Okay! Per a recent request, here’s my can’t-fail always-awesome recipe for perfect Burning Wheel beliefs every time. One pot, quick clean-up, 10 minutes of prep.
Suuuuper quick backgrounder for anyone who doesn’t know how Burning Wheel works: in BW, you earn “artha” in various flavors for interacting with your Beliefs, Instincts and Traits, or BITs. Bs and Is are player-authored; traits start out coming from lifepaths you chose at character creation, and later they’re voted onto your character whether you want them or not because of how you play. But the entire game is built on carrots, not sticks, so even if you end up with a poopy Trait, or wrote bad Beliefs or Instincts, you’re never obligated to play toward them. You just don’t get paid artha.
What comes next is a summation of my best practices from being The World’s Biggest Burning Wheel Superfan many moons ago. I still adore the game but it’s been a while since I was hardcore about it. Anyway, don’t take anything I’m about to write as rules. It’s just ideas for building an efficient artha machine that’s also fun to play.
Beliefs come in two forms: actionable and ongoing. Actionable Beliefs are things you can complete, typically in service to a larger goal. So like…your larger goal might be “I will open the Eastern Shores to trade with my kingdom.” And your first Belief might read, in total:
“I will open the Eastern Shores to trade with my kingdom, but first I must travel there myself and discover what they need of us.”
So you do the traveling thing and ask around about what they need, boom, you’ve completed that Belief. Then you’d update it:
“I will open the Eastern Shores to trade with my kingdom. Now that I know they need seed, I’ll secure a supplier back home.” And then you go working on that.
The other kind of Belief, ongoing, isn’t intended to ever be “done.” You keep it open because you want Fate. Fate is one of the two main kinds of artha you can chase. The other is Persona, and you get that for, among other things, achieving your Beliefs. An ongoing Belief usually sounds more like, you know, things you believe. Like:
“Sir Jerkface cannot be trusted.” Or “I can’t leave town, the gnolls will eat me.” And each time you act on that distrust or that fear, boom, Fate. They might get resolved too! But you haven’t built that Belief for that purpose, because you want a steady income of both Fate and Persona. They’re each useful in their own way.
Instincts also come in a couple flavors: useful and colorful. The best Instincts are both! And you want both, because Instincts that cause trouble for you are the ones that earn you artha. So a purely useful one like “Always scope out an escape route” or “Never be the first one to eat or drink something new,” well, those are just useful. They’re a way to make sure the GM doesn’t trip over your schtick. The tactical genius always has a way out, the paranoiac never gets poisoned.
Straight colorful ones are good too, because they usually get you in trouble or otherwise complicate your life. “Always draw your weapon on a stranger” is a terrible idea, right! It might be useful if you’re getting jumped in a dark alleyway, but the king’s guard won’t like it one bit when you arm yourself before them. Best-best practice is to come up with Instincts that are both useful and colorful: maybe good, maybe complicating.
Traits aren’t up to you at character creation so I’ll skip those, other than to mention they exist, and you get paid when your trait adds context or complication to your situation.
Mark asked about “workshopping” Beliefs. That’s a big and important part to making sure the game starts right. The right Beliefs make sure the GM always has something to grab onto, the players always know what to chase after if they don’t have something in the plot already drawing their attention, and it keeps tone and momentum on the same page. Built correctly, it’s also an energetic artha engine and you’ll have lots of fate and persona at hand.
Anyway! That perfect formula goes like this:
1 Belief or Instinct about the GM’s situation. Usually the GM will pitch the game around one or more core things. Think Fronts from Apocalypse World.
1 Belief or Instinct about another PC.
1 Belief about something in the setting that interests you personally. Your flag to the GM that says “I’m really interested in this thing.” Yes, just a Belief, not an Instinct in this case.
1 Belief or Instinct that’s just totally wrong. Like, you’re just straight up mistaken or incorrect about something.
1 Belief or Instinct that contradicts another of your BITs in some way.
1 Instinct that illustrates an important bias in the character.
That’s six things. Obviously you’ll need to double up on a few of these.
You’ll know if the formula is working because you’ll get paid. Artha is mechanically useful, but it’s also a good canary in the coal mine so to speak. If you’re not getting paid, change your Bs or Is until you do.
Workshopping is where everyone works all this stuff out at the table at the same time. Good BW play means intertwining your Beliefs and Instincts so they trigger each other in obvious ways. Inobvious ways as well! But that’s on the GM to uncover later. You also want to make sure you have about a 50/50 division between internal and external tensions. If it’s all external, you have a very traditional “party” and that’s boring. If it’s all internal, it gets really fraught really fast. Hard for long-term play.
The GM is a biiig part of workshopping because they will want to know early on what “challenging your Belief” looks like. A bad Belief will be hard for the GM to know what to do with. Usually, IME, it’s because the player has come up with something they could have already done. So when I’m GMing and I’m feeling iffy about a Belief, the first thing I will ask is “so why haven’t you done this already?” Particularly when it comes to actionable Beliefs.
Workshopping is also something I found myself doing every three or four sessions during extended play. By then, the players will have seen if their little drama engines were burping up artha or not. If they’re not, then we talk about the stuff that isn’t firing.
I feel like the minimum artha you should be getting off your BIT machine is 2 fate and 1 persona. Personally I feel like it was a successful session if I got 3 fate and 2 persona, but that takes a lot of hustle and a GM who’s paying attention.
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Man, you’re almost making me want to play BW. (No shade, it’s just not historically been the game for me, but this might be part of what I was missing?)
Ah, interesting. This seems like the kind of thing I learned to do with In A Wicked Age’s best interests.
This makes me want to play BW too, but then I’ve have to go deal with all the crunch of it :S
It’s not for everyone! Hell, it’s not even for me any more, mostly. But we’re starting a run of it and I’m feeling nostalgic.
I’ve always kept a tiny thought at the back of my mind of creating a version of Burning Wheel that highlighted all the best stuff (like a beautifully crafted BIT machine, which is still an amazing model for certain kinds of adventure drama) while streamlining the hard stuff, like scripting and advancement.
But in some important ways, the difficulty of the game as written is a part of the experience. It forces you to conform to its demands.
Once upon a time certain parties were working on a BW / TRoS mashup for blood opera, but it seems to have faded away.
I’m pretty sure I learned this from you, O sensei, about 8 years ago, after scouring the now-defunct Burning Wheel forums, like the obsessive-compulsive maniac that I am. It served me well in the many games and sessions I’ve played and ran over the last couple of years… and I, too am taking a break from the Wheel. It is a VERY intense game, I find, so I’m looking to less intense games these days. Great summary here!
Paul Beakley DO IT
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Paul Beakley Can your simplified, stripped down version of Burning Wheel be about Mice?
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Damn I wish I could play BW!
What is artha/fate/persona good for? Because I am looking for a similar carrot for Mageblade, and these sound really interesting.
Jonathan Perrine Mouse Guard is so not simple BW!
Paolo Greco Fate is for opening/exploding 6es after you roll, mostly. And Persona is for buying dice before you roll, mostly. They all have secondary uses that nobody remembers as well. Like Persona can protect you from death, iirc.
Deeds is a special rare economy, like once per arc, where you can roll twice your pool or shade-shift your dice. I can’t remember, honestly, Deeds hardly ever comes up.
Paul Beakley interesting! Those “uses nobody remembers” seem more interesting than perking up dice rolls (also because I already have mana to do that).
I do not have bw but I’ll see if there’s anything in Mouse Guard (which iirc is a mini bw)(sorry I was wrong)Again in Mouse Guard is not mini BW.
I love BITs. They are awesome game tech. But the 3 different flavors of Artha are a fiddly too far for me.
If I were going to hack BW I’d condense to 2. 1 the equivalent of Persona that you’d get the way you get Fate. 1 the equivalent of Deeds that you’d get like Persona.
As it stands now, I’m one of those people that stare at BW and am like…no way am I dancing that hard for Bennie’s that do almost nothing.
Fate* has almost made me rage quit in the frustration of unfulfilled expectations.
*The BW Artha not the game.
I really want to play Burning Wheel with a group of people all happy to take time to learn the rules and a GM who knows what they’re doing.
The “table of people who take time to learn the rules and a GM who knows what they’re doing” is one reason I’m hesitant to run Burning Wheel though, even though on a read it has so much potential for teh awesome.
Paul Mitchener any system is better in that mode though. Players who are just like “yeah, what do I roll?” tend to wreck things for me.
BW might also have the added benefit of being so dense to learn that it leaves more casual readers behind
Aaron Griffin that’s true, but some systems can better survive a lower degree of mechanical involvement as long as there’s other involvement and players know what their character does, or there’s not much to the mechanical aspect and anyone will quickly pick up the mechanics without having to consciously learn them (for example, Over the Edge).
Paul Mitchener BW definitely needs dedicated players. As a novice BW GM, I ran three mini campaigns over the last two years and the wheel refuses to turn (pun intended) if your players don’t want to help carry the load.
The Artha/BITs system requires players (at least occasionally) chase the carrot. If they don’t act on their BITs, they don’t get Artha. Aside from the game’s mechanical benefits (increases in stat numbers, more/better roll bonuses, etc.), this also means the players aren’t engaging with the story they said they wanted to take part in.
It’s a difficult game, but I agree: you need dedicated players more so than most other systems. Half-assing Burning Wheel isn’t really an option.
BW demands participant mastery more than any RPG I have ever encountered.
Love this, Paul. I gave this a scan and compared it to how I remember explaining all this to my players last month, and I think I more or less said all of this to then. I can say that they whizzed through belief pitching, workshopping, and finalizing with evocative results and very few hiccups along the way. Going to keep this post in mind as we go forward.
I wish you could play a game with just BITs
Bam! Great stuff, and a good post. 🙂
If you don’t make a BW-lite, someone else might. I might. And if I make it, it will be bad.
The first 70 pages of BW is “BW-lite”. Works peachy.
EDIT: I hope I’m not coming off as snarky here; if so, I apologize. I’m just saying, the lightweight version is built into the game, and has been since Revised, iirc. It’s a great way to start.
Oh yes! You can totally play with versus tests and artha and leave out scripting. Mostly how I run it at cons anyway. Kind of can’t leave out advancement in campaign play, which is a huge pea under the mattress. So’s Resources and lifestyle tests and taxation, all of which you can also ignore at a con.
Convention BW is almost its own game!
You can grab the Hub and Spokes doc for free and totally run with just that for a goodly number of sessions. I mean the first time Adam Koebel ran BW on Roll20 Presents I think they went like 14ish sessions before breaking out any of the scripted stuff (Duel of Wits). They did use Circles and Resources, but that stuff is pretty easy to grok. (Though is not in the Hub and Spokes doc.)
I forgot about the Hub and Spokes separation. I’ve started a run with just that before, and then brought more rules in over time.
I suspect I tend to forget the Hub & Spokes version because as well as “lite” I want “open licence”. Without that, I’m reluctant to put serious effort into a game system.
(I’ve also heard Crane express doubts, in a podcast interview, about whether the Artha cycle works properly without the extended conflict subsystems to burn it.)
Rob Alexander it’s true, yeah. We ran into that here, especially when scripting tired us out.
Rob Alexander no doubts. We know it doesn’t work properly for long-term play without using extended conflicts. The game is designed to make use of them regularly.
If players are sitting on a stack of more than 3 or 4 Fate points and/or 2 or 3 Persona points, it’s usually a sign the GM needs to push for more conflicts.
Re: your OP, you nailed it, Paul. That’s been my BITs template.
And after running 60+ sessions and being a player for 10+, there’s no game I look forward to GMing more. Still. New campaign starting with four great players on March 1.
Burning Wheel
We had our first session of our new Burning Wheel game yesterday. Felt pretty great to be a player. Mostly it’s a much-needed reminder of what all the uncertainties of being a player feel like.
Two of us are old-time BW superfans so it was like slipping back into an old favorite pair of shoes. Shoes we had forgotten to air out, kind of forgot that there’s that spot that rubs on your heel, oh jeez these are kind of heavy, why were these favorite shoes? I’ll never forget the big picture of how the Wheel turns but the details, oh lord the details. Particularly since we’re on Gold, and the vast majority of my time is in Revised, and things are different.
Our newest player has ramped up just fine, because the big picture of BW (building die pools, versus and scripted tests, chasing BITs) is quite similar to Mouse Guard and Torchbearer. The big difference, I think, is how elaborate the Artha machine is in BW compared to the others. And it’s that complexity that really drives the game.
The big player-facing uncertainty I was reminded of was the quiet, totally unspoken negotiation between player and GM to buy into each other’s contributions. There’s so much player authorship early on (and in our case, very little GM authorship to start other than a map and a few locations, no driving premise per se) that it really does feel different than, say, the first shake-out session of Apocalypse World or a more GM-driven experience like Mutant Year Zero. Or a campaign-driven setup like King Arthur Pendragon, where everyone’s already aware of the “right” things to focus on.
It’s an interesting dance! I’d try a thing and feel if it was “fun” or at least interesting. The GM would toss out a thing and wait to see if we’d take the bait. The players aimed at each other (per my always-awesome BIT recipe: click here for reference) and felt out what was interesting about each other’s starting bit of authorship. There’s so, so much more cross-negotiating. I think it’s good! But it’s hard. Harder than everyone looking to the GM for cues as to what’s important. It’s stealthily non-trad in a way I think a lot of folks overlook.
Our three characters are weird and very low-scale, given we constrained ourselves to three lifepaths and only the peasant, villager, and outcast settings. (Religion was open but nobody went after it.) One of us is ummm born villager -> village guard -> shopkeep or something, at the ripe old age of 19. Another is born villager -> groom -> hunter, another 19yo I believe. Because I could and it seemed fun, I’m born peasant -> augur -> mad summoner. Building a guaranteed fail machine is so freeing! It also reflects kind of the worst side of star player behavior: the boredom-avoidance urge. Trying hard to be the ringer, but my girl is so, so broken and strange. It’s hard to be a wallflower.
In the end, we did the artha payout checklist and everyone got a really healthy dose for the second session. I don’t know about the other players, but I feel like our BITs are claustrophobically interwoven. It’s good for tension! And I think at some point very soon we’ll need to start resolving some of the most immediate mutually-incompatible drives.
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I meant to do this before 12/31 but, well. Y’all have read plenty about my malware woes. It’s under control for now, but I’m looking at maybe, possibly reinstalling at wordpress.com and letting them deal with the server headaches.
Here’s what I played and my year-later takeaway, nice and short for potty reading:
Epyllion
Played, didn’t run. I really enjoyed it! But a couple things still jump out at me a year later:
As lovely as the friendship crystal mechanic works (short version: you give away your supply of tokens to other PCs when they act on the flags you’ve put on them during character creation, then either count them up when helping or spend them on the “moon magic” move), I still remember it being especially punishing for groups that aren’t great at paying attention to each other. Basically, you end up spending a lot of energy playing toward other folks’ flags but if they’re not paying attention, it’s easy to feel resentful about spending that energy. Given how my year played out, I very much think this is a phenomenon of my home group. I hope to address this more specifically in 2019.
I have no idea how the long game plays out. I chased advancement really hard and got to the next age. It’s fine. I did notice that advancement choices are pretty narrow. I feel like everyone’s playbook will end up looking like everyone else’s playbook across play groups and experiences.
Ref:
No Thank You, Evil!
I played a good amount of this with my daughter early in the year but we haven’t played in months, now. Honestly, I’m kind of itchy to get her to try something with a little more mechanical complexity. That’s totally on me and if I’m being honest with myself, it’s probably not what she would enjoy. But I think about running NTYE and it bores me. The narrow, short formula absolutely works! But it’s a narrow, short formula for play.
Probably the next thing we’ll do with it is move her to the highest character sheet level. She graduated from triangle to square in January, and that might have been the last time we played.
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Burning Wheel
2018 has obviously been a long fucking year because I completely forgot we played Burning Wheel! I played, didn’t run. It was nice. I’m also clearly not the target demographic for this game any more. It’s just such a heavy load, both on the GM side and the player side. Lots to manage. We didn’t do a great job of really workshopping Beliefs, and our campaign reached a point where we’d just kind of…done what we came to do. Was that my short attention span? Maybe!
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Bluebeard’s Bride
Played this at NewMexicon 2018 and it blew my mind. It’s super weird, very arty-farty, not at all a conventional RPG in terms of agency and bildungsroman and long meaningful campaign play. It’s a one-shot featuring a series of horrific vignettes, everyone plays an aspect of a single character and takes turns in the driver’s seat, and it’s so squicky and weird that it’s just impossible (or perhaps just in poor taste) to try and describe actual play. Very high on my list of best games of the year.
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Sagas of the Icelanders
Another NewMexicon 2018 game. I ran this, because I always run it. SotI is on my very short list of games I’m so good at, I can make the game do anything I want. It is a lovely experience every time.
This particular game was a “spotlight GM” event that I ran. I remember it being funnier and more Fiasco-y than it usually is. Worked great and I’m adding that mode to my quiver for future runs.
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Masks
My first run at Masks and it was super fun. My buddy Kit ran it at New Mexicon, and he is to Masks what I am to Sagas. The game does some really interesting stuff about supers relationships and completely dispenses with Champions style physics modeling. It’s terrific, loved it, want to run it here in 2019.
I had another opportunity to play Masks later in the year, at Rincon 2018 with Jason Corley running it. I played a more conventional character and it was a more conventional experience, which is great because you don’t have to push the envelope every time.
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Golden Sky Stories
Actually a fantasy adventure hack called Fantasy Friends. GSS is cute but not my jam: it’s heartwarming and affirming, you basically bid points to get things done and then do heartwarming and affirming things to get those points back. I mean it’s nice! And Nick Hopkins did a really good job running it. I was just ehh on the whole model of play afterward.
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Coriolis
Coriolis was my only real heartbreak of 2018. I adore, absolutely love Mutant: Year Zero from Fria Ligan, and Coriolis is built on the same engine. The game is packed with interesting history and social context, the setting is super interesting, characters look neat. I mean just on reading the text, I was all in. But the game has a huge glaring problem at the center of it: a GM-facing economy called Darkness Points.
What I discovered was that I grind against the DP economy in every imaginable way. First off, there’s a huge list of bad shit the GM is “allowed” (?) to launch at the players by spending DP. I read that to strongly imply, or mandate really, that nothing on that list is in my toolbox without spending those points. Then what really killed me was that I can effectively earn and keep unlimited DPs, and the players can’t do shit about it. Even playing hard toward the intent of the system, this is I think intentional! So there’s no meaningful decision making, no tension, nothing. It’s a list of things I feel like I can’t do but actually can do because I’m spending an effectively unlimited number of points.
I will say, though, that Coriolis has an extremely nifty spaceship combat system. Each player takes on a specific on-board role and everyone’s contribution matters. It’s great.
Otherwise, the game left me restless and irritated. What a shame, because it’s so very beautiful. And it appears I only ran three sessions of it? Ye gawds.
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The Veil
I tried to run The Veil but it catastrophically failed for us within an hour of the first session. When I had read the rules, the playbooks stood out as weird and very specific and I thought “oh wow, everyone is so strange!” And they are. But once you figure out where each playbook comes from, escaping the tropes and references becomes nearly impossible.
For us, I think, we worked hard at not doing that. But the moves, oh the moves. Designer Fraser Simons made a fairly lengthy argument explaining his approach, which was to build the moves in a very broad way. I like the idea in principle, but lordy in practice we just couldn’t get a handle on how anything was supposed to work or how any given move’s outcome was supposed to look in the fiction. The whole thing felt very abstract and it wore everyone out in about an hour.
But! But but but: I think The Veil may be best in class for how you create your cyberpunk setting. Each playbook has a very specific set of questions and inputs, so that any given playbook mix produces a wildly different and unique setting. We really liked this. The Veil produced a setting I’d be very happy to play in! Just with a different game.
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Scum & Villainy
My surprise hit of the year was Scum & Villainy, a sci-fi take on Blades in the Dark. I’d had the pleasure of playing once before at a private con earlier in the year, but I was so exhausted that the playbook felt like an incomprehensible wall of jet fighter controls.
I gotta say, now that I fully grasp how the GM-player transaction works in Bitd/S&V, it might be my favorite. Even more favorite than Burning Wheel! I really like how the negotiation bounces back and forth: how well positioned are you? How difficult is the thing? How hard do you want to try? Are you willing to take an additional consequence? Love it to pieces.
Our run at Scum petered out because everyone advanced to a point where there was really no more mechanical tension to the game. This is something I was worried about in Blades as well: the Resistance mechanism (short version: if you suffer consequences you don’t like, you can resist them at a cost to your stress) is such that eventually you can just do anything and everything and practically never suffer for it. I don’t love the realization that so much of the play juice was coming from the mechanisms, but in S&V it did for us.
It did get me thinking about versions of Blades where maybe you don’t get better, but the scope of your action just gets broader. Dunno. It was a good experience, very fun, just ran its course.
Oh and I ran it at RinCon 2018 and completely forgot! Pitched it, explained it, ran it, easy as pie. S&V is definitely on my short list of pickup one-shot games I’m happy to run without any prep.
Ref:
The King is Dead
This is Vincent Baker’s diceless, GMless game of fantasy intrigue built on the PbtA framework. I absolutely love this! And it may be my favorite of his games, even more than Apocalypse World itself.
The core of the game is that everyone gets a copy of the same rules book. You sketch out sexy young princes and princesses in a Game of Thrones-ish setting. And then you start picking little mini-games to play out scenes. You start with a game called “muster and intrigue,” which adds a little fictional context to the setting and gives you a card. The ostensible object of the game is to win the crown by any means necessary. You do that by building a good hand of cards, with more and better face cards worth more than numbered cards.
I’ve played this game twice now. The first time, we just rolled with the minigames and didn’t worry much about the underlying card game. It was really fun that way! But the second time, when I ran it again at Rincon in Tucson, I really charged hard at the card game. It was even more fun that way, because it forced me to play really strategically and think bigger-picture. My game basically shifted from playing Arya to playing Cersei.
Highest recommendation.
Ref: https://indiegamereadingclub.com/indie-game-reading-club/the-king-is-dead/
Palimpsest
Okay, I pretty much never brag on myself but I’m going to now: I am super proud of my Game Chef submission this year, a little time travel game called Palimpsest. The premise is that three different time travelers converge on a small but vital moment in history, and try to make events conform to their wishes before uncertainty collapses and that moment is forever set.
I’ve run it twice, it was fun twice. It could stand a bit of polish and definitely some art direction, but this was the first time I’ve ever submitted a Game Chef and thought to myself “oh heck yeah, this fucker has legs.” I’m gonna publish it in some form down the road. But for now, here it is:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QdRrUkaaxZvUO1ENt2D6OpjoBv1SEhVuG2Q5wcdeono/edit?usp=sharing
Legacy
Oh boy. The last game I ran this year.
It did not end well.
It started with such promise: a game about generations passing through time. A game about building up communities, rather than scrabbling for short-term wins.
It ended for a lot of reasons. Some had to do with the game itself: Mechanically, Legacy was overwhelming to everyone. There are move sets for your character and your family and the common moves and the story moves and and and. There are multiple economies. There is room for really unpleasant coercion via the game’s debts system. But beyond that, Legacy demanded everyone walk away from deeply ingrained habits of character monogamy, agency, and campaign continuity.
It was just too hard. It ended on a really sour note and we haven’t run a game since. That was early December, I think? It’s been a month.
It did, however, give me a lot to talk about.
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Part 3 of ? in the Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset series
The hardest thing I ever ask of a player is to decide what they’re going to care about.
Some games tell you what to care about, right? You’re dungeon delvers, so you’re supposed to care about the treasure. Advancement is a strongly implied goal as well. But there are also games that don’t tell you what to care about. Why is deciding what to care about such a challenging lift?
We’re playing Shattered City, a PbtA game derived from Legacy that doesn’t specifically tell players what to care about, so I can’t stop thinking about this subject. It’s a game design challenge but it’s also a creative, social and emotional challenge for the players. Burning Wheel covered this ground, and workshopping Beliefs and Instincts is a notoriously difficult process. In Legacy games, which feature big shifts in time and an explicit split between big-picture events and small-picture character vignettes, there are no specific economies driving choices other than the ones you choose, I think it’s even harder.
And what does “interesting” even mean? Is it interesting to the player, to the GM, to the other players? To your blog readers? To your Twitch audience?
How does this continue to be so hard?
Such a mystery. Or you could help the players figure it out for themselves.
Where To Look
Sometimes, system provides the player benchmarks and validation. You want to advance, so do the things that earn you advancement. You will grind out food, rest and light, so do things to maximize them.
Other times, the game’s premise provides an answer: you’re a secret society of monster hunters, you crew a tramp freighter, you’re a criminal gang. The shared goals in these games are of course entirely embedded in the game’s fiction: monster hunters hunt monsters, tramp freighters take jobs, criminal gangs claw their way into being bigger and badder. Shared goals are great! But those are all extrinsic goals. They’re not the character’s goals.
Meanwhile, we’ve provided players almost no training at all in developing their own intrinsic goals. Decades of shitty GMing have provided plenty of negative reinforcement though, mostly by ignoring what players tell us. It’s too hard to integrate their backstory. I forgot that NPC you took an interest in. Our session time is so consumed by the job/mission/dungeon that there’s no time left for the characters. You can’t wander off the rails.
I’ve talked on and off for a while about the concept of “holding environment.” To recap, it’s the premise of your game that gives the characters reasons to spend time together, particularly in scenes. And those premises can be all over the place: for emotional support reasons (personal relationships in a closed environment, like the settlements of Sagas of the Icelanders), for tactical reasons (party builds in D&D), for professional reasons (a ship crew like in Scum and Villainy), even for meta-play reasons like “because we all agreed to show up on Saturday afternoons for five hours.” But those are all related to the larger social dynamic of all the players at the table.
I suppose it’s not unreasonable that a player might pick any of these things as their intrinsic goal: what I want to do is support someone else’s effort. But I don’t think that’s sustainable or scalable. What happens when the whole party exists to support…the whole party? Or crew or whatever. At some point, if you’re playing a game where the emergent fiction is the goal, someone needs to care about something.
The secret is that not caring protects you from being hurt. Not to get all armchair therapist here, but identifying what players fear will hurt them is most of the exercise.
Why Should You Care?
Deciding what in the fiction to care about makes some assumptions. The big assumption is that “the fiction” matters, changes, and is part of your overall enjoyment of the medium. And different RPGs care about “the fiction” in very different, incompatible ways. A dungeon delving game puts a lot more emphasis on the tactical fiction than, say, a ships-crew game that emphasizes the fiction around tramp freighter logistics. Or a feels-heavy game that emphasizes emotional context way above tactics or logistics. Or a political maneuvering game that emphasizes social context.
Some games are written in a relatively fiction-agnostic way. Personally I think that’s usually not intentional: the designer(s) just didn’t think about what aspect of “the fiction” they wanted their game to address or facilitate most clearly. But that incoherence can be intentional. You can get a lot of good play even while the players don’t settle into a gestalt.
Because I can’t stop thinking about this topic, I’m starting to think “give me easy things to care about” is something I desperately want and need in a game. “Don’t punish me for the things I end up caring about” is a close second.
Okay I totally lied. Let’s get all armchair therapist!
Get Out Of Your Own Way
I think the difficulty comes down to fear.
Fear of being judged for having a bad idea. Easy and shitty to be judgy about other players’ contributions: it’s dumb or hackneyed or predictable.
Fear of tripping over the GM’s authority or credibility, their prep or plans.
Fear or uncertainty around fitting your idea into established fiction, or external canon (the Star Wars problem, if you haven’t bought into making a canon-rich setting your own).
Uncertainty about how your authority interfaces with other players’, including the GM. What happens if I want to care about something that contradicts what someone else wants to care about? Will the system let me fight that out, or do I need to talk it out? Is that going to be okay or weird or what?
A general lack of player credibility, that the table won’t buy your idea but they might buy the same idea if it came from a higher-credibility player. (How do you build credibility? Glad you asked.)
Not wanting to rock the boat if the table’s goals don’t match yours. Everyone else is there to beat a dungeon, but while you’re exploring your thief’s morality, that’s interfering with your thief’s tactical efficiency. That’s not what the other players signed up for. I’ve done this, and had it happen, and it sucks.
But what if I choose wrong?!
Okay, So How Do I Choose?
Sometimes it takes time to settle into the game’s table vibe and established fiction. It’s hard to decide what to care about when nobody else has decided what they care about (including the GM!). Someone has to go in the water first and prove it’s warm, or at least swimmable. That’s usually one of the unspoken responsibilities of facilitation: clearly signaling where it’s safe to put your attention.
You feel that stutter-step tempo during scene framing in GMless games. This can be a tough exercise, particularly if you’ve never done it before and especially if you’ve never GMed or facilitated before. If you’re doing a scene with another player, you both fumble around until you settle on a premise for the scene you can agree to and find interesting. I’m not sure how you speed up that process other than through practice and saying “yes” a whole lot when the other side offers a scene up.
But that’s just related to making the game proceed, and doesn’t have anything to do with deciding what to care about inside your own head. I’m thinking about how I go about settling on a vibe or characterization or whatever, in these set-your-own-scene games. It’s so hard because I’m asking myself what I can care about for the next four hours. And sure enough, I still face all the fears I list above: does this fit with everyone else’s investment? Will I be judged favorably for it? Is it “clever” (ugh)? Does my characterization fit with the premise or setting or genre?
I’ve been playing these kinds of games for a decade and I’ve never really dialed it in. But I’ve also mostly GMed conventionally structured RPGs for four decades, which has given me plenty of training in being comfortable asserting anything.
Okay, finally the useful part.
Subjects To Care About
Again, I’m assuming you’re playing a game where the fiction matters, where players need to pick something to care about otherwise the game won’t go. The set of games that requires this is quite small. Similarly, the set of games that actively reject or ignore this is also quite small. The vast majority of games, either tabletop or larp, work best when the players settle on some set of things. And the table, ideally, supports your choices.
Goals: Personally I think this is a pretty shallow take on “the fiction,” but sure. Let’s assume your character is consumed with the burning desire to do well at their…thing, their job, whatever it is. This is an easy fallback to competency-porn type play: characters who are good at their job, enjoy being good at their job, and look great doing it. There’s no need to justify your character’s goal, just pick something, anything (but please, please pick something in the fiction, not “I want to unlock this ability”). Goals are a terrific jumping-off point to decide that you care about what may have led to this goal.
Logistics: This is, to my mind, a logical extension of investing in goal-oriented fiction. Now you’re caring about how to get the rest of the players as deep into the dungeon as they can get, or fly their ship as far and as safely as possible, all the support stuff that happens in a game. I mean, it’s a thing and you could pick it to care about. Folks who love to be supportive frequently fixate on a game’s logistical concerns (and are frequently frustrated when games simply don’t have them, eg no tracking ship fuel or maintenance schedules, don’t really care about food, rest and healing times, and so on).
Emotions: What does my character feel about things? Are those feelings a rational product of their setting and situation? I talk about this bit a lot in the previous Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset. In short: your character’s emotional state can be literally anything, rational or not. Your goal is to be true to it, explore it, see where their hopes and fears and desires take them.
Relationships: How does your character fit into their larger social context? What friends, families, rivals and enemies are around them? This means choosing to care about your character’s relationships and treating them as real, rather than as (merely) useful or obstacles. This is often ultimately goal-driven, but it doesn’t have to be.
Setting: Tricky one! I feel like choosing to care about “the setting” is some alchemy of social concerns, taking an interest in big sweeping events, and fidelity to genre expectations.
Fidelity: Does the game feel like the genre you’re modeling? How do my decisions advance that feeling? This level of caring feels really meta to me, like, it’s more concerned with “correct” authorship than with interesting or provocative authorship. But genre is a good way to ensure everyone’s on the same page, right? If we’re hunting vampires, it’s practical and useful to invest in your depiction of vampire hunting: describing badass mission prep, complaining about being too old for this shit, relating stories about how vampires ate your family.
Yeah don’t do this.
Just Pick Something. Anything. Many Anythings, Even
The reason this is in my Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset series is that choosing what to care about ultimately means engaging in proactive play. Invested play. Thinking more about what you want your play experience to be and taking measures to ensure you get it. It’s a refutation of play where you simply react to what the GM throws at you in the most tactically efficient way possible. That’s a whole category of play – arguably the biggest! – but it’s not storytelling-mindset play.
And like I go into in some depth in the previous piece, stories are not games and games are not stories. Just because you’ve picked something to care about, that doesn’t mean you should expect your wishes to go unchallenged. In fact it’s now on the GM to specifically push you on the things you care about. And those challenges might not feel like how you imagined things going down. If you want your wishes to be all that matters, write a story. On the other hand, if you’ve picked something (anything! Many things!) and the GM, other players, and evolving events don’t take that into account, that’s worth talking about.
(Which is the next-hardest thing for players to do!)
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It seems to me that your suggestions turn Beliefs into ‘quests’ rather than what they are supposed to be, which is…beliefs. They are things the character cares about and believes in. They should include a value statement followed by an actionable element. To adjust your example, it should include one more element:
“My kingdom will prosper if we are able to trade with the Eastern Kingdom. I will travel there myself and discover what might open those doors.”
This leaves room for your belief to be properly challenged. Now the GM could introduce a character or evidence to suggest that your kingdom will NOT prosper if the Eastern Kingdoms open trade. Perhaps a local artisan who explains how his family business will be ruined if you allow cheap imports of goods from the Eastern Kingdom.
I think the value statement performs the same job as the ‘long term’ statement you were describing in this post, but it makes it more of a belief rather than a quest.