abstraction reduces some part of that vastness to something manageable. At each such turn, ask yourself: “Is this abstraction better for the game than simple play?”

In many cases, the answer is yes. Each game has a different focus, and the rules should be crafted to better those foci. The world is huge: don’t be afraid to simplify parts that matter less.

If the focus of your game is, say, exploring a new planet, you may find it helpful to abstract government funding from the home planet. It is a relevant part of the fictional world, but is extremely complicated, and—critically—most of those complexities are irrelevant to the explorers on the ground. What matters is the input (what the explorers need to do to get funding) and the output (how much funding they get). The precise details of each wheel of government funding are irrelevant: abstract them.

In a game where the focus is exploration, however, exploration should remain unabstract.

6. If your abstractions do not match your fictional world, de-abstract until they do.

If at any point the abstractions in your game—the rules—do not match the reality of the fictional world, change them. The fictional world is supreme: abstractions can always be de-abstracted, but the fictional world cannot be changed except from inside the fictional world.

Friction between your world and abstractions is normal and expected over the course of any game. No abstraction is more precious or important than the fictional world—change them at your own whim.

7. If you want to change your game, change your world before your abstractions.

Because the fictional world is supreme, it is the single most important aspect of your game. When you change the world, you change the game.

If you decide as a table of players to change your game, step away from play and change the world together. Decide what matters and what doesn’t to your play, and change the world based on those desires.

The abstractions are all secondary. Inevitably, as your world changes, you will find your abstractions do not match the fictional world. When this occurs, de-abstract until they do match. Then, as you play, re-abstract those parts of the game that are justified in doing so. Don’t get caught up in the rules.

At no point should the fictional world change as a result of some previous abstraction, some holdover rule that demands its presence be felt. Fear neither the rulebook nor the self-crowned game designer.

8. Play is the focus of the game. Play is not abstracted.

Abstractions are, by their very nature, mechanistic. Non-playful. Play in RPGs occurs at the fringes and margins of the abstractions: they are relevant and impactful, but not where the primary act of play occurs.

Your game should focus on play, not mechanisms.

9. The fictional world cannot be perfectly simulated. This does not mean you should not try.

The fictional world is infinitely, fractally complex. It is impossible to truly simulate: no person nor text can imagine the full thing. We are limited in our understanding by myriad factors, unaware of even our own unawareness. We remain wholly ignorant in the face of the vastness of knowledge that comprises the fictional world. It is impossible to truly simulate.

You should try anyway.

Strive forth boldly towards the platonic ideal of total simulation! Reach for the wonder of a wholly secondary world! Approach those distant spheres!

10. Players come before the fictional world.

In all senses, the people you play with are more important than the game. Your play community is the foundation of play. Nothing matters more.

Notes

Brooklyn, New York.

Are RPGs Games, Really?

Defining Games and Play

In their landmark 2004 game design textbook, Rules of Play, Salen & Zimmerman devote a chapter to definitions of games.

They run through eight definitions of games and play from various scholars—Huizinga, Caillois, Abt, Avedon & Sutton-Smith, Suits, Crawford, Costikyan, Parlett—and compare them in a single charming chart:

Table of game definitions from Rules of Play

(Salen & Zimmerman 79)

There are, obviously, many other definitions of games, but I think this chart does a pretty good job covering the basics.

That said, it is worth noting that Salen & Zimmerman do conflate play and games here; while they discuss those boundaries earlier in the chapter (Salen & Zimmerman 72–73), both Huizinga and Caillois primarily discuss play, rather than games. Granted, Caillois writes in French, where jouer, “to play,” is simply the verb form of jeu, “games.” But most translations of Man, Play, and Games—including Barash’s, the one most people read—do decide to translate it as play. Huizinga, however, specifically calls attention to the games/play distinction at the very beginning of Homo Ludens (Huizinga 3), and as his own translator (for certain editions—it’s a complicated history), is very intentionally choosing to use “play” over “game.” The others all mention both games and play, but the definitions they offer primarily center on game, rather than play.

By conflating their definitions of play and games together in the chart, Salen & Zimmerman ignore some of the nuance: there are subtleties between a playful act outside the context of a game—say, rolling down a hill, or making puns, or flirting—and more formalized games. Those distinctions matter for us, as we’ll see.

Because I’m a noted fan, I’ll also include De Koven’s descriptions (not, interestingly, definitions) of game and play from The Well-Played Game. On games:

For me, the oncept of games embraces those activities we know mostly clearly to be games—football, cat’s cradle, gin rummy, peek-a-boo. These are clearly games…. I consider a game to be something that provides us with a common goal, the achievement of which has no bearing on anything that is outside the game. (De Koven xxiii)

And on play: “Play is the enactment of anything that is not real. Play is intended to be without consequence…. When we are playing, we are only playing. We do not mean anything else by it” (De Koven xxiv).

And finally, the now-common definition that Salen & Zimmerman themselves offer: “A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Salen & Zimmerman 80).

Defining RPGs

In Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach, at the conclusion of Chapter 2, “Definitions of ‘Role-Playing Games,’” Zagal & Deterding offer this accurate-if-unhelpful summary:

Many definitions of “role-play” and “role-playing games” have been suggested, but there is no rboad consensus. People disagree because they often have an unclear idea of what kind of phenomena they are talking about, and therefore, what kind of definition is appropriate…. Hence, if we ask for a definition of “role-playing games”, we can only refere to either how particular groups at particular points in tiem empirically use the word and organize actions and the material world around it or how we, as a scientific observer, choose to use the word to foreground and understand a particular perspective… (Zagal & Deterding 47)

Worth noting that Zagal & Deterding here refer to RPGs a whole, including TTRPGs, larps, CRPGs, MMOs, and other myriad forms of roleplaying. The book does go into more definitions of TTRPGs in Chapter 4, but that chapter’s authors—including our good friend William J. White—don’t manage to defeat the challenge that Zagal & Deterding describe.

The RPGs I discuss are the ones I play most often, which you’re probably familiar with. Players take on the role of characters in a shared fictional world, and narrate their actions within that world. One player, the GM, doesn’t have a single character they play, but instead plays “everything else:” NPCs, monsters, factions, the environment, and so on. Sometimes, the players or GM give up control over some aspect of the fictitious world and roll dice to determine how the game world operates.

They’re RPGs. You’re familiar.

My particular leaning is more sandbox-y, more open-ended, with fewer rules. “The OSR” has a lot of baggage as a term, but it’s a reasonably good umbrella moniker for the style of play I enjoy and the games I run.

Most of the definitional work here applies to most categories of RPGs: traditional ’80s-90s stuff, Forge-era storygames, “Powered by the Apocalypse” and its descendants, late-aughts retroclone OSR style, big crunch 4e grid games, newer-age NSR/FKR/etc OSR style, and so on. These definitions mostly don’t apply to some of the most cutting-edge contemporary indie work: solo games, lyric games, and certain varieties of GMless game largely fall outside these definitions.

Onward!

Do We Play RPGs?

Yes! Yes? Yes. Almost certainly.

Huizinga defines play as an activity that is voluntary, nonserious, limited in time and space, ordered with rules, for its own sake, separate or distinct from reality, and featuring tension and joy (Huizinga 9–11). We’ll talk about rules more in a bit, but RPGs are activities that are indeed voluntary, (infamously) limited, for their own sake, separate from reality, and feature tension and joy. Seriousness is an unclear element: Huizinga goes back and forth on the definitions of the term (Huizinga 5–6), but acknowledges himself that “Children’s games, football, and chess are played in profound seriousness; the players have not the slightest inclination to laugh” (Huizinga 6). There’s more to dig into regarding his definitions of seriousness (particularly as it pertains to ritual, culture, and the rest his book), but suffice to say Huizinga’s definitions of play do not contradict the activity of an RPG. Checkmark from Huizinga.

Caillois largely agrees with Huizinga, defining play as free, separate, uncertain, unproductive in that creates no new goods or wealth, governed by rules, and make-believe in its awareness of a second reality (Caillois 9–10). Rules are, once again, the sticking point, but the other five certainly fit. Checkmark from Caillois.

De Koven’s definition as enacting anything that isn’t real (De Koven xxiv) fits RPGs perhaps better than almost anything else. Checkmark from Bernie.

Salen & Zimmerman’s other six (as well as Salen & Zimmerman themselves) don’t clearly define play in the separate way that Huizinga, Caillois, and De Koven do, so we’ll leave them for the next section.

We’ll get to the question of rules in its own section, which is a sticky point. But for now, we can say with some certainty that we do play RPGs.

Are RPGs Games?

Let’s examine each of Salen & Zimmerman’s fifteen comparative definitional points in turn (going in reverse order):

Art

Are RPGs art? Yes! There are inumerable definitions of art, but RPGs are expressive and creative. Good enough for me.

System of Parts/Tokens and Resources

The fuller line that Salen & Zimmerman pull this criterion from is this:

A game is a closed formal system that subjectively represents a subset of reality… By closed I mean that the game is complete and self-sufficient as a structure. The model world created by the game is internally complete; no reference need be made to agents outside of the game… By formal I mean only that the game has explicit rules… a game is a collection of part which interact with each other, often in complex ways. It is a system. (Crawford 4)

Do RPGs fit this? Not all of it. RPGs are fundamentally open: the rules are made to bend and change. Likewise, an RPG world is never “internally complete.” As players take actions, they change the game world, altering the structure.

There is an argument to be made that the purely diegetic fictional world of an RPG does fit this definition, and that as players and GMs we merely examine one part of it: an argument that the world exists independently from our interactions, and that while we may never experience that world in its fulness, it is complete and self-sufficient.

That said, no text can fully contain such a world, and thus the published rules of an RPG certainly do not qualify.

As for Costikyan’s definition, Salen & Zimmerman (seemingly) quote Costikyan in saying “A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal” (Salen & Zimmerman 78). They cite Costikyan’s famous text I Have No Words and I Must Design, but through a weblink, one that’s now dead.

I’ve read I Have No Words and I Must Design, and I searched through my copy for that exact quotation, and I couldn’t find it. I don’t know where Salen & Zimmerman got that quotation from.

Do RPGs fit that definition? Not fully, no. Yes RPGs are art, yes they have players, yes those players make decisions, but only sometimes do they manage resources and only sometimes in pursuit of a goal. This may fit certain tables’ games, but it’s not a blanket yes.

(While we’re on Costikyan, the definition of games from him that I learned in undergrad, which appears in I Have No Words and I Must Design, is as follows: “An interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle toward a goal” (Costikyan 25). An interactive structure of endogenous meaning does sound like an RPG, but one that requires players to struggle toward a goal certainly doesn’t. Many RPGs have goals—get loot, gain levels, save the world—but at no point do the text, the GM, or the play processes demand players follow those goals, let alone struggle.)

Inefficient

Suits, in his rather wondrous book, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, somewhat idiosyncratically points out that games are deliberately inefficient: “…games are goal-directed activities in whihc inefficient means are intentionally chosen” (Suits 37). In poker, he points out, the goal is to win as much money as possible, but if you simply your opponents over the head, or if another player repays you a previous debt, you may’ve made more money—but you haven’t won at poker (Suits 37). It’s a fascinating observation.

Does it apply to RPGs? Yes and no. As Mulligan points out, players—as they roleplay characters—seek the path of least resistance. RPG characters want to do things very efficiently: they don’t want to struggle, they don’t want to get hurt, they don’t want to expend resources.

But players do want inefficient play. Walking into a dungeon, encountering no enemies, grabbing the loot, and then walking out entirely safely is unsatisfying. It’s boring.

This once more gets into the question of the fictional world as game and the table as game.

Sidebar: Frame Theory. In the landmark RPG sociology book Shared Fantasy, Fine describes three basic frames, which are bundles of shared experiences, expectations, and identities (Fine 186, 194):

The “primary framework,” that is, the real world. Physical, actual reality, with all of its normal social rules and expectations. Players are themselves.
The “game framework” formed from the rules and mechanics. Here, players are thinking in ludic game-mode: they make optimal, tactical decisions from within the context of the game and the rules.
The “fictional framework,” that is, the world of the game. Players are characters, fully inhabiting their fictional personas.

(For what it’s worth, I think frame theory gets a lot of talk for what it is. It’s a useful referential tool, perhaps, but in terms of both game studies and design, I find it a bit overblown. The Dungeon Zone is fun, but it’s a bit played out at this point. It also has a tendency to really draw the attention of my undergrad students to the point that they don’t want to talk about anything else.)

I mention frames because they can cast some light with regards Suits and inefficiency.

Within the primary frame, as players and de-facto audience members, players want inefficiency. We want to struggle, to feel the tension, to, as Mulligan says, look back on a beautiful irrigated garden.

In both the game and fictional frame, however, players want to be as efficient as possible, and here a distinction emerges: in the game framework, inefficiency is indeed built in as Suits describes. Levels, feats, XP, stats—all increase over time but demand struggle and arbitrary requisites. A player may want to reach Level 20, but the inefficiency of the rules makes for a more satisfying experience.

In the fictional frame, however, there is no efficiency: all challenges are diegetic and inherent to the fictional world. We assume characters behave rationally and efficiently. When we encounter a monster in the dungeon, it’s not because the characters want to encounter a monster, it’s because the monster is really there. From within the fictional frame, if the adventure is satisfying, it is that way purely by happenstance.

So, are RPGs inefficient? Yes, but no.

Make-believe/Representational

Yes! Very obviously, RPGs are deeply ingrained in make believe, fantasy, imagination, and all related topics. When I say “I stab the monster,” those words are a representation of a shared fantastical reality occurring elsewhere.

Uncertain

Yes! The outcomes of an RPG are deeply unclear, both in the dice’s randomness but also in the raw uncertainty of multiple people contributing to a shared fantasy. Even without dice, RPGs are uncertain because reality is uncertain.

Voluntary

Yes! If you don’t want to play an RPG, you aren’t. A player can stand up and walk away from the table. Indeed, if players don’t agree to the balance of narrative authority—between the players, the GM, and any other elements at play—the game falls apart.

Yes! See Fine, Shared Fantasy. Or indeed nearly any depiction of RPG players from the past 50 years.

Artificial/Safe/Outside ordinary life

Huizinga writes that “…play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own” (Huizinga 8). He goes on to say “What the ‘others’ do ‘outside’ is no concern of ours at the moment. Inside the circle of the game the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count. We are different and do things differently” (Huizinga 12).

Caillois writes that play is “Separate: circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance” (Caillois 9).

Crawford writes “A game, then, is an artifice for providing experiences of conflict and danger while excluding their physical realizations. In short, a game is a safe way to experience reality” (Crawford 12).

De Koven writes:

Play is the enactment of anything that is not for real. Play is intended to be without consequence. We can play fight, and nobody gets hurt. We can play, in fact, with anything—ideas, emotions, challenges, principles. We can play with fear, getting as close as possible to sheer terror, without ever being really afraid. We can play with being other than we are—being famous, being mean, being a role, being a world. When we are playing, we are only playing. We do not mean anything else by it. (De Koven xxiv)

On its face, RPGs seem to neatly fit these definitions. RPGs take place in a fictional world, as fictional characters. Players regularly play characters who murder and steal, and everyone has a good time.

On the other hand, there’s bleed. Role-Playing Game Studies defines bleed as “the phenomenon when a player’s thoughts and emotions influences the thoughts and emotions of the character they are role-playing (bleed-in) or a character’s thoughts and emotions influence the player (bleed-out)” (Stenros, Bowman, et al. 420).

Bleed is everywhere. We constantly feel emotions as a result of our characters’ feelings, and our characters constantly act under the emotions we feel. This is a large part of why safety tools are important: they provide structured ways to stop or slow unwanted emotions at the table.

To a certain extent, the existence of bleed proves that RPGs are not separate from real life. The sheer fact that safety tools exist is an argument for the connection between reality and play.

While bleed perhaps contradict’s Crawford’s and De Koven’s definitions, it doesn’t preclude Huizinga or Caillois’ definitions. RPGs are indeed distinct: we all meet at a certain time and we sit around at a certain time.

While bleed poses some emotional threat or danger to players, it is still incomparable to the physical dangers that the characters face. When a monster kills a character, the player does not die.

So are games artificial or separate or safe? Yes, but no.

Never associated with material gain

Yes! While there were a few RPG tournaments in the ’80s, they never caught on. There is no comparable play within RPGs to anything like professional sports, gambling, or large-scale tournaments.

(There is a separate argument here regarding the shift from GM to game designer selling their work as a monetization of the hobby, but game design itself is fundamentally distinct from play.)

Not serious and absorbing

As mentioned before, Huizinga is a bit contradictory on this. I think Salen & Zimmerman’s depiction is overly simplistic. RPGs certainly are serious and absorbing, but it’s not clear according to Huizinga what bearing this has with regards to an activity’s status as play.

Involves decision-making

Yes! Many decisions are made in RPGs at all levels of play.

Activity, process, or event

Yes! RPGs are clearly an activity. You play RPGs.

Goal-oriented/outcome-oriented

Most RPGs do not have explicit goals or outcomes in the traditional sense. In very few RPGs can you “win” or “lose.”

Indeed, Salen & Zimmerman go on to point out RPGs as an exception to their own definitions: “Role-playing games clearly emobdy every component of our definition of game, except one: a quantifiable outcome… In other words, there is no single goal toward which all players strive during a role-playing game” (Salen & Zimmerman 81). They equivocate on this a bit by saying that individual sessions may have goals—kill the dragon, save the king, steal the hoard, etc.—which can form outcomes (Salen & Zimmerman 82).

I think their analysis is largely accurate. There are lots of small goals in RPGs from session to session, but there is no overarching goal. Likewise, in most RPGs, those goals are extremely player-defined: there is no requirement or task set by the game that the players must follow. While there may be fictional incentives towards certain goals (kill the dragon so it doesn’t destroy the town) and certain non-fictional player goals (a player wants to have an in-character romance), neither of those are strictly binding, and neither are required for an RPG to function.

On the other hand, within the primary frame, there are many goals: players want to tell an exciting story. They want to feel cool and powerful. They want to explore another world. They want to have a good time with friends. But these primary frame goals are not unique to RPGs, nor even to other games: a player may want to have a fun time with chess, but “have fun” is not a rule of chess.

Are RPGs goal- or outcome-oriented? No.

Conflict or contest

To some extent, the answer is an obvious yes: there are dragons to be slain and treasures stolen. The basic ability check is fundamentally a form of conflict.

There are three counterarguments to this. First, in most RPGs, the mechanics that allow these contests to occur are simulated: a Strength check is a check to see if a character can lift something heavy. What that lends itself to varies: it could be a check to swing the sword that slays the dragon, or it could be a check to lift a weight on a squat rack. A check is based on uncertainty, but that uncertainty does not necessarily require conflict or contest.

One possible exception to this is that of conflict vs. task resolution, as defined by Baker in “Roleplaying Theory, Hardcore.” Baker writes:

Task resolution is succeed/fail. Conflict resolution is win/lose. You can succeed but lose, fail but win.

In conventional rpgs, success=winning and failure=losing only provided the GM constantly maintains that relationship - by (eg) making the safe contain the relevant piece of information after you’ve cracked it. It’s possible and common for a GM to break the relationship instead, turning a string of successes into a loss, or a failure at a key moment into a win anyway.

…whether you succeed or fail, the GM’s the one who actually resolves the conflict. The dice don’t, the rules don’t; you’re depending on the GM’s mood and your relationship and all those unreliable social things the rules are supposed to even out.

Task resolution, in short, puts the GM in a position of priviledged authorship. Task resolution will undermine your collaboration. (Baker “Conflict Resolution vs. Task Resolution”)

Under these parameters, Baker describes altering the otherwise-simulated nature of common RPG resolution mechanics into mechanics that instead fundamentally alter the shared fantasy. The role of the dice shifts to a more oracular role: they determine not only performance or ability but the nature of the fictional world. A check would only be made, in these contexts, when there is necessary conflict that demands resolution. It’s important to note that these ideas, as written in the text, only apply to some RPGs. A GM could perhaps alter another RPG’s text to better fulfill Baker’s ideas, but not all RPGs behave this way.

The second issue, however, one that even Baker’s framework does not resolve, is that at no point does an RPG necessarily demand conflict within its fictional world. It’s entirely possible to play an RPG and simply never encounter anything dangerous or uncertain—that’s not how most tables play, but there’s nothing stopping those tables from doing so.

The third counter to the claims that RPGs are based on contest is that players and GMs are not strictly in competition with each other. There are cooperative games, certainly, but the lack of any clear goal in an RPG means that players are not working against some opposing force. There are moments of conflict that occur as a result of the fiction, but those are not required or enforced by the RPG in and of itself.

Do RPGs feature (necessarily) conflict or contest? No.

Proceeds according to rules that limit players

Consider Fine’s frames again: where do the rules exist?

In the primary framework, we have rules regarding our conduct at the table, most of which are not codified by the text: listen when somebody talks. Show up on time. Don’t throw your dice at other players. (It’s worth noting that a few RPGs, like Alder’s The Quiet Year, do interact with this framework: in The Quiet Year, players may only speak at a certain time. These RPGs are unusual, though, and are outside much of the discussion thus far.)

In the game framework, we have many, many rules: ability checks, attack rolls, saving throws, class, species, class, level, HP, and so on. These rules are strictly governed by the text.

In the fictional framework, the rules vary. Some of them are rules of the fictional world as defined by its inhabitants (“in this city, weapons are not allowed”), and thus can be broken like laws. Some of them are implied by our own world’s rules, like physics (“if you don’t eat, you will starve”). Some of them are unique to the fictional world (“when the moon is full, you transform into a wolf”).

In most RPGs, the game framework and fictional framework interact regularly. If you transform into a wolf, your game statistics change to match the wolf. This is common in most kinds of games.

In his unfinished manuscript, Inventing the Adventure Game, Robinett writes:

Making a simulation is a process of abstracting — of selecting which entities and which properties from a complex real phenomena to use in the simulation program. For example, to simulate a bouncing ball, the ball’s position is important but its melting point probably isn’t. Any model has limitations, and is not a complete representation of reality. (Robinett, Chapter 5, “Getting Ideas”)

In an RPG, the rules too are abstractions, and those rules may simulate the ball’s position. What is unique to RPGs, however, is that despite not existing in the rules, the ball still has a melting point. Just because an element of the world is not present in the abstract simulation of the rules does not mean that element does not exist.

In RPGs, the fictional framework takes precedence, regardless of abstraction: if a character transforms into a wolf and their statistics don’t change, it feels strange. It feels incongruous, or cheap, or fake. We expect the rules of the RPG to conform to the fiction.

Likewise, in most RPGs, characters are not limited to what the rules explicitly allow them to do, but instead to behave how they choose within the fictional context of the world. Zagal & Deterding write that in RPGs, “Attempted character actions are limited only by the imagination of controlling players” (Zagal & Deterding 45). A character may attempt nearly anything. They may not succeed—at most tables, a character could not jump to the moon—but they may try.

Because of this reversed relationship, that the rules of the game framework are dependent on the rules of the fictional framework, the written rules of the text diminish in importance. It is possible to play an RPG with no game framework—the primary and fictional frames must exist, but the game frame is secondary. Abstractions are purely representational: the map is not the territory.

All that said, the primary and fictional frames do still present rules that must be followed. If players can’t agree to the basic conventions of their group, or if start breaking the rules of the shared fictional reality, play stops. Critically, in most RPGs, the rules of the primary frame are left entirely unspoken, and in many RPGs, the rules of the fictional frame are meant to be changed or expanded upon.

So, do RPGs proceed according to rules that limit players? Yes, but the rules necessary to play are not those found in RPG books.

In Summary

Here’s the checklist in order:

Proceeds according to rules that limit players: Yes, but not the rules found in the text.
Conflict or contest: No.
Goal-oriented/outcome-oriented: No.
Activity, process, or event: Yes.
Involves decision-making: Yes.
Not serious or absorbing: No, but this is hard to define.
Never associated with material gain: Yes.
Artificial/Safe/Outside ordinary life: Yes, but no.
Creates special social groups: Yes.
Voluntary: Yes.
Uncertain: Yes.
Make-believe/Representational: Yes.
Inefficient: Yes, but no.
System of parts/Resources and tokens: No.
A form of art: Yes!

Obviously, Salen & Zimmerman provide these comparisons to demonstrate there is no one singular definition of game. It is an old and ongoing debate within game studies.

But it’s clear that RPGs defy much of what makes normal games what they are. They aren’t like normal games. They don’t work in the same way. Videogames, board games, card games, folk games, party games, sports—there is a great of overlap between them, and relatively little overlap with RPGs.

RPGs are unique.

Conclusion

Consider De Koven’s definition once more: “…something that provides us with a common goal, the achievement of which has no bearing on anything that is outside the game” (De Koven xxiii). Once again, the answer is contradictory. Within the rules of the text or the context of the fictional world, no, RPGs are not games. But as players, as people who want to play, then yes, of course RPGs are games.

So what does this mean? What does RPGs’ status as weird fringe maybe-games tell us?

The most obvious conclusion is that, within the pedagogy of game design, the design skills between RPGs and most other games are significantly less transferable than between other types of games. If you’re trying to learn or teach RPGs, you need to do it differently than the other games.

The other conclusion, particularly with regards to the definitions surrounding rules, conflicts, and goals, is that a lot of what gets put into RPG books largely doesn’t matter. The elements that change the fictional world—setting, genre, adventure, tone, aesthetic—do exist in many RPGs, but they are rarely given the same foregrounding as the rules.

As designers, the key question we need to ask ourselves at every turn is this: are rules the most effective way to get the outcome we want? Game design is, to a large extent, the design of experiences. But because rules have relatively little importance compared to other games, it’s worth strongly considering how much of what you want players to experience is defined by the rules. In terms of what is actually played at the table, rules are often secondary in impact compared to non-mechanical writing. Defining the world in fictional terms has a much stronger impact than defining it in rules.

So go forth and design, in the knowledge that RPGs are weird and the rules don’t matter.

Works Cited

Baker, Vincent. “Roleplaying Theory, Hardcore.”

Caillois, Roger, trans. Meyer Barash. Man, Play, and Games.

Costikyan, Greg. I Have No Words and I Must Design.

Crawford, Chris. The Art of Computer Game Design.

De Koven, Bernard. The Well-Played Game.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens.

Salen, Katie, and Zimmerman, Eric. Rules of Play.

Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia.

Zagal, José, and Deterding, Sebastian. Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach.

March 25, 2023 design game studies

Quotations from The Well-Played Game

I recently read Bernie De Koven’s The Well-Played Game all the way through for the first time. Here are some of my favorite bits.

…as our play community develops, there are particular times when we seek out games withy fewer and fewer rules. We have so affmired our ability to play well together, to be safe with each other, that rules begin to get in the way of our freedom together.

As we begin to sense our power to create our own conventions, as we discover that the authority for determining whether or not a particular game is suitable resides not in the game but in the play community, we are willing, even, to change the very conventions that unite us. (pgs. 12–13)

As we continue to pursue this need to focus on the game alone, we find ourselves less and less willing to do anything other than think about the game. (…)

We create an authority which is no longer within our control, no longer subject to the conditions of our community. This helps us keep our minds on the game. This helps us avoid arguments. We have others now who can do that for us.

As our rules become regulations, we create greater and greater distance between our community adn those who govern it. Not only do we give our authority over to the referees and umpires, but we also allow their authority to be determined by an even larger authority, unnamed, unspecific, to which ascribe the personality for determining the regulations by which we play. (…)

We have reached a point in the pursuit of our well-played game in which the game has taken precedence over our community. (pg. 32)

Rules are made for the convenience of those who are playing. What is fair at one time or in one game may be inhibiting later on. It’s not the game that’s sacred, it’s the people who are playing. (pg. 44)

If anything needs to change, it is much more logical to change the game than it is to change the people who are playing. (pgs. 47)

No matter what game we create, no matter how well we are able to play it, it is our game, and we can change it when we need to, we don’t need permission or approval from anyone outside our community. We play our games as we see fit.

Which means that now we have at our disposal the means whereby we can always fit the game to the way we want to play. (pg. 53)

Clarity. Clarity. We can’t play unless we are clear that that’s what we’re doing. (pg. 103)

The games [of the New Games Foundation] were called “new” not because people had never played them before but because they were kept new by the ways in which they were played. Whatever rules there were, they were only the starting point, the introduction to the game. They described not how the game had to be played, but rather how the game could be played. People played the games the way they wanted them to be. that was the understanding that made the games “new.” (pg. 113)

We can play dangerously and still play well. If it works, we can play with more. We can be safe even though we’re playing with things that we can’t play with anywhere else. We can play with serious things—things of consequence. We could play with silence, with fasting, with patience. We could play with anger, with fear… Because we play responsibly, because we have affirmed our responsibilities to each other, to the sense of wellness, we can become larger than necessity. We can discover a new freedom. (…)

So we play with danger. A little danger. Enough danger. It is thrilling beyond words, this ability to play well with survival—to include in our games the very things that we have never been able to play with before. We can even play with death.

We can do this as long as we maintain our balance, as long as we are fully aware of the consequences, and fully accepting them. But, as our games get dangerous, our community has yet another obligation—we must make doubly sure that everyone we are playing with knows the consequences, has chosen to play. (pg. 125)

Playing to win is as absurd as anything else, but if it helps us play well together, if it helps us arrive at a well-played game, we have to know that we all take the effort seriously. (pg. 130)

Imagine how incomplete you would feel if, before the game, you were already declared the winner. Imagine how purposeless the game would feel—even though the universal agreement was that you were the winner.

It is disillusioning, being a winner. As disillusioning as it is to be a loser. If you’re a winner, you lose the reason to play. The game goes on, but you don’t. If you’re a loser, you lose reason. You go on, even though the game is already over. (pg. 138)

We seek purpose so strongly that when our purposes are finally, ultimately fulfilled—when we come close enough to see that satisfaction is inevitable—we create, as swiftly as we can, other purposes. (pg. 140)

When we’re playing, we’re not thinking about how well we’re playing. We’re just playing. We’re not even thinking about playing. (pg. 142 )

If we can all play well together, if we can find out how to do that, we might be able to raise the stakes infinitely. (pg. 143)

The Well-Played Game was first published in 1978—an auspicious era for us elf-game nerds. The way De Koven writes, though, it all feels relevant. One of the quirks of De Koven (as with a lot of game studies text from before the ’80s) is that he takes folk games as a default assumption. Games were published, sure, and there were board game designers that were active, but the vast majority of games lacked such a clear designer and direction. They were made, largely, by their players.

One of the quirks of studying RPGs is that, despite the astounding and enduring influence that D&D has had on videogames over the decades, RPGs remain folk games. It’s almost impossible to make definitive statements about rules or mechanics or design because they’re so unique and individual to their own tables. Even extremely tight, rigid RPGs vary wildly from table to table and group to group.

It’s what makes De Koven so relevant to our circles and scenes, I think. He writes for a time when games, as they existed in the collective consciousness, were far more fluid and pliable than we conceive of them now. Yes, videogames can be changed (see Boluk & Lemieux), but RPGs are fundamentally folk-based games. There is no authority that really matters beyond the players at the table.

It’s a beautiful thing.

February 11, 2023 game studies

Lingua Ignota, Live

On December 16th, 2022, I saw Lingua Ignota live at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In a word: Prophetic. Transcendent. Messianic. Rapturous. Revelatory. Apocalyptic. The most affecting performance I’ve ever witnessed, and one of the most intense emotional experiences of my life.

The setup was simple: a stage at the front of a large warehouse music hall. She had a modified piano, a laptop connected to gargantuan speakers, and a microphone. In the background, a video looped, showing cut-together and blurred footage of marshland, red smoke, and middle-Americana carpeted-floor church services. The stage lights weren’t always on, but when they were, they shone red. She also had five tall, thin vertical lights, freestanding, which she moved around regularly. They glowed gold; the affect was that of either candlelight or angelic divine illumination.

She began the show by walking down into the audience, the house lights off. She went to the center of the audience, stood on a box, and turned on a single of her golden lamps. Then, she sang “O Death,” the Appalachian folk song. When she reached the final line, she turned off her light and sang to all of us in total darkness.

She could have ended the show then and there, one song, and I would’ve been happy. Simply sublime.

The rest of show was split into two parts: the first third, she sang and played her piano. The rest of the show, she turned on a backing track from her laptop, an overwhelming wall of sound, and sang with just the microphone.

She was like a prophet. A figure who understands fundamental mysteries of the universe in a way that the rest of us do not. She was a saint. The word I wanted to address her by was “master,” or “teacher.” I was overwhelmed with intensely personal respect and devotion. I wanted to cry out to her, up there on her stage, to weep at her feet and beg. If she had told us to give up everything and come follow her, I would have done it without regrets.

And yet—she remained extremely human. Twice, once on the piano and once with the backing track, she stopped her show right in the middle because someone in the audience needed help. She was very open about it being a show; she joked about how easy it was to stop and start because it was just one button on her laptop. She ducked behind her piano between songs to drink coconut water. It was unabashedly all production and show.

But that only made it more powerful. Both times, I wondered how she would recapture the mood and atmosphere after such a stark interruption, and both times she had us all in her thrall in seconds. To know that she had conjured up sound and wisdom not as a transient experience dependent on external forces, like a seance or a drug, but as something she simply controlled—witchcraft. Like calling down lightning on a whim.

I was in tears for about half the show. I started crying during “FRAGRANT IS MY MANY-FLOWER’D CROWN” (“For I have learned / All men are brothers / And brothers / Only love each other”) and more or less didn’t stop. It was catharsis on a level I’ve never felt, and sometimes doubt I will ever feel again. I felt raw, like I was laid bare for judgement day, sins and all.

The show worked its way through a compilation of songs from SINNER GET READY, CALIGULA, and ALL BITCHES DIE. Her backing track was based on the albums, but modified.

Twice during “MANY HANDS,” I was struck with fear and panic, gasping and weeping. I know all of the words to “MANY HANDS” (“The Lord spat and held me by my neck / I would die for you I would die for you He wept”). It is the song of hers that is most important to me. Seeing her perform it live in front of me was simply apocalyptic. I mouthed the words along like a prayer, and she took those words and threw them back at me with holy fire and brimstone. I couldn’t look away. I quaked in my boots and sobbed with terror.

Multiple time throughout the show, she took hold of one of her lights and descended into the audience, singing all the while. We parted before her, a crowd of the faithful ready for her message. She walked through our midst like an angel or a ghost, gracing us with her presence while silently demanding everything we had. To see her part the masses singing, holding aloft the only light in the hall, was simply unearthly.

Later, she sang “FAITHFUL SERVANT FRIEND OF CHRIST,” illuminated only by two of her golden lamps. Hearing her, silhouetted against heaven’s light, call out those words (“Faithful servant and / Friend of Christ / Most glorious and / Holy light”) was perhaps the closest I’ve ever felt to God. It was penitence, a burning declaration of faith, one that might yet signal redemption. I wept for joy.

In the end, though, she was gentle with us. She returned to her piano for the last song, a stripped-back cover of “Jolene.” It felt like aftercare, softer reminder that this was just a show and she was just an artist.

Maybe. While I understand on an intellectual level what elements of the show I saw and heard, on a spiritual and emotional level I remain in utter confounded awe. Mabe she simply did her research on revivalism and American faith music. Maybe she simply constructed one of the most meaningful performances I’ve ever seen. Maybe she simply is a virtuoso of unparalleled talent.

But maybe not. Down in my bones, it is an unquestioned truth that she speaks with divine authority, that she sees something the rest of us only dream of. In my heart, there is no question that she is blessed by God and the Devil alike.

After the show, I was in a daze. I wanted to say a million things, to scream and cry and laugh, but I didn’t. I mostly just stood silently. I was on the edge of tears on the walk out of the hall, and cried again on the way home.

I was raw for days afterwards. On reflection, weeks later, thinking about the show still makes me cry, but mostly I feel gratitude. I will likely never see her again, but she commanded such revelation that I cannot feel anything but a burning passion, a profound thankfulness for showing me some glimpse of the fiery heavens. God’s mystery is great and terrible, but she is his prophet.

January 9, 2023 music

Review: Wolves Upon the Coast

Preface

Wolves Upon the Coast is a “grand campaign” written by Luke Gearing—of Gradient Descent, Fever Swamp, Acid Death Fantasy, and many others—and is, basically, brilliant.

What is Wolves Upon the Coast? What it says on the tin. Wolves is a giant campaign, one that has everything you need to sustain sessions for months or years.

The slightly longer answer is that it’s several things: an oddball D&D clone, a vast semi-fantasy-historical viking hexcrawl, a boatload of magical items, a very clever magic system, and a fascinating monster manual. We’re going to talk about each of these in turn, as they come.

(I should mention now that I’ve hung out with Luke once or twice on a couple of discord servers, a lot of our RPG-friends overlap, and I’m generally a fan of his work. He gave me a code for Wolves.)

Wolves is also simultaneously a deeply idiosyncratic piece. It rejects modern design trends. It’s rooted in the old school not just in highbrow philosophy or design ethos but in the way it presents itself and its rules. It’s not uninviting to play, per se, but it has a kind of baroque jank that has largely been scrubbed from most modern OSR-ish work. It reminds me of OD&D and B2; it reminds me of the original GLOG. It’s a work that is invested in procedure (as distinct from rules), and in being actively played.

In general, Gearing’s work consistently shows a high words-to-game ratio: a sentence of his prose can fuel a scene, while a page of it can fuel a session. Wolves, like The Empire of Texas before it, is full of extremely terse, extremely usable text. That’s not to say there isn’t flavor and prose and richness—there certainly is, not just mere descriptors—but it’s never empty metaphor. Everything Gearing writes is there for a reason, and typically that reason is to be put into your game.

Like I said: it’s brilliant. Let’s talk about it.

Part 1: System

Wolves does come with its own built-in system; it’s basically just D&D, with a few key changes and lots of small ones. Key changes like:

No mental or social stats.
No classes.
Advancement based on boasts: make a boast, gain +1HD. Fulfill that boast, keep the bonus; fail the boast, lose it. Chicken out on your boast, and you can never boast again.
Hireling rules based on the amount of wealth you own—not spend, but own.
Lots of little niche rules for random bits and bobs: sinking boats, wind speed, ripostes, ransoming ships, and so on.

Two things really strike me about the core system of Wolves as a D&D system: first, it’s got a lot of neat structural tricks to allow players to set their own goals and pursue their own paths. The boasting-as-leveling system is the cleverest, I think—it allows players to essentially determine their own milestones for advancement (with a kind of soft GM-veto for acts deemed not “suitably heroic” enough). Want to go kill a dragon? Boast about it. Want to steal ancient treasure? Boast about it. Want to explore new lands and meet new people? Boast about it. It gives players all the tools they need, and turns them loose.

My second major impression is that there’s a strong sense of, for lack of better word, fiddliness to it all. Listen to this:

Sinking. When a vessel may begin sinking, roll 1d6 - on a 1-3, it is fine. On a 4-6, it begins sinking. This process takes 3d6 Turns. If half the crew works to save the vessel, it might (70% chance) avoid this fate. This takes 1d6 Turns, and cannot be done if under attack. Any further Sinking result halves the time left before the vessel sinks.

Very niche, very specific, and very non-generalizable. You can’t use these rules for anything other than the deliberate use-case they were created for, and no other rules would or really could be used in place of them. They’re fiddly.

On the one hand, these kinds of rules require a non-zero quantity of rules-checking; these are complicated enough that, for probably the first dozen times a boat started sinking, I’d have to look these rules up at the table. On the other hand, this is an extremely useful rule for a game using Wolves—island-hopping and ship combat is quite common, and so ships will sink in your campaign. When that happens, you need to know how a ship sinks, how long it takes, how it might be saved, and what happens if it’s damaged again: all of which these rules provide. This has everything I’d want to know if and when my naval battles begin.

This kind of design crops up again and again in Wolves: highly specific rules that feel sort of vaguely rough-edged and harsh, but actually remain exceedingly usable at the table in play.

Specificity of this particular kind stands in stark contrast to two broad trends I see within RPGs as a whole: first, it’s very anti-universal-resolution. In 5e they literally assigned the six stats to boats and said “yeah, just run ’em like monsters I guess.” (Bizarrely, Games Workshop decided to do the same thing with later editions of 40k vehicles.) While I do get the impetus—learning new rules is hard and not fun—it leads to a genericization, a kind of middling vanilla milieu that renders new and exciting things into saminess. Fiddliness like this means that specific situations can herald deliberately designed outcomes, ones better suited than generalized mush.

While there are a lot of hyper-specific rules in here that remind me of some of the old AD&D and GURPS manuals, there very clearly aren’t rules for everything. Lots of the stuff you’d normally find in a system like this (in-depth combat rules, advancement, character archetypes, genre info, anything social) just aren’t present.

Which, despite what Forge and post-Forge types like to say, doesn’t mean that Wolves isn’t about combat or advancement or characters or genre or social stuff—quite the opposite. As someone cleverer than me once said, “rules elide.” Rules exist to take away the responsibility of players and GMs so you can focus on everything else. While the rules are very fiddly, they’re fiddly so you don’t have to think about them: you can look them up, roll a few dice, and get back to the meat of the game—that is, everything other than the rules.

Also, there’s a postscript I’ll include in its entirety: “The great tool of Creation is the knife.”

Part 2: Hexcrawl

Here are the raw specs: it’s a 51 × 32 hexcrawl of 6 mile hexes detailing a Northern Europe-ish region that’s about half ocean. It’s still a work-in-progress: at time of writing, I’d guess that currently it’s about 80% of the way to completion; it currently has north of 250 keyed hexes. I don’t know the exact word count, but I’d guess it’s more than 75k words but less than 100k (though the other chunks of Wolves, the system and items and magic and monsters, probably boost it above that).

Currently, the hexcrawl is divided into five sections, based on five of the major-ish landmass-ish sections: Ruislip, Albann, the Mid-Isles, Faroe, and Noos. Here’s the map. Each has their own PDF, weather tables, and encounter tables (sometimes multiple). There’s seven or eight dungeons scattered across these, each with a couple dozen rooms. I’d guess there’ll be six or seven major sections once the project’s finished.

A confession: I have not read 100% of the hexcrawl. I’ve read most of it and skimmed through all of it, but I haven’t read everything in total. It’s huge.

Again, the short version here’s is that it’s all just really fucking good. Gearing’s got this terse, direct style of writing: it’s written to communicate to the GM. It’s among the clearest, least-fuzzy adventure language I think I’ve ever read. It tells you what you need, and little more.

That’s not to say it isn’t evocative or engaging—it absolutely is. Gearing has these little dramatic flairs he inserts in from time to time; they’re not overbearing or distracting, but they add spice.

Here’s a short example, from the northern coast of Albann:

12.03 Crabs.

Thousands of crabs in a small set of rockpools. They move in circles, dancing, locking claws with one another. If disturbed, they all scuttle into the ocean.

You see what I mean? It’s such a simple encounter, one of the shortest in the whole hexcrawl, but it’s delightful. It’s the dancing that makes it—a thousand crabs is one thing, but a thousand crabs dancing in circles to music none of us can hear? Fascinating.

Here’s a longer one, from central Noos:

37.16 Pyramids. Between the trees, small pyramids of clay-brick stand amongst their collapsed siblings. Most are no larger than 10’ square, vegetation crawling over their surfaces, their peaks 12’ in the air. Open doorways allow access to the interiors - most now home wildlife, their nests filling the enclosed space, hiding old firepits.

Hundreds cluster - closer the centre, they increase in size and ruination, some showing signs of burning long ago. Presences still lurk in these despoiled homes - denied the sun, they wait in the deep shadows until night lets them creep forth and devour the living.It has been centuries since they saw humans not descended from the invaders of so long ago.

All of these buildings have been emptied of their contents long ago. A single, smaller pyramid towards the centre is made of red bricks, the top brick missing. 121 bricks were used in its construction, and the top 60 contain a rod of gold worth 100sp.

The spectral inhabitants consist of families of 2d6 Wraiths, the lower d6 of which are armed with bows.

There’s so much packed into just a few paragraphs: raw description, yes, but also bits and pieces of history and nuance, not to mention the immediately-gameable content between the loot and the wraiths.

It’s this kind of design, I think, where Gearing truly excels: layers of potential energy wrapped up in each other. Every sentence in Wolves is there to add more to your game. A sentence can sustain a scene of play; a paragraph might give you enough for an hour.

There’s a common trend I’ve found in RPGs to lean into tighter and tighter designs. Design as a tool for the delivery of an intended experience: something the designer as author is placing upon you, the player as audience. It’s easiest to see this, obviously, in post-Forge games of the past decade or so: look at any popular PbtA game (e.g. Masks, Bluebeard’s Bride, Monsterhearts) and there is a strong sense of designer intent: you play the game as the designers intended, and you have fun in that experience. Yes, there are strong elements of improvisation and expression, but everything the designer gives you is clearly structured for a specific outcome. (A harsher critic might describe those games as feeling like they play themselves.)

Wolves is antithetical to this ethos, this kind of intentionality of design. Obviously, Gearing writes with purpose, but that purpose is almost always to be expanded upon. Everything across the hexcrawl begs to be played with, to be investigated and tinkered with and added into the players’ own self-determined path forwards. As players cross the vast miles of land and see, every group will encounter different enemies, different villages, different quests, different treasures. By playing Wolves—no matter how you play Wolves—you will come away with your own unique, engaging tales, ones specific to your table and your players.

I could gush on and on about this, but I’ll keep it to three last points:

First, the semi-historicity. Wolves is more “historical” than most D&D content: for example, characters don’t speak Common or Dwarvish, they speak Pictish, Brythonic, Latin, or Noos. The names for people and places often (though certainly not always) draw from actual northern European history and folklore. It gives the hexcrawl a strong sense of place and time, a kind of groundedness that’s rare in RPGs—and, critically, it does it without ever dumping on pages and pages of lore.

Second, Wolves is huge, but it understands how to use that scope and scale effectively. There are definite lows and highs to the crawl: there are tiny shitty villages with tiny shitty problems rubbing up against dragon hoards and sunken sea monsters. Raiders and monsters prowl across the landscape, defining chunks of the map by their own unique dangers. Languages force cultural divides. As players travel across the map, the political, geographic, and cultural barriers can all be felt. You could run Wolves for years probably, and I’m sure your players would notice the shifts as they did. The sharp contrast between regions and locations is impressive, made all the more so by the fact that it remains tonally and simulationally consistent.

Third, Wolves is weird. It always creeps up on me: in between the vikings and giants and dragons, it will drop something totally bizarre: a 9-foot human skeleton with an elongated skull inside a giant crustacean shell that’s worshiped by the locals. An avatar-incarnation of some ancient chthonic god wrapped in its own myriad tongues. A chain-gang of mummies with their lower jaws removed, tongues swinging with golden weights. A merperson pregnant with a thousand eggs, each with a prophecy inside. I could go on and on and on, but I am consistently impressed by how Gearing can, over two pages, swap from intense feudal politicking to describing horrific ritual—and all still have it work.

In short: the hexcrawl, the bulk of Wolves, is just phenomenal.

Part 3: Treasure

Wolves includes a separate document for its treasure titled &&&&&&&& Treasure, usually shortened to & Treasure, or just &T. &T, like Volume 2 Monster & (see below) is also available as a separate release in a charming A6 spiral-bound format.

The content of &T is as follows: 120 magic items, 20 less-magical artefacts, a 1d100 table of trade goods, and 12 varieties of coin.

It also comes with some fast-but-robust tables for different sizes and scales of loot: for example, you might roll for “Tomb III” and determine that a given loot cache has 1d12 × 100sp, 1d4 × 100sp worth of trade goods, a 70% chance of an artefact, and a 10% chance of a magic. Meanwhile, “Magic-User I” has 1d4 × 100sp, 1d6 × 100sp worth of trade goods, 20% chance of an artefact, 20% chance of a map (to more treasure), and 1d4 magic items.

I love these tables. They’re way, way more intuitive to use than Treasure Tables A–J while simultaneously expanding on the reasons to use those kinds of. The hexcrawl of Wolves makes direct mention of both individual items and treasure tables: it’s pretty common to see a dungeon’s main cache have both a few individual items, plus a roll on the tables.

&T is, I think, probably the weakest point of Wolves as an entire project. That’s not to say it’s bad—it isn’t, it’s good—but it struggles in unusual ways.

Part of this is that Gearing’s normal style has been turned up a few notches on the poetic scale, often at cost to its usability. Here’s an example from the weapons:

18. Red-Pouch

A generous sling, made all of one continuous piece of oxblood leather. The cords whip the slinger upon release, always drawing blood and spraying it about.

Adds 2 to damage. Pursuers can always find your trail of blood.

When the ransom was not paid for the Red Bull, it’s [sic] captors chose humiliation. They castrated the bull and made weapons of its scrotum. The river of blood from this castration led the rightful owners to the camp of the raiders.

Like, it’s a cool item, right? Bull testicle sling that gets significant bonus damage but draws trackable blood whenever you throw it. Fun item.

Then, Gearing adds the extra paragraph at the end, some snippet of lore or history; almost all items in &T have a description like this, sometimes more than one.

I don’t think they work, really. That kind of prose really adds to a hexcrawl because it informs how you as GM describe the encounter: it clues you into the tone, the vibes, often a smidgen of backstory you can have NPCs reference or explain. With a magic item, the prose just kinda… sits there. I don’t know how you’d communicate to players, and I don’t know how it’d influence them even if you did. Most of the prose in &T feels empty; it doesn’t need to be there.

That said, a lot of these items are pretty rad. The armor pieces in particular are a high point. Check this out:

14. The Bearskin

It smells like the forest. The scent fills your head - soil on the tongue, moss tickling the roof of your skull. Twigs scrape your throat. Walls offend - ursine eyes and ursine paws are not made for containment. Drop down on to all fours and wander outside…

Unless you learn to control it - tame it. Throw the pelt around your shoulders slowly. Do not let the smell entice you. Do not drop down onto all fours. Stride like human. Two legs, hands. Draw the head, eyes hollow, up over your own, but do not close your jaws around salmon or the invaders of your forest realm.

Always take it off as soon as you are finished spilling blood.

AC as Leather. The wearer rolls damage dealt twice and takes the best result. Warding Save once a week or become a bear for 1d6 days.

A very fun item, very cool, very evocative. I would love to give this to my players, and I would love to wear it as a player.

But also—I think you could trim down the first two paragraphs into one. I get why Gearing split them, there are two separate concepts being communicated, but even still: it’s one magic item, I don’t think it needs four paragraphs to describe what it does.

At the end of the day, &T’s issues are just bloat: that most common, endemic, and forgivable sin of RPGs. Bloat is everywhere, we’ve all gotten used to dealing with it. Nothing in the book will actively ruin your game, all of the treasure and items are still extremely usable. It’s just got too much fat around the edges.

And honestly, &T is still one of the best books of just treasure I’ve seen; a sub-par Luke Gearing project still stands head and shoulders above almost all other RPG books.

Part 4: Magic

Wolves packages its magic in a separate document, which has two things: a list of spells, and a list of charms.

There are no classes in Wolves. You don’t play a Fighter or a Thief or a Wizard, you just play a dude. Because of that, spells have different requirements: there are no slots or mana points or whatever. Instead, every spell has a specific ritual associated with it: to cast the spell, you need to perform the ritual.

Here’s an example (slightly edited for formatting):

Anti-Magic Shield

Achieved by: A circle described with ‘chalk’ formed from diamond-dust and dragonbone (One Use).

Effect: No magic may pass through, under, or over this barrier - those within are utterly immune to magic.

I really love this kind of spellcasting. This structure—ritual and effect—is just fantastic. It’s such a good way to do quiet backdoor worldbuilding, to build in little mini quest-hooks for your players, to make spells a big important deal without needing mountains of mechanics.

Basically all of the spells in Wolves are pretty standard D&D spells: you’ve got your polymorphs and fireballs and dimension doors and so on. Most are “One Use:” you do the ritual, you cast the spell, the ritual components are spent or gone, and you need more to cast them again. Some, though, are 1/day, meaning if you achieve some very difficult task, you can cast them once per day forever. A very few are permanent, requiring monumental, borderline-impossible tasks to achieve.

I do think some of these ritual requirements get a little ridiculous and out-of-scope—to get the permanent version of comprehend languages, for example, “the caster’s tongue is split open with a golden sickle beneath a moon hidden behind the Tower of Babel.” Like, come on, how the hell are my players supposed to get the moon to hide behind the Tower of Babel? On the other hand, the One Use version is pretty reasonable (swallow a poisonous snake local to the region you want to learn the language of) and permanent spells are pretty powerful. But I digress.

The hidden detail here, the one that Gearing never mentions in the text but is very compelling, is that these rituals are an excellent kind of reward for players. Put the ritual for some spell carved onto an ancient rock buried in a dungeon, and that’s just as valuable as any gold or weapon. Have a Druid offer to trade magical secrets as reward for some task, and players will genuinely be tempted. These kinds of spells feel more spooky and mysterious and actually magical.

By default, Wolves has three saves, only one of which is used against magic effects: the eponymous Warding Save. Whenever you make a save against magic, it’s Warding. By default, the chance of success against Warding is very low: you need to a roll a 17 or higher to succeed.

After the spells, the book also has a section of Warding charms, small ritual elements that can be used to protect you against ill magic. Here’s an example:

Yew - Another storied tree, the berries used to avoid capture - the eaters escaping into death. It has authority over the dead, and demands they remain asleep. Shields of yew carry this charm with them.

+4 Warding vs effects from the undead beneath a Yew tree. +3 Warding for a yew-shield bearer.

It’s simple: stand underneath a yew tree, resist the undead; carry a shield of yew, carry some of that protection. Here’s another example:

Pocket Figures - Carved figures of saints, gods and heroes are widespread and multivarious. Each has a story, and are said to protect from that which they overcame.

Heroes and Saints grant +2 Warding against that which they overcame in their stories. Gods grant +0 Warding against things within their dominion, and against anything they opposed.

It’s brilliant. These charms add so much depth and color and texture to the world. Every plant, every animal, every item has the possibility of carrying some small magic inside of it, something you might be able to use on your way.

These, too, like spells, make for powerful treasures. Either the items themselves—you could imagine finding a yew-shield or carved icon in a treasure trove—but also the information and means to create them. Each charm is its own little micro-quest, something to look forward to on your main journey.

I love this magic system so much. Wizards are no longer just “the people that can cast spells,” but the people that fundamentally understand the rules of magic, the hidden secrets that ordinary people never learn. It’s amazing; I don’t really know what else to say. I want to hack this magic system into every game I play, with custom-tooled spells and rituals and wards for each setting. It’s fantastic.

Part 5: Monsters

Alright, technically, the stuff I’m about to review isn’t part of Wolves. Last year, Gearing released a short A6 zine titled Volume 2 Monster &. It was given away as part of Exalted Funeral’s Free RPG Day. It’s not officially part of Wolves, you have to buy the $5 PDF separately, but all of the monsters in Wolves come out of V2M&, the treasure rolls in &T reference it, they’re all tonally part of the same package. (It’s also got some absolutely ripping layout by international man of mystery, Bonito—seriously, check out the screenshots on EF.)

Volume 2 Monsters & is one of the most fascinating pieces of RPG work I’ve ever seen.

In short, it’s a monster manual: it has some very short stat blocks for all of the classic monsters, and then a short bit of text. I say “text” because it ranges between prose and poetry and just kind of open-ended vibes. Here’s an example:

gnolls

HD 1†

AC AS ARMOUR

DAMAGE AS WEAPON

The body is as loyal as the mind,

unwilling to die despite horrific wounds.

All took the mask willingly. To those not

understanding what it entails, the mask is inert.

It is made of thick stone. It depicts a snarling dog.

Once donned by the willing, it cannot be removed.

One wearing the mask is utterly loyal to the one who

offered them the mask. If this chain is broken,

they are free but retain their subordinates.

All await this day, but are powerless to hasten it.

Domesticated animals and crops despise them, and

wither in their captivity.

This is but one of the paths a man may walk to

leave mortality behind.

And here’s another one, just to see the full range:

griffons

HD 7

AC AS LEATHER

DAMAGE 1D6+2

Beyond

vanishing

larger

screamtearfleshbonesplitter

clarity

the horse is in two halves

talongrip

and away

the eyes of a bird contain only flat madness.

The horse continues to scream.

There are about 50 monsters in V2M&, and all of them are like this. A very short but complete stat block, and a bizarre bit of writing based on it.

With one exception—the juggernaut, basically a colossus from Shadow of the Colossus—all of these monsters are classic D&D monsters that’ve been around forever. (A couple got renamed, like ennts and gothrogs, but you can figure them out instantly.) You know these monsters, you’ve stats for them a dozen times, you could run them in your sleep.

What makes these monsters so interesting, then, is the absence of the traditional “monster explanation.” It gives snippets and slivers of a much wider world—there are like a dozen monsters that end with “This is but one of the paths a man may walk to leave mortality behind.”—but never elaborates. Every time I read one of these monsters, I come away with new ideas and views and angles about how to run them in my games. I don’t always like these new visions of monsters (though I often do), but they’re always thought-provoking.

If V2M& hadn’t had the stat blocks, if it was just a list of monster names and associated vibes, I’d take it as a pretty interesting reflection on monsters: a book of poetry, basically, specifically on the topic D&D and monsters. But it does have stat blocks, it is inarguably a monster manual—I’ve used it in my games! But it’s more. And less. Somehow.

Here’s a tangent: my preferred definition of lyric games—that nebulous category of itch.io art-game RPGs—is a piece of writing, a game, that is fundamentally more about the act of reading it than it is actually “playing” it at the table. Biswas’ You Will Be Liquid is, like, the premiere example of this kind of game.

This leads a lot of lyric games to deliberately be pretty light on mechanics: their rules are way more about the vibes they instill in the reader than how they literally play out at the table (because, you know, most lyric games never see the table). Evocative prose matters a lot more than clarity of design or balance or whatever. Some people really don’t like lyrics games because of this; I think they’re mostly whatever.

Regardless, I bring all this up to say: V2M& isn’t a lyric game. It’s playable. It’s usable. It’s meant to see use at the table, and to have players interact with the content it provides. Despite being so poetic and romanticized and lyrical, V2M& is a stolidly useful tool as a GM. It has hooks. It has mysteries. It expands your view of the monsters you know and love and recontextualizes them with less than a paragraph apiece.

I don’t think this would work with new monsters, or unfamiliar ones. The books works specifically because it’s playing in a familiar space, taking age-old monsters and doing something new with them. For my money, pretentious as it sounds, V2M& is a genuinely postmodern piece.

It’s brilliant. It’s fascinating. It’s the most interesting monster manual I’ve ever read.

Conclusion

Wolves Upon the Coast is among the most ambitious and impressive RPG projects I’ve ever seen. It gives itself a huge goal—rewrite OD&D and then write the best hexcrawl ever—and then hits it near-perfectly. Every page is new and exciting, bursting with content and ideas and things for your players to do. I could run a dozen campaigns in Wolves and not grow tired of it.

Wolves is simultaneously a meditation on 50 years of RPG design and history, a groundbreaking piece of writing and design, and a genuinely delightful campaign. If you want to delve into its mysteries and complexities, you totally can; if you just want to run a good old fashioned Viking campaign, you totally can. It’s gargantuan yet intimate, sweeping yet personal, conceptual yet tangible. It’s Gearing’s best piece of work to date.

★★★★★

A masterpiece.

August 7, 2022 review

The Beautiful, Useless Metaphor

In a past life, I played a lot of Gwent, the Witcher-brand digital card game that grew out of the minigame in the Witcher 3. It’s good. It’s got lots of interesting builds and decks, the balance hasn’t been truly terrible in years, and the card art is phenomenal.

In Gwent—and other card games—there is a strategy called “bleeding.” When you bleed, you play shitty cards from your hand on your turn in order to extend the round, thus forcing your opponent to play good cards. You’re already planning to lose the round as is, and you don’t mind throwing away your bad cards, so any card you force out of your opponent this round is one you don’t have to deal with next round. It’s a classic strategy, really.

There’s also a game mechanic in Gwent called Bleed. Bleed applies a counter—usually 1–6 or so—onto a card, that saps 1 HP from that card every turn thereafter. Bleed has its purposes: it’s not good in every situation, but lots of decks rely on it for various strategies. It’s damage over time.

Bleeding, the mechanic, is quite useful in decks that try to bleed their opponents. Slow-ticking damage over time gets a lot of value in long rounds, and cards that deal Bleed damage (as opposed to normal instantaneous damage) are usually pretty cheap. It’s a fun resonance, especially since bleeding, the strategy, predates the Bleeding, the mechanic.

One of the factions in Gwent is the Monster faction. One of the many possible decks that Monster players can run is a Vampire deck—you cram a bunch of Vampires into your deck, some engines that key off of Vampires, some combo pieces, and one or two bits of tech to fill int the gaps. It’s a classic.

Because the designers know their lore, Vampire cards often deal Bleeding damage. Likewise, lots of the Vampire engines require enemies (or allies) to Bleed, and lots of the Vampire cards require long rounds to be successful—even the cheap ones. You see where this is going?

Vampire decks bleed their opponents dry.

It’s a brilliant piece of design. The mechanics serve as the perfect counterpart to the theme. You feel like a vampire when you play a Vampire deck.

Traditional game design like this, the kind you see in most games, is mostly an act of metaphor. Designers take some non-game thing—warriors fighting, nations building, birds nesting—and make it into a game. Games (usually) are composed of mechanics and systems and rules, and clever design requires making those rules convey the feeling of the non-game, sometimes better than the original non-game object could on its own.

This metaphorization isn’t unique to games: all media does it, to some extent. A Dutch angle conveys something unsettling or ominous because it feels strange and wrong, not because literally tilting a video is scary. Much of the work of artists and designers is to convey a specific feeling through a medium not ordinarily used to convey that feeling.

Because games are systems, though, they usually have to deal with layers of abstraction. Players don’t want to wade through every possible level of depth and density, so mechanics are abbreviations, simplifications, zoomed-out views of a larger whole. You don’t model each and every cell of muscle breaking under a sword-blow, you just lose some Health. Once you’ve reduced muscle and blood down to Health, though, that muscle and blood ceases to exist in the game as a whole.

Part of what makes traditional games good, then, is when even through this abstraction you still feel the original—you feel via the metaphor of game design.

Roleplaying games, I think, defy this.

Obviously, almost all RPGs use some level of abstraction, in stats and dice rolls and so on. But those abstractions still have a concrete reality beneath them: the diegetic world supercedes the game rules. Rulings exist because the rules do not and cannot cover every eventuality: RPGs are open systems. When the rules don’t match the world, you change the rules. The metaphor doesn’t need to exist because the reality is not being removed.

Abstractions and mechanics exist in RPGs because real life (or, you know, “real” life with dragons and lasers or whatever) is too complicated to model. You usually wouldn’t, but if you wanted to, you could probably come up with a table that matches your Strength score to cubic inches of muscle mass in each muscle group, and then correspond that to how much you could deadlift with various groups. We don’t do this, obviously, because it’s a pain—not because muscle mass doesn’t actually exist in the diegetic world of the game.

Here’s a counter-example: in Monsterhearts (good game, Avery’s a great person), there’s a mechanic called Strings. Strings represent one character’s power over another, basically—you “pull their string” to get them to do what you want, usually. It’s a kind of social currency.

Every monster in Monsterhearts is a metaphor, just like (most) monsters outside of Monsterhearts. Each represents a different kind of toxic, broken, unhealthy, or struggling relationship. The Vampire in Monsterhearts is about abuse, specifically one person being in a domineering, controlling position over another. Here’s one of the Vampire’s moves:

Invited. You cannot enter a home without being invited. Whenever someone invites you in, gain a string on them.

This is, from a traditional perspective, pretty good. It keys into the traditional fantasy of playing a vampire (requiring an invitation), and it ties into the abusive-overlord angle, in that someone inviting you into their home grants you power over them—which, in some cases, is the classic behavior of an abuser. Monsterhearts is full of good metaphorical design like this, where the mechanics map cleanly onto the fictional story being told.

Here’s a question, though: what does this move actually mean? What happens when you do it? You enter someone’s home and, according to the game rules, you have a String on them, you have power over them: why? What’s actually happened in the world of the game to cause this to occur? I genuinely don’t know. I can kind of vaguely infer it—the vampire takes in details of their house and thus better understands their victim’s psychology, or something?—but I don’t understand the concrete (fictional) reality of what’s occurring when this move triggers.

This is game design running away with itself. RPGs don’t need this kind of ludic metaphor because they never lose any of their diegesis. This move (and lots of others) has lost sight of land: it’s come ungrounded from the reality of the game world in order to perfect its own metaphor—a metaphor that’s being used to describe that selfsame game world.

Now, obviously, there are some reasons to design it like this. The relationship angle is one: if you remove any pretext of the Vampire class, this move basically says “abusers gain power over individuals who seemingly-willingly invite them into their homes,” which is a not-unaffecting thing to say.

But here’s the thing: the metaphor, of vampire-as-abuser, already exists in the game world. When you meet a character that controls you with its gaze, simultaneously allures and horrifies you, and seemingly has infinite power, you are meeting a character with (some of) the traits of an abuser. You don’t need mechanics to do this, because roleplaying games exist outside of their mechanics first.

Metaphors in RPGs exist because metaphors in writing exist, just like in real life.

There are lots of reasons for the popularity of this kind of ludic metaphor. One is that the games most people are familiar with, video games and board games, use metaphor like this all the time. If you’re trying to adapt, say, Dark Souls to an RPG, you’ll probably end up looking at a lot of video game abstractions and metaphors. Even if you’re not doing an adaptation, you absorb the game design of the games you play via osmosis, and that comes out in your RPG writing. Mechanical metaphors are everywhere in games, so they feel natural to include in RPGs.

Another is that, as a designer, it feels good to come up with these ludic metaphors: it’s hard work, transplanting fiction into mechanics, and so when it comes together, it really sings. You create these beautiful interlocking systems that perfectly express some fictional element, and that’s very satisfying. (There’s also a little bit of self-fulfilling loop here, where game designers want to feel relevant and important, and so write every increasingly-tight systems with little wiggle room for players.)

Another reason is that Vincent Baker keeps writing articles like this.

It’s also that this kind of thinking, that ludic metaphor is inherently useless, leads down some strange paths. (Why do we abstract anything in RPGs? Why do we have mechanics? Why aren’t manuals just writing about what things are, free of rules? Is this just improv? Does game design exist?) While I personally have fully accepted that brainworms have entirely eaten my designer-mind, it’s been a long and rocky road to get here. If you’re really used to designing entirely through metaphor (like I was, it can be pretty scary to just step out into weird writing-land where mechanics don’t matter and the rules are made up.

But it’s also very liberating. Nowadays when I write systems or classes or whatever, I just write what is true. Fighters are good at fighting. Wizards can do magic. I still use systems, obviously, but I don’t try to convey messages and meaning through my mechanics. Mechanics exist because I don’t want to describe through every swing of a sword and twist of a knife, I just want to roll 1d6 damage and move on. The rules exist to quickly and usefully gloss over everything you don’t want to focus—they elide, as Jared would say.

I obviously still worry about metaphor, but now I worry about it like a writer. And, when the game design itch takes me, as it often does, I go and design board games or card games or video games. RPGs are just different, you know?

July 7, 2022 design writing

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New Simulationism

1. The fictional world is supreme.

2. Restrict the non-diegetic means by which the world can be changed.

3. The GM is a referee, not an author—they too are subservient to the fictional world.

4. Rules, systems, and mechanisms are abstractions of the fictional world, not structures or orders for players.

5. All abstractions must justify their existence against unabstracted play. Many abstractions are justified.

6. If your abstractions do not match your fictional world, de-abstract until they do.

7. If you want to change your game, change your world before your abstractions.

8. Play is the focus of the game. Play is not abstracted.

9. The fictional world cannot be perfectly simulated. This does not mean you should not try.

10. Players come before the fictional world.

Notes

Are RPGs Games, Really?

Defining Games and Play

Defining RPGs

Do We Play RPGs?

Are RPGs Games?

Art

System of Parts/Tokens and Resources

Inefficient

Make-believe/Representational

Uncertain

Voluntary

Creates special social groups

Artificial/Safe/Outside ordinary life

Never associated with material gain

Not serious and absorbing

Involves decision-making

Activity, process, or event

Goal-oriented/outcome-oriented

Conflict or contest

Proceeds according to rules that limit players

In Summary

Conclusion

Works Cited

Quotations from The Well-Played Game

Lingua Ignota, Live

Review: Wolves Upon the Coast

Preface

Part 1: System

Part 2: Hexcrawl

Part 3: Treasure

Part 4: Magic

Part 5: Monsters

Conclusion

The Beautiful, Useless Metaphor