A Revival of What Though?

So, I have stated that this blog chronicles my journey of beginning a revival of TTRPG's in my city, but I haven't stated what type. It is one thing to teach everyone voice acting skills and to create my own B-list Critical Role. It is another to restore the pure and clear reality of Dave Arneson's original castle Grayhawk at my table. I want to state the components of the type of play I find most enjoyable; this isn't to say other styles of play are inferior, they just aren't my cup of tea. 

The very very short version is everything I do is organized around player agency. The core components of agency as I most enjoy it are a variety of options, real stakes, clarity that lets players understand the likely outcomes their choices, and a world that throws them varied and interesting situations where they are constantly asked to generate novel solutions. 

I think most people reading this would then lump me in with the OSR, or maybe the NSR because I like artpunk. I also know the above definition is fairly dense, so what follows is an explanation of each, along with a bit of a bibliography.

Real Stakes: the core of the game is seeing what players do in interesting situations. However, a prerequisite for agency is the ability to make bad choices and experience their consequences. As a drama, I like the podcast Worlds Beyond Number. One of the draws for me is seeing Brennan Lee Mulligan, who might be the paragon of improv-as-TTRPG, at work. He is incredibly gifted at listening to his players, and responding in a way that says yes to what they want while also subverting expectations or introducing complications (aka "yes, and"). 

I think there is a lot to learn from this type of play, but I find myself infinitely frustrated at times because sometimes he says "yes, and" to clearly bad decisions. In one arc (spoilers) a main character is attending a meeting of witches who intend to vote to kill her. As a witch, this character is meant to be wise, charismatic, and relational (her witch domain is that of the World's Heart). However, in play, the person playing her is regularly imprudent. She has good and clear arguments against killing her, but in addressing the witches, she fails to articulate them in a meaningful way. 

Despite her lack of prudence and cleverness, Brennan says "yes, and" and provides her with outs that then feel disingenuous and un-earned. I started out liking TTRPGs because of Brennan as a DM, but as I started DMing myself, I found that this "yes, and" model was much more satisfying to listen to than it was to lead. Since then, I have been much more enthused by an old school model of play which puts the emphasis on player agency, and as a key subset of that, refuses to protect players from the consequences of their choices. 

A core component of this is a grounding in a shared world: the players act within that world, but in the same way I am bound by gravity's 9.8 m/ss, they are bound by the situations they find themselves in. I like the idea that a reliance on randomness is meant to actually modify the options players have available, as stated in The Retired Adventurer's analysis of what the OSR is actually about. The fact that they have written out an emotionally satisfying character arc doesn't change the fact that they chose to fight a dragon at level 1, and they cannot rely on a "DM ex machina" to protect their character.

Common Sense Simulationism: I'm stealing this term because I quite like it, but I think many people will read this and say, "oh, he's talking about..." And then insert their choice of "Rules-Lite" or "rulings over rules" or whatever, but here goes. 

I once had a player ask if he could shoot an arrow into the eye of an enemy. In that situation, I don't want to consult a chart with information on arrow speed and wind deflection. I also don't want to say, "no that's actually a special action that only the ranger gets" or even worse "it doesn't have that option in the rules, so no." Instead, I want to make the gut check that shooting an arrow that precisely is quite hard, harder that just hitting the enemy in the first place. So, I'll just add 5 to the enemy's AC and say AC means they hit and 5 above means they hit the eye, and call it day. Similarly, I often tell my players that their character sheet provides the beginning but not the end of their options. 

The game worlds I create tend to be quite toyetic; there's a mine entrance with support beams that are rotted through, or a boulder right at the edge of a cliff or a guard who is exhausted and deeply in debt. There's no rules explaining exactly how to interact with those objects/people, but common sense dictates some options and I just use my common sense on what would happen. If I think the outcome is uncertain, I have my players roll a luck or skill check. I love terming this "Common Sense Simulationism," even though I originally found the term in a random blog post on Weirdness in games.

The thing about this is my common sense and my player's common sense are not too far off. This means my players can predict how I will most likely rule on any given action, because its probably close to how they would rule if they were in my shoes. With this predictability, players can make choices with some sense of the likely outcome, and this predicability is key to empowering players to make choices. 

Tools & Problems: as I mentioned in the above, I think the core of gaming is putting players in interesting situations and seeing what they do. They cannot do this effectively without having options. I mentioned above that part of this is creating a world that is toyetic or playable; one that begs the players to interact with it and where they can predict the likely consequences of their actions. 

Another piece is creating interesting and comprehensible NPCs. There are a ton of ways to do this, but I write my NPC's with a conviction, or single sentence indicating their core motive as well as their framework for viewing the world. While I never go so far as to say those out loud, if characters see a guard drinking on the job, they get the sense of his priorities pretty quickly. When players begin to grasp what these convictions are, they begin to also understand how their actions will affect these characters. Again, this gives them options for how to proceed. 

Beyond that, I also want my players to each have interesting options (see pg 2 q2) as characters. The idea is they are not only themselves; they are also a former Magician's apprentice or Ranger or Farmer or whatever. I don't want to elevate their options to the point where they no longer experience risk, but I want them to feel more talented than just "Ben from accounting with a sword."

In my rules system, that means getting a combination of items, abilities and magic. I intentionally randomize what abilities and spells are available at character creation, but give players free choice of what is randomly available, and each ability is only available once. This means every member of a party has access to abilities nobody else has, and in the open-table format I often play in, that means there is variance on the tools available even just based on who showed up to play that day. Through this threefold model (toyetic world, predictable NPC's, and character abilities), I try to give characters tools that they can use to address the world, which allows them to make more interesting choices.

Disproportionate, subverting world.

D10 zombie apocalypse encounter table

1 3d100 zombies

2 2d4 bandits. Mark forehead with W. Call themselves wolves. Favor melee weapons. Always fight to death.

3 couple being attacked by a zombie; male has a broken leg, female clearly isn't any good at this. Will reward anyone who helps with food.

4 small town block with signs saying turn away, complex improvised fortification. Single armored occupant HD 4 will attack all who enter with assault rifle.

5 Isolated Cabin. Inside, doomsday prepper HD1 hunting rifle who didn't prep very well. Doesn't know about the zombies; believes everyone he meets works for the FBI.

6 d2 cops HD2 vest + glocks in a car with a white cross on the back windshield. Will seek to kidnap those they meet.

7 beautiful deer. If characters stay near it for more than 1 round, it gets shot by a hunter (1 hd, rifle), 1 in 6 the ricochet also hits a character.

8 stack of water bottles in the road with a note. "From a Friend"

9 grocery store with a helicopter crash and 2d20 zombies on the roof. Full of food, but roof caves in 1d6 rounds after entry.

10 cheese making aikido master and his pet goat Tabitha

The Walking Dead gets increasingly silly the longer you watch it, but one thing it does incredibly well, especially early on, is random encounters. Making a run for food surrounded by zombies is exciting to watch two or three times, but after that, you need something else. Throughout the show, the writers consistently generate "something else"'s that are a. Disproportionate to both each other and the characters abilities and b. subvert expectations without defying them. 

To illustrate this, compare the severity of running into 1 and 3 above. The former is an impossible obstacle that must be bypassed, distracted or simply run away from. The later might be a mild moral quandary, but is fairly easy to deal with. Not only are they different, but they each put different stressors on the characters. 

Additionally, all of the 10 are surprising in their own way, but none of them feel like they break the rules of the established world. All of these qualities are key for not just an interesting show but more importantly, an interesting world for characters to play in. In the fifth novel in the Expanse series, there's a quote that goes:

"Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It's attractive because it's simple, it's direct, it's almost always available as an option."

If my players only encounter things that they can punch their way through, then they don't have to be creative about what they do. While a series of five encounters that are all best solved with violence may have the appearance of players making choices, because they choose how to conduct the violence, I find it actually leads them down a pre-generated railroad of people who need punching. To give players the full range of choices requires putting things in front of them that cannot and should not be punched in the face. Providing a varied world like The Walking Dead does gives them the opportunity to come up with interesting solutions to all of them. 

In Conclusion

At some point, I will probably come back to this and make some changes. For now though, this will suffice as a summary of what games I am trying to play.