Brain Dump

This is a rather rambly post, I had a bit of a hard time finding my focus for it. I suppose that when you do a weekly post some weeks you just suck. My apologies.

Roleplaying is a complex hobby, one that has defied any attempt to define what, precisely, it is. Roleplaying is an incredible hodgepodge, and individual groups pick and choose various aspects of it in various quantities for their personal use.

Roleplaying consists of various quantities of the following things, but it is important to remember that in some groups the quantity is zero for somethings. Mechanical risk/reward evaluation, tactical/strategic thinking, acting, immersion, story-telling, story-authoring, collaboration, and there are surely some that I have forgotten, or even failed to recognize.

Take a look at that list. Those are fairly complex things. Story-telling, for instance, involves reading your audience and shaping your story to them (at least to some degree); acting involves verbal and non-verbal cues; immersion, man, I am not even going to touch that one at the moment.

Various groups (and schools of roleplaying play and design) tend to favor specific combinations of the various elements that are all lumped in as part of the hobby as the thing they pursue. From this arises the problem often referred to as “one-true-wayism”, or the belief that one’s personal understanding of how the various elements are combined in play is considered the only valid combination.

The fights over whether something is, or is not, “really roleplaying” are ultimately socio-linguistic. They are fights to have the right to an existing sub-cultural niche. There is an entire, likely interesting, article on that subject, probably already written in some other context, but it is beyond the scope of what I plan to discuss here.

The important thing is that it is in this confluence of various activities that we find our fun. The fun is not purely in story-telling, else we would be story-tellers, not roleplayers. Nor is the fun purely in the tactical thinking, nor acting, nor immersion. The fact that we roleplay instead of doing these other things is a very good indicator that there is something enticing in the synergistic combination of these elements. Something that makes us want to roleplay instead of story-telling, and acting, and playing tactical games separately.

None of this is really new. Most people recognize that roleplaying is something of a hodgepodge hobby. Though I think it becomes very easy for us to lose sight of that when we do theory. We get focused on one aspect or another, and though we know intellectually that what we talk about is merely a slice of things, we often act as if it is the entirety.

I do think that all of us doing roleplaying theory stand to benefit significantly from studying the various theories surrounding the discussion and practice of these related fields, especially discussions of motivations to participate in these fields. There is something uniquely compelling about roleplaying, and I have this intuition that whatever it is is present in every permutation of the hobby.

The problem is, of course, that I have no idea what this unifying thing is. It seems that there must be something that drives us to the hobby, and that the core of that something could very well be universal, but I do not even know where to start looking for it.

A lot of the roleplaying theory I discuss is aimed at a very specific branch of roleplaying: narrative generation. It is something that I really enjoy, or at least it synergizes with whatever it is that I really enjoy. Yet I recognize that there is more out there, and much of it is terribly under-explored.

A final admonition: when you do roleplaying theory, remember that roleplaying is big. Probably bigger than whatever it is you are thinking. That does not make your thinking useless, but it does mean you should be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking you are talking about all roleplaying.

Next week: The difference between rules and guidelines, and when you should use one over the other.

First, an apology: this article is way longer than the already-long articles I tend to write. I generally aim for 1,000 words, this one weighs in at just over 2,500 words. For those who struggle through it, well, I’m impressed, and I hope it’s worth it.

A Bit of Background (I blame Mo)

My guess is that anyone really following roleplaying theory is going to be familiar with this already, and that anyone reading my little blog is reading roleplaying theory elsewhere, but just in case, I put together this summary.

Four months ago yesterday, Moyra Turkington posted a much-discussed blog entry entitled Push vs. Pull. In it, she suggests that there are these two ways of approaching roleplaying, and that a lot of Forge-style games are focused on one. Since she personally prefers the other, she sometimes has trouble.

Discussion sprung up in a number of places, including Anyway and The 20 by 20 Room. The next day, in a sort of response to the discussion that sprung up, Brand had his own post on Push and Pull, in which he tries to expand upon Mo’s original post. I think that Brand identifies the root of the confusion over the terminology here.

The day after that, Mo explains what she was trying to do with the original post. A couple of days later, Brand expands again on the topic, this time providing an example, discussing presentation, and talking about possible future development in pull-based gaming. (If you look through the comments of this, you can watch me struggling continually with the distinction. It took me four entire months to figure out what was going on, and I blame it on the complexity of the issue, which I’ll get to in my analysis.)

Things go quiet for a while, though people are (probably) still mulling over the push/pull distinction. Then Paul Tevis has this interesting post on push and pull as techniques for presenting ideas in games (specifically setting), and Mo has a response.

Again, things go quiet for a while, and I’m prepping for my big article on the subject, and someone decides to steal my thunder. Judd goes and posts a thread on the subject which I (to my shame) promptly threadjack for my own nefarious purposes. Tony Lower-Basch has a thread in response, and an entire series of blog posts are spawned: Chris Chinn, Joshua BishopRoby, and “Pease” Jess (Jess, sorry for not remembering your name, I know it’s rude…) all chime in.

At this point I must admit that I’ve been feeling irrationally put upon. Why did someone have to go and steal my thunder? I’ve been planning this week to be a discussion of Push/Pull for over a month now. Maybe I should just try to play myself off as prescient. Ah, well…

What sort of distinction is it?

The reason that this whole discussion has been so complicated and confusing is that the push/pull distinction is a big one. It occurs at such a high level, that we have all had trouble assimilating its use in roleplaying theory. The push/pull distinction is ultimately a distinction at the level of general social interaction.

Specifically, push and pull are a distinction between the ways that we utilize authority structures to get what we want out of social interaction. (This is probably a good point to mention that push and pull are not the only two ways that we utilize authority structures; I will mention at least two more later on.) Since roleplaying is a social activity, the ways that we engage socially are necessarily relevant to it. However, since push and pull are such high level concepts, it can be difficult to see how they apply to roleplaying directly.

This is, from what I can tell (and from my own personal experience), where all the confusion is coming from. Mo was expressing in her original article that she has a preferred method of getting what she wants socially, and that many roleplaying games are structured and written to promote a different type of social interaction. I know that, personally, I was not thinking nearly high-level enough to understand the distinction she was making.

What is the distinction?

If push and pull are different ways of utilizing authority structures to generate specific social outcomes, what are the different ways?

Push is the assertion of authority to generate the desired outcome. “My character opens the door” is an assertion of authority: I want to have the fictional door open, I have control over my character, I assert that control to get what I want. “The rules say that you have to roll Lock Pick against DC 15 successfully” is also an assertion of authority: I want you to fail to open the door (or at least have a hard time of it), we have agreed to play by the rules, thus the rules act as an authority you must abide by, and they say you have to roll.

Pull is the recognition of authority to generate the desired outcome. “Is there a back door to the building?” is a recognition of authority: The GM gets to decide what exists in the setting, I acknowledge that by checking a contribution I would like to see against that authority. “I want Sally to fall in love with Harry, is that okay with you?” is also a recognition of authority: I have a desire, but you have authority over some of the resources I need to fulfill that desire (in this case the character Sally), I express to you what I would like to see happen with the thing you have authority over. “You don’t… drink it do you?”* is another recognition of authority: You have control over the person doing the drinking, and I am goading you into taking things to the next level.

The tricky part about all this is that a lot of pulls are handled with tonality and facial expressions. I imagine that in actual play, I would never include the “is that okay with you” part of my second example. Everyone involved would be able to tell from my tone that I was seeking permission, or expressing a preference. The third example, well, it works best when you have that slightly fascinated/horrified look on your face, and an almost pleading tone to your voice. I think the problem may be that in textual media it is natural to assert authority, but much more difficult to acknowledge it, at least in efforts to obtain a specific outcome.

The other mode

I mentioned way above that push and pull are not the only two options. There is at least one more, which may be two separate things, and there are likely more than that.

Consider: if push is about asserting authority, and pull is about recognizing authority, then there should be some sort of interaction that attacks or ignores authority. “My character opens the door” “That’s nice… so the door’s still closed” is an ignoring or suppressing of authority. You assert that you have the authority to open the door, and no one fights you on it, but at the same time no one acknowledges it either. I do not have a name for this, but I would also guess that this is almost always (if not simply always) dysfunctional.

There are probably more modes out there, and I would be completely unsurprised if someone can come up with a functional way to use the one I sketched above. Feel free to discuss.

Adding to the confusion

I think Mo is super-smart, I mean she noticed this important thing that I had totally missed. That said, I think she contributed a lot to the confusion in her first post on the subject. Specifically, she chose Breaking the Ice as her example pull game, and she put her example in this form:

In Breaking the Ice, you must please the other player, rather than beat the other character to get bonus dice to make attraction happen. You must be willing and open to step back and let another player please you so you can grant the dice because your granting dice allows the other player to try to and attract you. It’s collaborative.

Now, it may just be that I am a big dummy, or it may just be a difference in communication style, but this confused me about the distinction she was trying to make. (It is only fair to point out at this point that it was further discussion with Mo that helped me figure this whole thing out, so I am totally indebted to her, but I do think this original presentation was unfortunate.)

This phrasing makes it seem as if pull is collaborative while push is competative, which after discussing things with Mo clearly is not what she meant. That is going to be important: you can be collaborating equally well using push methodologies, pull methodologies, or some combinatio of the two. At this point I do not believe that either is inherently more collaborative, though it does seem clear that one is less confrontational.

Specifically, since pull is a recognition of someone else’s authority, it does not generate authority clashes. Push does not always generate authority clashes, but it has the potential to, which makes it possible to be more confrontational.

Clearer examples

That criticism aside, I think Mo is right on that Breaking the Ice is a game that facilitates pulling, I just think she expressed it poorly (at least for my comprehension, it is possible that everyone else got it on the first read). Specifically, Breaking the Ice takes two necessary elements of play, and gives the entirety of each to a different player.

Specifically, to play Breaking the Ice someone has to contribute material to the fiction of the game, and someone has to figure out when to roll dice. In traditional play all involved players would get a bit of each, but in Breaking the Ice one player gets one and the other gets the other.

This results in a dynamic in which one player can not ever decide when to roll the dice, and thus, implicitly or explicitly, must recognize the authority of the other player. This means that they add things to the fiction with the often unstated clause of “that’s worth a die roll, right?”.

On the other side, the player with the dice says stuff like, “And then do you do this…?” or, more subtly, they set something up trying to draw a certain type of response, like “He slips on the wet spot and both of you fall to the ground in a tangle”. Further, each player can trade authority. “I’ll give you dice if you’ll do X.” or “I’ll do Y if you’ll let me roll dice.”

Pull is powerful

For completeness sake, I really should unpack push a bit more, but I think that it is actually pretty well understood, and not something that needs serious articulation. Also, I am lazy. So what I am actually going to do is expand a bit on the power of pull, and make some closing remarks.

Pull is powerful because it allows you to bring in a whole suite of other social techniques. When I recognize your authority over a certain social element, I can bring in that most powerful of social weaopns: trust. When I say, “I want Sally to fall in love with Harry”, I am also often saying “I trust you to evaluate things fairly, and to make me happy if you can.”

With trust in the game, the door is opened to any number of terribly dysfunctional techniques. I can guilt trip you: “Not only did Sally not fall in love with Harry, but what you actually had happen sucked.” I can be vindictive: “Well, Sally didn’t fall in love with Harry, so now I’m not going to have Harry do this other thing you want.” I am sure you can imagine some others.

That does not mean that pull must, or even often is, dysfunctional, but I do feel it is important to note where some of the dangers lie. Pull is not better, or even safer, it is simply different, and some people have a preference for it.

I keep coming back to the classic phrase “With great power comes great responsibility”. In many cases, pulling is using that phrase: “You have the power to make this decision, I’m trusting you to choose wisely.”

Designing for the distinction

Breaking the Ice has a great way of generating pull dynamics, and I think there is a vaulable lesson to be learned. One way to help a game support and promote pull dynamics is to put certain types of authority entirely in the hands of one player, or at least to take it entirely out of the hands of one player.

And if you think about it, you may notice that a lot of traditional play works like this: the world is controlled by the GM, he has the authority to say what does and doesn’t happen. Thus, in order to input stuff into the fictional world (like the door I mentioned far above) the player must appeal to the authority of the GM. This puts players in a position where to get certain things done, they must pull the GM.

So, one way to facilitate pull is to make players have to turn to other players to get certain things done. Most stakes-setting in games like Primetime Adventures and Dogs in the Vineyard is at least nominally pull: no one can make someone else agree to the stakes being proposed, and you must have their agreement to move on. (Of course there are other social dynamics at work, there is significant social pressure not to shoot down someone else’s stakes, or that has been my experience anyway.)

Splitting up authority is one way to facilitate pull, but there have to be others. The problem is that I am more push-oriented than pull-oriented in general, so I have trouble seeing them. This is where you come in! Help me!

A preference indeed

Also, and this is, I think, important: people tend to prefer what they are good at. I would suggest that at least one reason Mo (and others) prefer pull is because they are better at pulling than pushing. That is, they more often achieve their desired ends via pulling than pushing. When a game is designed to facilitate push-focused play, then the people who are good at pulling are at a disadvantages. The techniques that they are best at are hard to use, while the techniques that they are not so good at are made easy. This makes it harder for them to achieve desired goals than it is for push-oriented people to achieve desired goals. And that is why this distinction matters.

Of possible interest

A final note, one not related to roleplaying theory directly: I think Mo may be onto something interesting with this comment from the original article.

I think it’s important to notice that the first game is created by a male designer and the second by a female designer. I’m not saying that one game is male domain and one is female. That’d be a stupid thing to say. I can’t help but think though that this fact has some relevance based on the different ways that boys and girls are socialized. What we are talking about here is the ways in which we are skilled in dealing with conflict resolution.

Traditionally, society has afforded more authority to males than to females. This means that males are socialized to utilize the authority that they have for simply being male. At the same time, this means that females are socialized to utilize the authority of other people (often male people) in order to get what they want. Interesting, huh?

Back in early April there was a brief flurry of activity discussing “out of the box” games. Joshua BishopRoby summed things up nicely in What is Out-of-the-Box?. It is not really necessary for you to have read all of that in order to follow what I am going to talk about here, but it is a bit of context you may find useful.

Last week I talked about Taking a load off, and this turns out to have implications for the way people learn to game. In narrative play, mechanics help to effeciently drive play toward the good stuff, but because different people consider different things to be the “good stuff” this process is necessarily player directed.

Dogs in the Vineyard is my go-to game to point out a lot of really good procedural stuff. The rules are very clear about what input is needed from players and where that input slots into the mechanics. For instance, the town creation rules ask you to think of a Pride that is the heart of a town’s problems, and then consider what Injustice that leads to, and so on in an escalating line.

The problem is that players can not know for sure just how compelling their choices will be until they have played for a bit. Some things seems like a great idea in theory, but once you get them into practice you realize that they just do not work. Of course the rules of a game can help to focus your attention on a narrower number of options (“an instance of pride” is more specific than “an instance of wrongdoing”, and as such gives you a narrower field to get good at evaluating), but the rules can not make you pick something compelling.

Another place to see this in action is in Dogs in the Vineyard‘s conflict resolution rules. The first step is to set stakes. The rules tell you how to set stakes, but they quite literally can not tell you how to set good stakes. They do point the way toward some indicators of good (and bad) stakes, but they can not do more than that. This is because the value of any set of stakes is idiosyncratic to the group and the specific situation of play. Sometimes “Do you kill him?” is interesting, sometimes it is not.

Dogs in the Vineyard‘s rules do not tell you how to evaluate stakes for conflict to see if they are any good or not (it is entirely possible that no rules can possibly tell you such a thing, I do not know for sure). The result of this is that the learning curve for playing Dogs in the Vineyard is steeper than it may first appear. You can learn all the rules and still not be able to play.

This phenomenon is not unique to roleplaying games at all, in fact you see it all over the place in sports. Knowing the rules of basketball does not mean you suddenly know how to dribble or shoot a layup. However, most people come to roleplaying games and think of them as analagous to board games. In board games, unlike in sports, the time it takes to acquire non-procedural skills is negligible. If you have never rolled and read a die before, well, it turns out that there simply is not much skill involved. Never looked something up on a chart? Never drawn and interpretted a card? Both pretty simple.

All of this helps in thinking about roleplaying in two ways.  First, it helps to explain at least part of why people are resistant to learning new games.  New games are not easy to pick up, there exists an entire set of techniques and skills which the rules just don’t explain.  Further, it is okay that roleplaying games work like that.  They are not suddenly defective games, they just are not quite the type of games we had thought them to be.

The second thing considering roleplaying as more analagous to sports than board games does is that it can help us in presenting our games.  It makes us more aware that there are skills that we are not teaching, and further it makes us aware that there are skills involved that simply take time to learn.  This is an important thing to keep in mind as both players of roleplaying games and as writers and designers of roleplaying games.

This analogy also lets us consider ways to utilize skills from game to game.  We might, for instance, consider entire classes of games based on the skills that they assume you already have.  This is similar to the way that basketball, baseball, and football assume that you already know how to run and throw a ball.

This may also be a good way to understand why people often enjoy similar groups of games (such as the fact that many people who like games that come out of the design philosophy of the Forge like more than one Forge game).  Families of games re-use similar un-taught skills.  This means that the skills you had to learn to play (say) Dogs in the VIneyard are similar to the skills you need to play (say) Primetime Adventures.  Not identical, of course, but the skills similar enough that you are not starting off from scratch, which is a big deal.

So, next time you find yourself tempted to think of roleplaying games as board games, stop and remember that there are some important, and difficult to learn, skills that you are not teaching.

Next week: Push and Pull, my take on the nebulous distinction.

It turns out that for the purposes of narrative generating play effective game mechanics always do one or both of two things. Of course roleplaying is not purely about generating narrative, or at least it does not have to be (something I plan to address in a future article). However, this article looks solely at roleplaying as a narrative-generating activity.

The first thing that mechanics do is teach. They provide an example of procedures for players to follow. As players utilize these procedures repeatedly over time they learn the lessons the procedures are designed to teach. As this process advances the players rely less and less on the mechanics to accomplish the goal, for they have learned how to accomplish that same goal without mechanics. This has the important effect of making these mechanics obsolete. That is, mechanics that are pure-teaching mechanics eventually teach their lessons, and then they are no longer useful to the group.

At first glance, this may seem like a bad thing. Who wants to design a set of mechanics that stops being used? However, sometimes designing rules to act as crutches to be discarded when they are no longer needed allows for significantly more flexible play, especially once the crutch-rules are discarded. (I actually plan to write an entire article on this at some point with justification, but real quick: fixed procedures such as mechanics constrain play which means that play is less flexible. Feel free to ask for clarification if you need it, I just do not want to go into this now because it would take over the article.)

An example of a teaching mechanic (though, as we will see later, not a pure-teaching mechanic) is Dogs in the Vineyard‘s town creation rules. The town creation rules provide a step-by-step set of procedures to follow to create situations for play. Each time you go through them you get a little bit better at creating situations for play in Dogs, and even cooler you get ever-so-slightly better at creating situations period. So each time you use the town creation mechanics you learn to create better situations. Those mechanics are teaching you to be a situation generating machine.

So, one thing mechanics can do for narrative roleplaying is teach procedures by guiding players through the proper way to do things. Sort of like a recipe in a cook book: once you have followed it enough times you no longer need it, and you can actually vary the quantities of ingredients to alter the final product in minor (or occassionally not-so-minor) yet significant ways. But you needed that recipe when you got started, otherwise you never would have learned enough to cook without it.

Mechanics in narrative roleplaying can do something else, and something that I think is significantly more powerful and useful in the long term. Teaching is something that mechanics can do, but things other than mechanics can do it too. For instance, you can simply teach by explaining what to do, or by providing examples of play, or by having discussions with the players. That does not mean that teaching mechanics are bad, mechanics actually provide an extremely effecient method of teaching by having players learn by doing, but they are only one method among several.
The second thing that mechanics in narrative roleplaying can do is save time and effort. Think of it this way: the human brain only has so much it can do during any given unit of time. It varies from person to person, but there is some maximum number of things you can think about and manipulate mentally. Mechanics can provide sets of procedures that lighten the load on your brain.

Let us look, once again, at town creation mechanics in Dogs in the Vineyard. As I mentioned earlier, teach you to generate situation, but they do something more. They make situation generation easier. Assuming that you already know everything there is to know about situation generation, you can still benefit from these mechanics because generating a situation (at least a situation of a specific type) is easier with them than on your own.

Good procedures act as force multipliers. They minimize the number of inputs that must be made by players to get a high-quality output. This means that situation creation is faster using Dogs town creation rules.

The reason that this is important is that, for most people, situation creation is a necessary activity for play, but it is not the reason to play. While it is important, necessary, and even fun, it is not the most fun thing about play. In order to make sure as much fun is happening as possible, procedures are developed that make the less-than-most-fun stuff take as little time as possible.

These sorts of effeciency-based procedures are the editing that I talked about three weeks ago. They let you get as much of the good stuff as possible by making the stuff you have to have to support the good stuff take up as little time and effort possible.

At some point I would love to see a discussion about how to construct and balance these sorts of mechanics take place, but at the moment I do not feel up to leading it myself. It is a simple idea, but one that is taking me a lot of time to explore. I feel as if I still have a lot of thinking to do before I really have a grip on the implications of all this.

The important part is that narratives are produced by people, and as such they must have human input. The trick is figuring out which parts can do without direct human input and thus can be replaced with mechanics, and which parts vitally need human input and how to integrate that input with the mechanics. Of course which parts are which is going to depend on the nature of the narrative in question (which is why different games are good for telling different kinds of stories: their time-saving procedures maximize the ability to address different things).

Outside of these two things, mechanics have nothing to offer narrative roleplaying. So look at your game and ask yourself: “Is my game purely a narrative game?” and if it is, “Which of my mechanics are teaching, which are helping play get to the interesting stuff, and which need to get the axe?”

Next week: Deceptively steep learning curves and why people don’t want to learn your new game.

I’m a big fan of the plot twist. That sudden, wrench in a narrative which realigns all that has gone before from one sort of story into another. One of my personal favorites is Timothy Zahn’s The Icarus Hunt. You get right up the very end of the book thinking you know what’s going on, at least in a general sense, and then bam, something changes. Suddenly you see everything that happened in a new light. The clues were there all along, you just thought they meant something else.

I love that feeling. That abashed yet excited moment when you shake your head and say, “you got me…” In fact to this day, every so often I pull out The Icarus Hunt and reread it so that I can remember how great that reveal was. No, I’m not surprised anymore, but the echoes of that pleasure still resonate.

Where are those moments in roleplaying? I know I don’t have them, and I think it actually has to do with the limits of the medium itself. Perhaps plot twists are not impossible in roleplaying, but they are certainly difficult. As far as I know, no one has yet developed an effective set of techniques for reliably pulling them off.

It is a good idea to define what I am talking about right now in order to avoid confusion over my use of the words “plot twist”. First of all, it is something unexpected, or more precisely something contrary to what was expected. That is, a plot twist is not an “I didn’t see that coming” moment, but is instead a “I saw something else coming, and boy was I wrong” moment. The greater the force of the shift involved in realigning your understanding of the narrative, the better the plot twist.

Plot twists are also unexpected in that they reveal as true an option you had not even considered. If you were thinking, “Well, he might be a traitor, but I think he’s loyal” and it turns out that he’s a traitor you have not a plot twist, but an error in evaluation.

Finally, the best plot twists at least look predictable. You can look back and see all those clues that you failed to pick up because you did not know to look for them. This is why most Sherlock Holmes stories are not plot-twisty: at least half of the clues that Holmes picks up are not revealed until the end. You have no chance to figure out what happened, even if you know as much strange trivia as Holmes does. However, it is not necessary that all the clues be revealed, just that enough are revealed that the audience feels as if they could have figured it out if thay had paid enough attention.

As far as I can tell, plot twists are best executed using the stage magician’s most vital assistant Miss Direction. Each clue, each chance for the reader to see the plot twist coming must be accompanied by an explanation the audience can grab onto. You want the audience to be surprised when you reveal a character has been a double agent all along? Then make sure that each time you drop a hint about it you offer some other plausible explanation for that hint that fits into the player’s expectations.

Earlier I said that the nature of roleplaying itself makes plot twists difficult, if not impossible. Now I shall endeavor to expand on why I think this is the case. The important thing to remember is that roleplaying is chaotic.

First of all, it is the nature of the roleplaying medium itself that every author involved is also a member of the audience. Since plot twists can not come from the rules (for reasons I think are obvious, but which I am still hoping to explore in a later article), one of the audience members must be the source. This means that it is literally impossible to execute a successful plot twist that surprises everyone at the table. Still, you would think that a plot twist could still be executed that would surprise at least a part of the audience, so let us move on with that assumption.
Plot twists in fiction are extremely delicate structures. Dropping a hint without a carefully balanced bit of misdirection can spoil the whole thing early, and failing to drop enough hints robs your reveal of force. If the audience has no chance to see the twist coming, then they will not be able to appreciate the clever way you misled them.

This means that crafting a good plot twist requires a significant degree of precision. In static forms of media you can attain this precision simply through continuous editing. Need to drop a couple more hints early on? Not a problem. Failed to provide enough misdirection? There is still time. Unfortunately, this just is not the case in roleplaying.

Roleplaying is a real-time activity. This means that if you fail to drop enough hints early you do not get to go back in time and do it retroactively. If you fail to produce enough misdirection then it is too late because you learn your misdirection was too weak because it already spoiled your reveal.

A possible solution to this is to work out your hints and their accompanying misdirection in advance. Prep them before play so that they are as well-tuned as you can make them. Unfortunately this runs into another problem with the structure of roleplaying: you are not alone.

No single person is the sole creator in a roleplaying session. This means that the story can go in directions you never anticipated. This is often devastating to prepared plot twist material. What if someone reveals that your planned double agent can not possibly be a double agent because of thing X? What if the story flows in such a way that there is no good time to drop your hints?

Thus the solution must be in editing. Remember last week when I talked about game design as a form of editing? That is what I mean here. In order to generate good plot twists without robbing the other players of agency you would have to have some sort of incredibly powerful structure in place that supported the generation of well-balanced hint-misdirection pairs on the fly. The problem here is that not only can I not imagine what such a structure might look like, I am not even convinced that such a structure can exist (though I do hope it can).
But the structural problem is not the only one to be overcome (though it is, as you will see, the only problem that can be overcome through design). Indeed, there is an equally difficult problem brought on by roleplaying, at least in the traditional face-to-face mode: more channels of communication.

It is hard enough controlling a single channel of information (like text in a novel) with enough precision to execute a good plot twist, but in most roleplaying we are dealing with not just words, but voice pitch, facial expression, body positioning, and all sorts of other non-verbal stuff. The skill required to convey hints with misdirection without inadvertently letting something slip by increases significantly with each channel of communication you add.

To make things worse, much of the time you are playing with people who know you. That is, your audience is familiar enough with you to catch many of your unconscious mannerisms. They know you always smile just so when you lie, and other similar things. To add even more problems, they are also familiar enough with you to know how you think, they know that making this character a double agent is just the sort of thing you would do.

All of this contributes to the enormous difficulty of making effective plot twists happen in play. It is a problem of precision. Some things can be made more precise through the use of procedures and rules, hopefully someone will develop a good set of hint-misdirection rules. However, some things can only be improved with practice: the only way you get better at controlling the various channels of communication is by doing so.

The end result of all this is that good plot twists come from good procedures for generating material combined with a set of skills that are not often associated with roleplaying.

Now for everyone’s favorite part. The part where I make you do all the hard work by answering the tough questions. This week I want to know about your own play: have you ever had a plot twist of the kind I’m discussing here? Was it a fluke, or is it repeatable? What kind of structures have you developed in your own play, formal or informal, that help you do plot twists?

Next week: Mechanics in roleplaying games are good for two things: teaching and easing a path to the good stuff. Don’t miss the exciting discussion: Taking a load off.

Editing is a process of distillation for specific qualities. It is one of the great advantages of static media. You want to make your novel feel more action-y? Eliminate all that passive voice that snuck in there. You want more emotional investment? Kill that supporting character later on in the story so that readers have more time to get to know him.

Editing is how you select for a specific set of traits after you have already selected once. That is, when you first create (let us say that we are just worried about) your narrative you are already selecting for (say) romantic tension, but no matter how good you are you could have even more of it (or less if you later decide you have too much). (Quick aside: it is interesting to note that the more experience you get the better your pre-edited material becomes.)

Roleplaying does not have much in the way of editability, at least not as we tend to think of it. This lack of editability comes from two sources: 1) Tradition of play, and 2) Limits of the medium.

In traditional roleplaying groups very rarely replay things. There is no inherent reason that a group could not play a session over in an effort to make better focus on the parts that they felt were best and downplay what did not work well for them. Yet almost no one does this, and the few times that I have personally seen it done it has been an abberation rather than something that is done on a regular basis.

While the medium does not inherently preclude a traditional editing stance toward it, the medium does make such a stance difficult in some significant ways.

Editing is work, and not generally fun. Since people tend to roleplay for their own personal enjoyment they are not all that interested in doing significant amounts of work without significant amounts of fun as a payoff. Most people just do not find the work worth doing.

One of the primary points of enjoyment for most roleplayers is revelation. That is, they like discovering things whether character reactions, or bits of the world, or whatever. When you are editing you are no longer discovering. This means that while you may make the scene ultimately more interesting, its lack of newness makes it less interesting to those involved. Since the primary audience for the fiction being generated is the same group doing the authoring, it seems that the editing does not really benefit the group since it means expending time on a less fun activity.

Roleplayers do not want to edit their work, but (at least some) roleplayers do want to distill the fun parts. No one really wants to be involved in the game that is (as the cliche goes) “thirty minutes of fun packed into four hours of play”. This means that roleplayers want to make their play better and better directed. If you are not going to edit, then make sure your first draft is as good as possible.

The obvious, if sometimes unrecognized, way to get better play is to become a better player. This is not precisely a brilliant observation, but some people do fail to realize that roleplaying is a learned skill. Through practice and effort you can learn to be better at it. But these skills are on the player side, and pretty idiosyncratic to the group; what role should game designers play?

The mechanics of a game can (and often are) used to restrict what sorts of things can happen in play. In a sense the mechanics can be thought of as a form of editing. That is, by restricting the contents of play to certain types of things you distill for those types of things.

An example: in my own work-in-progress The Suburban Crucible, every scene has one conflict roll, and the stakes for every conflict are determined already. Specifically, every conflict has as its stakes “Do you damage your relationship with the involved characters, or do you manage to reduce their bigotry instead?” The mechanics distill play to that question.

The result is that other “extraneous” things do not make it into play. This is a sort of focused way of looking at the age-old “System Does Matter”. The mechanics of the game you are playing matter because they select for certain types of fictional material. In my aforementioned example with The Suburban Crucible it selects for a very specific type of conflict and scene, and by extension selects against other possible conflicts and scenes.

The lesson to be learned here is that sometimes it is useful to think of game design in a different light. Treating it like editing in that it distills certain traits can be a valuable change in perspective.

This is going to be a bit of a non-traditional post for me. Yesterday, Jonathan Walton posted about a game idea that’s been bouncing around in his head for a while. The thing he said that most stood out, because it’s something I think myself quite often, is this:

It is the game I’m not capable of writing yet. Some day.

I’ve got at least one game like that. It’s Terminal is a game sketch I’ve been kicking around for about six months now. It’s a game for two players in which one player plays a close friend or relative of the other player’s character who has a terminal disease. It’s a game about the tragedy of losing someone you love, and watching it happen over time. But it’s also a game about the joy we find with people we love, and the way that you can extract companionship from so many situations. It’s a game about living life to your fullest with the people you love today, since you won’t have them tomorrow.

But I’m not good enough to write this game yet. Not and make it work right. That’s not to say I haven’t tried or am not still trying, but every sketch I do doesn’t work. Yet at the same time, every sketch I do brings me closer. The more I design, the more I play, the more I simply live the better I get and the closer I get to making this game work.

The same is true of me with other stuff: I have this totally sweet board game in my head that I can’t write yet. I have some cool music that I’m not good enough to put down on paper yet. I have some cool software I don’t know how to develop yet. I have some awesome sketches that I can’t yet draw. In each of these fields part of the reason I improve my skill is so that I can reach these great things in my head, and part of the reason I improve my skill is because the way to do so is to make other great things.

So, I ask you: what game do you want to design that you can’t yet? What are you, as a designer, working toward?

Thomas

One of the things I hear quite often when discussions of “what makes a game a roleplaying game?” are going on is that roleplaying games don’t have boundaries. That is, you can tell whatever kind of story you want to tell with a roleplaying game. This is, in a very interesting way, at the same time true and false.

It is true in that some things simply lie outside the scope of a game. Stealing an example from Wittgenstein, in a game of tennis there is no rule determining how high to throw the ball when you serve. There is no rule you can break by throwing it “too high”. Maybe you throw it a foot up, maybe you throw it 50 feet, either way you are still playing the same game. How high you throw the ball simply lies outside the scope of tennis. (Note that throwing the ball in and of itself is within the scope of tennis, you can not serve without doing so.)

Yet, the reason how high you throw the ball is not addressed in the rules of tennis is, quite simply, that the question is an uninteresting one for tennis. It is not an uninteresting question in and of itself, I recall a game I played as a child in which the object was to throw a baseball the highest. The question is simply uninteresting within the game of tennis.

I imagine that you could develop a game that was remarkably like tennis in which how high you threw the ball was vitally important. Perhaps a simple change in the rules such that if you throw too high it counts as a fault. There would arise an interesting question of whether or not you would still be playing the game of tennis or whether you would be playing something else, but I am going to put that aside for now, suffice it to say (for now) that I think you would not be playing the same game.

The point of all this is to draw the analogy it probably looks like I am trying to draw: if the rules do not speak to something, then that is a statement that that something is not important to the game. That is, the question is quite literally uninteresting from the perspective of the game.

For instance, you could play a game of Monopoly and, during play, tell a story about how you are all cut-throat real estate tycoons. There is nothing wrong with doing that, but I think you would be very hard pressed to justify a claim that Monopoly is about the players acting like they are real estate tycoons.

Since this is ostensibly a discussion of roleplaying, I suppose I should bring us back to that. This is, ultimately, a take on the mantra of “System Does Matter”. Your game, whatever it may be, is not about anything that you do not address in the game.

Let us examine some actual roleplaying games: Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition, My Life with Master, and Dogs in the Vineyard.

First, good ol’ D&D. Look at the game (by which I meant the totality of the PHB and the DMG), and you will quickly notice what the game is about. You will note that the game “keeps score” through levels and abilities. As you get a higher score you get more kewl powers.

How do you score though? According to the reward mechanics you score by “overcoming challenges”. It is pretty clear that these challenges are to be overcome using the game mechanics, and that overcoming these mechanical challenges give you kewl powers to give your character so that he gets cooler.

The fantasy setting? Who cares?! That is not what the game is about. I think this is pretty clearly demonstrated by the great success of games like D20 Modern and D20 Future. They use the same basic “overcome challenges with these rules to get kewl powers” paradigm. The setting is not important to the game. It is important for the game, just as throwing the ball up in the air is part of tennis, but your specific choice of what setting you want does not actually matter.

While you have to have such a setting to play, that setting is not what the game is about. In fact, from the perspective of the game, the setting turns out to be somehow uninteresting.

What about My Life with Master? What is important in that? Reading the book it seems pretty clear that what is important is: A) The unstable/dysfunctional relationship between the minions and master, B) Intimacy, desperation, and sincerity (why else would you have dice for them?), and C) Building functional relationships.

While there is a sort of default expectation regarding the setting, the game does not actually care where the game is set. The game is about those three things. I do not have my copy with me, but I am virtually positive that Paul mentions this in the text itself. You can set it anywhere/anywhen as long as you keep those three elements listed above in play. Those elements are what the game is about.

Finally, let us examine Dogs in the Vineyard. What is the game about? What do the rules speak to? Blood relationships, escalating conflicts, using violence to get what you want, and absolute moral authority. Note that in Dogs, the game actually is tied to the setting: all characters are required to have a coat, and all characters must take an ability related to the organization of the Dogs.

One of the things that makes Dogs in the Vineyard such a great game (from a game designer/writer perspective) is that it is so intensely focused on the point of play. (This is somewhat true of My Life with Master too, I just do not think it is to the same extent.) Further, the game does not claim to be about things that it is not, in fact, about.

That last is important. When people start talking about Dungeons and Dragons, eventually someone talks about how it creates these great epic fantasy stories. Yet an analysis of the game pretty clearly demonstrate that that’s not what the game is about at all. While you may be telling great epic fantasy stories while playing D&D, that is great for you, but it does not really have anything (or at least much of anything) to do with the game you are playing (or at least say you are playing).

So, the moral of the story is the old adage: actions speak louder than words. It does not matter what you say your game is about if the game is not actually about that. You could claim that tennis is about who can throw the ball highest on the serve, but you would be wrong.

(Interesting note: this essay started off as a discussion of scope in game design. It morphed as I wrote it. I think this may work out a bit better. This piece will serve as an (I hope) useful springboard for a discussion of scope next week. Of course it may turn out that this is a side-track, and simply wasting time when I could be talking about something useful… Ah, well.)

Thomas