Magisterial Games

I made a mistake. I’m still paying for it.

My first foray outside trad gaming was Burning Empires, the sprawling epic space opera adaptation of The Burning Wheel that came out in 2006. Great game, transformational, made me dig deep into my own analytical brain. It ultimately led to the creation of IGRC! I still have fond memories. I would love to run it once more in my lifetime, beginning to end. Probably 20ish sessions to play through the campaign system. A worthy goal.

Because it was my first and I had a quarter-century of trad baggage at that point, we struggled. The most contentious and innovative design element we struggled with was the fact that Burning Empires is a competitive RPG. I wrote extensively at the time that the competitive element of the game was probably overhyped – you don’t have that much control over whether you won or lost a session – and distracted from the main point of the game, which is of course the roleplaying. Roleplaying in service to an existential struggle between humanity and the evil body-stealing Vaylen, but still.

In the course of working out how to play this thing, I had to move my players off defaulting to an adversarial attitude toward the GM. That was pretty much impossible with Burning Empires because, of course, the players are literally in competition with the GM! Tough to trust that the GM is playing in good faith and in partnership with the players. And here’s where I made my mistake that continues to haunt me.

The way the game works, to ensure competitive fairness, everyone – including the GM – has a scene budget. You’ve got scenes where you just describe stuff or have conversations; you set up the fictional positioning to rationalize the die-rolling that’s part of that budget. Mind you, in 2006 “fictional positioning” wasn’t well understood. I don’t even think the phrase had achieved wide(r) use yet. The other kind of scene was where you roll dice, either to add “real” assets (NPCs, equipment, and so on) with actual stats to the game, or to resolve a conflict. 

That “real” in scare quotes? The root of my mistake.

In those early formative years, my players were quite impressionable. The ones who hadn’t quit, usually quite angrily, because that’s what Burning Wheel/Empires games do to play groups. The ones who stuck it out could taste the new ideas and desperately wanted to understand them. But that often meant understanding them within the framework of the old style of play. So to make it all make more sense, I offered a maxim: 

If you’re just talking and describing, it’s just talk. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not real. Only dice make things real.

Jump ahead 20 years and you can see how dysfunctional this idea is.

It’s just not how games work now. They probably never did. In the intervening two decades, I’ve come to understand that fictional positioning is literally everything. The dice are there for other reasons than to make things stick, or count, or be real. But that idea firmly lodged itself in the heads of some of my oldest players. The ones who needed to bridge the gap between what had come before, and what would come later. I took the maddening old “is it crunch or is it fluff?” dichotomy and fucking weaponized it. 

So many regrets today emerge from this idea. Only recently have I diagnosed what the hell is going on.

The result today is that I’ve got players who simply don’t trust that “just talking or describing” actually means anything at all. They continue to seek out die rolls to make things stick. To assert authorship. (You can’t have authority without author!) To override the whims of a capricious GM-God. When you can use dice to settle scores you don’t have to trust.

The problem is that randomizers have continued to evolve beyond “did you accomplish a task?” Like, you literally cannot enforce your will over the game with many PbtA style designs. They’re there to kick the ball across the field, give it a spin, add something new to The Conversation. But everyone has to be part of that conversation. This extends beyond system design as well, into the broader, fuzzier realm of play culture.

Before there were conversational games, there were magisterial games. Yes, sure, you can move the goalposts such that “the conversation” includes literally all communication between participants. But in normal-language use, conversations are give and take. I say something, you respond and add to it, I hear you and add or challenge or amplify, and so on and so forth. Magisterial games – again, normal language here, although I’ve used it long enough that it’s become internal IGRC jargon – are a call and response between a figure of great authority and those without authority. Is it any wonder at all that distrust might emerge from this arrangement? 

Magisterial games are just another way of describing “The GM is God” thinking. It’s the root of Mother-May-I type play, “does my character know this?” questions, playing close to the vest because if the GM knows your plans, they’ll just fuck you over.

You can imagine the thrill of empowerment learning that if you roll dice, then it’s real. Then God Themself cannot override you. You’ve stormed the gates of heaven and dethroned a capricious and unjust divinity. 

Dethroning the GM has long been a throughline of post-Forge designs. But oh gosh, there was a time when folks were het up to do that. Real revolutionary vibes. Ultimately it was a good thing to dethrone the GM! It feels so much better to sit at a table as a friend, with my friends, with my own responsibilities and authorities but a very different relationship with them. Cooperating with my peers, being their fan, moving everyone to consensus over the fictional position of our shared hallucination.

I hope my older players can somehow get there as well. The residual distrust is hard to swallow. It makes me feel like an abusive spouse who has sworn to do better but the abused party never quite believes it. Who knows? Maybe I deserve it.

While I have your attention!

I hope you’ll check out the Indie Game Reading Club’s new podcast, the Indie Game Talk Club. Have a question you’d like us to talk about? Email hello@indiegamereadingclub.com. We’ve recorded our first three episodes and are working on our next three.