I meant to write about this sooner: the relative heaviness of Legacy.
The game has a lot going on: two layers of play (zoomed in to characters and zoomed out to families) with some fuzziness as to when you’ve fully focused on one or the other. Everyone has two playbooks (character and family). Eventually — I’m hoping my players will start thinking about this tonight — they’ll take on Wonders, mega-projects you can do to radically reshape your setting.
The move sets are broken up into “basic” and “peripheral” moves, both on the family and character sheets, but honestly after a couple sessions the division seems arbitrary. There’s also some overlap between moves. Example: are you defusing a tense situation or forging a path across precarious or dangerous terrain? That was our big one last time, as the characters tried to make their way out of a treacherous vampire-infested highrise in the ruins.
The typical basic move load of a PbtA game is 8 or 9 moves. I haven’t done a comprehensive audit, but looking at stuff I’m most familiar with:
Epyllion has 9, and they’re super simple. Probably the tightest move set I can think of.
Apocalypse World 2E has 8, with a couple one-off or moves-that-trigger-moves type things. And then all the minigames: road war, battle, etc. I gotta say, I don’t super-love the dramatic uptick in rules in 2E but I very much appreciate that those move sets are minigames that get invoked at specific times (rather than being moves to watch for at all times).
NIght Witches has 6 day moves and 6 night moves, which never overlap. There’s also a couple brief/debrief trigger things that I don’t really think of as “moves.”
Cartel has 9 moves, plus the stress subsystem and the whole heat thing, which is a separate minigame.
Monsterhearst 2E has 7ish — I don’t personally think of XP rules, healing, conditions etc as “moves” so much as “rules.” They’re not things you put your hands on, as a player, to achieve your goals.
Sagas of the Icelanders really just has 2 moves that are common to women and men (tempt fate and look into someone’s heart) plus various necessary procedures (harm, scars, campaign play stuff), but really the meat is in the Man and Woman lists, each of which have 4 moves. So probably the “simplest” but also asymmetrical.
Urban Shadows, which I had previously considered the “heaviest” PbtA on my list, has 8 basic moves, 4 faction moves, and both the Debt and Corruption subsystems.
Okay. With me so far?
Setting aside what I think are arbitrary divisions between “basic” and “peripheral,” Legacy has 8 Family moves we regularly use, and 9 Character moves we’ve regularly used. Those aren’t the full counts; I’m leaving out procedural kinda-not-move moves like what happens when your Mood goes high or low, how to heal, all that stuff.
Given what feels like good play (so far), being able to move between both modes of play and even occasionally blending those modes, means keeping 17 options in your head at all times! And that does not include playbook, role, and family options — happily just one of each for everyone so far. And it doesn’t include any of the GM-facing stuff (zooming in and out, tooling up, the in want let’s-stir-the-pot move, the turning of the Age).
Mostly the game feels playable, at least from where I’m sitting as facilitator. I do find myself spending a lot of time guiding and suggesting moves for players to make to Get Things Done: think about lending aid! Don’t forget those Treaties you have! Do you want to call for aid? Don’t forget to spend your debt and tech! And so on.
Probably the one big shift I’ve needed to make is to simply stop looking for descriptive move triggers during play. Like, there’s just no way for me to keep all four Role moves for all three characters in my head at all times: the players absolutely must track whether they’re triggering those moves (and therefore advancing). I still heavily rely on players declaring moves they’re making rather than observing the fiction for moves being made. That’s not a mode of PbtA play I like — I think the prescriptive/descriptive move technology of conventional PbtA games is a family-wide killer app — but given the extraordinary interplay of mechanisms here, it’s just necessary.
On the players’ side, jeez, I have no idea how empowered, or not, they’re feeling about all these options. It feels like a lot to stay on top of.
It’s funny: I did not eyeball Legacy as “complex” when I first read it, nor do I even right now, knowing better! I look at a list and thinking, well 6 moves seems pretty simple! Except for these other four moves. And the other play mode and its moves.
I’m kind of reminded of Masks as well, looking over all these moves. The Masks basic moveset is just 8. But! There’s also the entire block of stuff having to do with team mechanics and manipulating Influence (strings-y type things). It makes me wonder if making, like, all the rules “moves” is actually the best way to go. I mean I don’t know! I’m working on some elaborate games on my end as well, and I deeply fear the ever-growing rat’s nest of interconnected procedures that seems to spawn in every direction.
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I love thinking about this sort of cognitive load measurement in games. Turn shares some design elements with PbtA games, but it has an odd number of move-equivalent rules units. Since each character has a human role and a beast archetype, each player is keeping track of multiple abilities/powers (usually one from the human side, plus 2-4 from their beast depending on advances). They also track their own stress and exposure tracks.
For move-like rules units, the Town Manager (GM) only keeps track of the Struggles. They trigger more like saving throws. There are 4 of them to keep in mind for characters in human form, and 4 mirrored versions to keep in mind for characters in beast form (essentially, each side has a “deal with a stressful situation” struggle, an “I need to communicate” struggle, a “limit fallout from physical action” struggle, and an “alleviate stress” struggle). Usually, that means keeping track of only four at once, but occasionally you’ll see players in a scene in mixed forms (e.g., one human and one beast – there are no hybrid forms in Turn).
Tease! Here I was expecting at least something about commercial airplane cockpit design and human factors….
For me as a player, the amount of cognitive load is relative. What’s the outcome or impact of cognitive load? Measuring cognitive load as if it were linear based on number of potential actions, without consideration of individual perception (cognition lives in each person’s head, and their perception of the load may vary), or the impact that has on the behavior of the loaded individual seems to be navel-gazing wankery.
Unless and until you regard the cognitive load as either an enabler or inhibitor of some other action, it can’t be quantified in a useful way.
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Lex Larson Agreed! When I’m facing something where I have some existing confusion or lack of clarity, a large number of apparent options can exacerbate that and make the situation worse, but there are other times where the same number of options makes me feel like I’m empowered with choices. There are a lot of potential outcomes.
Lex Larson I feel a bit that part of it here for me is about the context of those who seek for system levers and/or system mastery, and the weight of the number of options and complexity of interactions with them.
For example, Paul is a big system mastery guy. He wants to use the system well to do what it was intended to do to get a positive outcome for his table. Thus, when he comes to the table he’s going to try to interact with all the levers of the system in the best way as he can.
OTOH, when several of my players engage with PtbA games, the same number of levers doesn’t necessarily affect their play (or effect their game) in the same way because they don’t care about the levers, as such. Like, they come to play a character and get some feels, and so they do what their character does, and if they trigger a move along the way — cool.
I’m somewhere in the middle, and it often gives me an odd space to fit in where I’m dealing with a different level of cognitive load than either set of my players or folks I play with at cons or whatever. I don’t fit easily into either model of interaction with system, and so I find folks discussing how and why they interact with levers, and the points it hits them at, useful and not at all naval gazing. Even if I don’t agree with their analysis, their analysis helps me understand how they approach system, and thus how I approach them when we game together.
edit: Damn computer… didn’t mean to post yet.
Legacy, in terms of cognitive load, is an interesting game to me. As when I’m actually playing (the two times I played) I didn’t struggle with it particularly hard. But when I’m setting up a game, or doing mental prep to get my head into the game? Then it’s pretty brutal.
I think it has less to do with the number of moves though, and with the high variability of setting and the number of inputs that can go into it.
I’m having a hard time pinning this down in words, but while I sometimes feel this impression Legacy works more like Burning Wheel than PBTA, with these tight player-skill subsystems, I also feel that impression is wrong?
I get a push and pull between “Moving resources around is all about engaging these moves and figuring out what it looks like and only happens when you do” and then completely re-evaluate that when I see “_When your family claims or creates a significant resource in the fiction_ add it as a surplus”
I don’t feel clear about, is there a way to orthogonally create these things fictionally without working through these combos of family moves, or is that just a sign you weren’t watching the moves closely enough along the way?
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Jonathan Perrine right? I know what you’re getting at. The “conversation” feels less like natural language and more about the interplay of formal systems and economies. I pretty much never evaluate for moves triggers.
I think some of that too is how big and chunky resolution is. There’s not much that happens blow by blow, except possibly Defuse. Maybe. It’s just a different style.
I do think the game works better when the players understand their mechanical options and play hard toward them. And that’s very much a Burning Wheel thing.
Brand Robins One of the most common effects of cognitive load has to do with maintaining load over time erodes our decision-making abilities.
The study I read specifically used food choices when studying cognitive load. Folks who were under more load throughout the day experienced less ‘willpower’ to choose healthy food options at the end of the day.
In gameplay, that may be how cognitive load of a game manifests: we get the munchies. Or… maybe we get more impulsive and improv more than we would have, had we had less load.
Paul Beakley But the way I think this ties back into cognitive load is that on the player side, in many games I can often click off the move list part of my brain and chase fiction, relying on the MC to translate when we blunder into cool uncertain things aka moves.
Because that responsibility is spreading out a little, it’s harder to step back from those move sheets as a player.
Lex Larson oh interesting! Do you happen to have a link? Or study name so I can look it up?
I’m thinking about what sorts of things require “willpower” or something like it in a tabletop environment. Tamping down frustrated outbursts is at the top of my personal list.
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Brand Robins I’ll hunt the study up for y’all.
Thanks!
Brand Robins – here’s the main research on cognitive load impacts on food choices in adults, when provided food advertising as a stimulus.
researchgate.net – (PDF) The effects of food advertising and cognitive load on food choices
Awesome, thanks again.
Fascinating convo! I’m playing an Urban Shadows Vamp at the moment and trying to work out a balance between mechanically pursuing people for my Web, and portraying my character with fictional motivations. It’s hard and I never quite framed it like y’all are discussing.
Looks like this issue at the system-level in Legacy would break some groups. Oh for the days when PbtA was fiction-first, ’twas a simpler time. 😛
Aaron Feild oh yeah, the Vamp minigame is a really good parallel to Legacy. Now imagine everyone has to manage their own Web, and every Web needs to be moving forward through time for decades and centuries. It’s doable! But you need really good tools for it.
Today’s post digs into this one more.
Oh, huh, just saw this post too. Whoops! For what it’s worth a lot of what I’m doing when designing Free From the Yoke is in alignment with this; I’ve stripped back the number of moves, removed the basic/peripheral designation in favour of something more like ‘generic moves for a wide variety of situations’ versus ‘minigame moves for specific situations’, and I’ve cut out Treaty, Data and Tech as things you need to track.
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.
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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.
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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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