You’ve probably heard this one before: every authentic Navajo blanket (or “rug” as they’re frequently called but that’s not what they are) has a small imperfection — the ch’ihónít’i, “way out” or “spirit line,” depending — sewn deliberately into it. There are two explanations, both of which are true as I understand them, depending on context (1):
* An acknowledgement that only God is perfect, which also is an idea present around the world: Greek sculptures, Islamic art, Persian rugs, Orthodox Jewish houses, you name it.
* As a path for the weaver’s spirit, which they’ve imbued into the blanket during its creation, to leave the work so it isn’t sullied by the blanket’s sale and use.
I’ve been thinking about those ideas for a while now, especially related to some crippling perfectionist tendencies I bring to my own creative work — specifically, writing and running games.
Something I ran into when I was studying music history and theory in college, over and over again, was this thing where a technical imperfection in a work was the thing that took it from good to great. Later on, retroactively, theorists would just integrate the imperfection into their larger understanding of the form, and the next generation of creators would look for ways to violate the “rules.” The first time anyone heard a diminished 7th, I’m sure there were squints and cries of horror, right? Oh god that noise!
So my theory is this: it’s the imperfection that makes something great. It is, in a very real way, a “fruitful void” into which the players project themselves but beyond an at-the-table kind of way.
Examples:
* For me, the big imperfection in Burning Wheel that’s also key to its greatness is the scripted conflicts. They’re slow, they’re fussy, they’re procedurally challenging to master, and they take you right out of your character’s experience. They’re also one of the game’s (many) killer apps. Whenever it comes time for us to stop and script something, it creates this hiccup in our flow. It is a technical imperfection and the game wouldn’t be what it is without it. So we stop, we talk about the scripting, we move our heads into a different space. We accommodate the imperfection and therefore take a different level of ownership in it.
Maybe this is just a form of cognitive dissonance! Like, we already like this game, but there’s this part of it that’s hard/different/weird/disjointed, but we wouldn’t like a hard/different/weird/disjointed game so therefore…. and so on.
Another example:
* Apocalypse World 1E’s “seize by force.” Oh lordy was that hard to grasp. It was a huge glaring hole in the expected “this is how you hit and these are the consequences” school of violent conflict rules. So we had to adapt to it, right? Either we had to make this new weird thing fit into our head orrr, unfortunately, “fix” it via 2E’s various battle move solutions. (I’m in the minority here, I think, in that I really loved 1E’s difficulty, because it created a new space into which we could talk about what violence is really “for.”)
“Scene” long effects in games that make no effort to define a scene.
Murphy’s Rules-style math exploits that demand fictional positioning actually matter.
Per-session economic refreshes in games that don’t tell you how long a session is or how often you’ll need to engage with a reward cycle.
All imperfections. All the source of what makes a game great and not merely good.
I can’t think of a single technically “perfect” game out there, of course. Some are more airtight than others. But I think nailing down the imperfection in a game is a key toward figuring out what makes it great.
I’ve also been thinking about the deliberate imperfection as an out for the creator. I’ve been so obsessed with trying to achieve technical perfection in my work that I’ve also set myself up for a very unhealthy over-investment in the work after it’s gone out into the world. I very much will need a way for my soul to exit my blanket once someone buys it and inevitably misuses it.
What are some ch’ihónít’i you’ve seen in your favorite games?
(1) https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/article/view/1033/2037 if you’re interested in reading some hardcore academic talk on this topic
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This is a great insight! Two questions:
1. Do you think Luke & Crew would consider scripting an imperfection? (I’m, guessing the Bakers thought Seize by Force was, or they would not have revised it.)
2. “Murphy’s Rules-style math exploits that demand fictional positioning actually fucking matter.” Would you be able to give me some examples of this?
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Mark Delsing no idea on 1. That’s my take.
2: Oh dumb shit like putting sacks inside of sacks inside of sacks. Or weapons that have objectively worse stats and nobody takes ’em because nobody gets beyond “I roll to hit.” Yeahhhh good luck with that halberd in this tiny corridor.
Neither of which are the key to any particular game’s “greatness” that I can think of off the top of my head. But that’s the essence of a Murphy’s Rule.
I think there were things in Exalted that jump out at me like this. I don’t know why I think that. It’s at the back of my head.
Or maybe like…oh okay. In Urban Shadows the Wizard has a power-up move. It’s very simple, just roll it and get some hold to blow on magic. There’s no upper limit on how often you can do it nor how long it might take. So you have to talk about what it costs, time and materials wise, to power up. Maybe it’s truly nothing, and the counterbalance is the chance of rolling a miss! Maybe it’s time. Maybe it involves total quiet, and anything less than that requires you Keep Your Cool. But it introduces an interesting conversation about just what the Wizard’s jam is all about. US is full of that stuff, starting from “Let It Out” and going forward.
Mark Delsing better: ultra-effective combos in Champions/Hero type games, yeah? If you just math it out you can probably build completely “broken” effects. But then you absolutely must fictionally position their utility and effect, and in the course of that discussion the “broken” effect makes perfect sense. But the fact that you can math stuff out like that in Champions is part of its appeal, I think.
And then that mandatory discussion of effects’ fictional position becomes a Champions selling point.
You had me at “Champions/Hero type games”.
Fascinating. It’s a great point. I think that’s exactly why I love Saga of the Icelanders so much. The initial frustration when we figured some basic moves could not be used towards NPCs ; then realizing this glaring void in the design – for all its faults – actually made you target and interact with PCs so much more.
Linguist-me saw the title and immediately was like “Why is Paul talking about Navajo is this gonna be about minority and endangered languages oooooh oh wait no it’s…” and then it turned out to be great anyway, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
I.e. thanks for writing this.
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JC Nau right? I was thinking about SotI as well. You can’t talk sense to NPCs!
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Mark Delsing re BWHQ considering scripting an imperfection. You’d have to ask them, BUT there’s been many an occasion when they’ve flat out stated that Fight! Doesn’t work without scripting.
I’ve tried other games which use Social combat and I despise them. I don’t even like Mouse Guard social combat. DoW, however, I love to death. It’s the scripting PLUS the RP cue built into the different available actions to script
Man, I love you RPG nerds! Great Post Paul Beakley!
I agree with your contention that imperfection in a game is a “fruitful void” into which players insert themselves. There is no perfect game, and imperfections/incompleteness/unclarities in a game must be bolstered by a play group with its own spirit for the game to come alive.
Art lives in those imperfections. That’s important. And the designer can keep it that way by not explaining them.
My home group finished our season of Impulse Drive this week. We played it entirely via Zoom, character keepers in Google Sheets, rollforyour.party for dice, and Pinterest. It was my first successful run at playing a tabletop RPG online. I learned a lot about online play, and I’m looking forward to the next online experience. I can safely say I’m over my online play fears.
Click here to read the first half of my deep dive into Impulse Drive. I describe the meat and potatoes of how the game works there. These are my closing thoughts and I make several references back to it. Go refresh, I’ll wait here.
Good? Let’s do it.
The Pleasure of a Formal Finale
Bringing our game to a satisfying end reminded me that we frequently don’t do that. Far more often I just give up on a game, get distracted by something shiny, give in to impatience. Bad habit. I’ve shut down many games that needed to push past a hump.
I’m not sure what the inflection point is. For us it was around 10 sessions. Everyone was fluent with the system (even the little-used moves), their character options, and understood my interpretation and style of using the rules. Everyone’s storylines had momentum, so players could express their characters in more subtle and less urgent ways. We understood the setting better, including its underlying metaphysics. Every interpersonal connection had solidified – the pilot and the bounty hunter’s shared interest in professionalism, the pilot’s fear of the weird alien AI’s judgement, the mystic’s connection with the AI over their outsider-ness, and so on.
Arrrrgh!
A satisfying finale is, I think, satisfying because it’s your last chance to complete patterns. But to make the finale grand, you need to be willing and able to imply very large patterns leading up to it. The pattern-completion of each move playing out is a tiny little hit of happiness, but closing out the accretion of 40-50 hours of bits? Oh boy, it’s the final jigsaw puzzle piece being dropped into place. Actual, physical relief.
One thing that makes Impulse Drive play out one (and only one) campaign/season is that each playbook’s Calamity list includes a move that will take your character out of play, one way or another. It’s a neat, variable alternative to “retire in peace.” Two of our characters, the bounty hunter and the mystic, got to end the game with them. The bounty hunter faced off against the recurring villain with one final “only one of us walks away from this” move…and against all odds, missed. Astonishing. He rolled against his best stat – +3 – and missed. It was perfect. Meanwhile, the mystic had to burn through so much Stress to survive during the grand showdown that he picked up two Calamities, which allowed him to narrate taking over his mystic order and his sister becoming an estranged apostate of the same order. Marvelous.
It’s a Crew Game, but #notallcrews
“Space adventure” is a sprawling genre, particularly in the scamp freighter vein. We had chosen the smuggler ship playbook, which is baseline Impulse Drive. While fun-loving troublemakers are easy to understand, though, I think Impulse Drive forgets the genre also centers on frequent low-level conflict among the crew: Mal and Inara’s on-again-off-again relationship, Luke convincing Han to rescue a rich girl, everyone versus everyone every episode of Farscape. Sometimes everyone’s on the same page – particularly when they’re on mission – and sometimes they’re not.
The greatest ship crew ever conceived. I will not be taking questions at this time.
PbtA type games, especially when they’re close to Apocalypse World’s baseline, are tricky to maneuver through when it comes to PvP type conflict. All my players are experienced with Burning Wheel, and BW is our gold standard for fair-but-tough PvP play. The Duel of Wits system lets the players mechanize and resolve their arguments without any GM input. Impulse Drive doesn’t offer that. The PvP advice in every PbtA game I’ve ever run, including ID, is simple: follow the fiction. But in terms of gameplay affordances, it’s easy to push against that.
Like straight AW, there are essentially two mechanized social interaction sequences: intimidation and manipulation. Intimidation is in the Go Aggro vein: make a real threat and asking the target to force your hand or submit. Manipulation requires you have something on offer in return for agreement. Those choices are fine when it comes to pushing against NPCs. They’re less good against another player, because they both demand the target give up agency. There’s no counter-offer in the intimidate, and there’s no enforcement in the manipulate. Manipulate, in fact, is purposefully quite weak: the stick is that a PC must roll to get out from under it. The carrot half – XP if you do what I say – becomes non-incentivizing for reasons I cover below.
I mean, this is just how these games work without a ton of PvP infrastructure, like you find in Monsterhearts. What Impulse Drive is quite good at, though, is mechanically reinforcing a functional team. For example, you can support each other with a great move called “Lean on Me,” which covers both direct support and emotional comfort. It’s my current favorite version of helping rules, mostly due to the move being tied into the Stress rules. Not only can you provide help toward succeeding at the roll, you can also help them recover from Stress while you do it. Very neat. There are other examples of group decision type moves throughout the game as well.
Let us contemplate the fruit-filled gap.
On the other hand, leaving that gap in place is itself a design decision. If you’re not willing to actually harm someone, and you have nothing specific to offer, what does that leave the players? I know my BW-head players want a system cudgel, and not having one reflexively bugs them. But either the game goes on, or they dig in their heels and the game stops. This is also a legitimate outcome.
Story time!
We had an excellent moment in the game, near the end, where two characters had been acting like they were on the same page but were definitely not. Tons of marvelous dramatic irony, and the players reveled in it. But when the secret agent receives orders to get the mystic out of the way so the agent’s master can do a thing, the agent drugged the mystic and flew him out of the current system. The mystic eventually woke up, liberated himself, armed up, and got ready to murder the agent. Wow! But after some mystical psychic probing, he discovered the agent was following outside orders and would never physically harm anyone on the crew. That prompted a frustrating discussion.
The mystic wasn’t willing to blow away the agent, so no Intimidate. So instead he promised to mind his own business if only the agent would fly back – it’s the only thing he had to offer. He rolled Manipulate, but the agent got out from under it by succeeding at the Keep Your Cool roll. I think it cost a Stress, but whatever. So the players were left without a clear mechanical way forward. Interesting! I could have stepped in and offered something, but the real-world social pressure of both of them knowing the cost of digging in their heels meant they worked it out on their own.
Sometimes no system is itself the system. Sometimes frustration is okay.
The Long Game
As I suspected the last time I wrote about Impulse Drive, the playbooks are set up to play through one season of a TV show. It was a show with lots of little subplots, of course. Think Agents of SHIELD: three big acts within a larger arc. But the short list of advancements (you only buy from your own playbook, unlike Apocalypse World), the rapid pace of session-based advancement when sessions are short, and the list of Calamities you’ll eventually run out of all add up to a system-mandated endgame.
Would the game be improved with a … holy hand grenade? It wouldn’t not be improved.
To my mind, that’s a good thing. Because advancement is tied to missed rolls (Dungeon World style) and you use your Hooks to invoke more frequent misses and there are end of session questions, the shorter the session the faster the advancement. Everyone in our game of 12 sessions (or so, I lost count) advanced all five stats, bought all their playbook advances except each book’s “grenade” move – for real, every playbook has a special use of grenades, of all things – and most of their loadout slots. They did that a couple sessions short of burning through all their Calamities.
Our game shifted from lots of advancement-incentivized missing via Hooks, to all the stats improving, to everyone growing beyond advancement as an incentive and just killing it with boosted stats and no more Hooks. Which, you know, awesome. Love me some good competency porn. But since the Space Master (GM/MC) makes moves in the usual PbtA ways, I found myself grabbing more “when they expect you to say something” opportunities and making harder missed-roll SM moves because they were so rare. Giving up on advancement also meant the players spent less time thinking about and updating their Hooks at the end. If they had engineered better hooks I would not have minded a slower, longer focus. Ours didn’t, not really, and once hooks stopped mattering for advancement the players didn’t care about them.
The Work:Fun Ratio
It used to be fashionable in indie circles to loudly, angrily declare: “If the game doesn’t work, play a different game.” I think that has led to weird design choices, over-explaining rules, perfectionism and general paralysis among designers. It’s also led to much better, tighter, more focused design – even in mainstream games. Trade-offs! But as a culture-of-play value? I propose a different formulation: “If the game is too much work to make fun, find a game with a better work:fun ratio.”
Impulse Drive is an imperfect game. Its Apocalypse/Dungeon World origins are readily obvious if you’ve played either game. The new bits, like Calamities, stand out as novel. The bits of design tech from other games like Blades in the Dark (Stress, scene-scaled clocks) are also easy to suss out if you’ve played those games. In other words, the more different games you’ve played, the better you understand what Impulse Drive is trying to get at. You may need to help get it there sometimes.
The work:fun ratio to make Impulse Drive not just playable but fun is quite low, particularly if you’re experienced in the PbtA space. I would not suggest Impulse Drive as anyone’s first PbtA game, but third or fourth? It’s very easy to bridge over the game’s rough bits.
Parting Thoughts
In the end, I really enjoyed this campaign. I learned a ton about related subjects as well:
Character-driven PbtA play doesn’t really interface well with Stars Without Number style sandbox setup. Still a useful tool! But I learned a lot about both PbtA and sandboxes by trying to combine them.
Fruitful voids are still a thing, and I need to give the players space to navigate them (even if they’re frustrated with fumbling around).
It takes time for folks to get comfortable with a game’s systems, characters, and setting and situation. It’s almost always worth it.
There are notable technical upsides to online play, particularly the utility of a shared character keeper and the ability share screen media. I’m never giving up on live table play but I’m proceeding with online play with more confidence.
Clear endings are powerful enough that they’re worth intentionally pursuing.
Next up: still deciding! I’m leaning toward Imp of the Perverse. Which happens to be just $20 for the very beautiful book right now, by the way.
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