If you want to clarify to yourself the things you love about roleplaying games, play a session of your minimum viable game. Start with as blank a slate as you can manage and feel for the missing pieces.
There are a few games that excel at completely improvised roleplay, but the list is shorter than you think. There are lots of “generic” RPG systems or platforms out there, but in most cases there’s still prep to be done: working out stunts in Fate, spec’ing out opponent values in GURPS or Hero, whatever. I recently got to play a couple games of Mana Project Studio and Fumble GDR’s Not The End, which was a fine example of this minimum viable game genre.
Not The End
Sometimes you just want to wing it, you know? Particularly at a con: I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get a bug up my butt and I’m like, “I could really use some space horror right about now.” Or “time travel, awesome, but man it’s a hard genre to just improvise around.” You didn’t prep anything, didn’t want to prep anything, you just want to sit and play a game with some friendly strangers.
Not The End, from Italy-based Mana Project Studio and Italian podcast Fumble GDR, has turned out to be outstanding for this kind of play. It’s also most definitely not for everyone. It’s close to a perfect Rorschach Test of a game, the absolute minimum to provide prompts and structure to your play and hardly anything else.
Not The End’s central trick is that to test your character – you run tests at the usual time, when something is risky and the outcome is uncertain – you draw from a bag filled with colored stones. The GM sets the test’s difficulty (how many GM stones are going into the bag) and danger (how many of the GM’s stones you need to draw to be taken out of the scene). Then the player looks over their traits and also throws their stones into the bag. The player, knowing exactly how many of the GM’s and their own stones are in the bag, then decides how many stones to draw, from 1 to 4. The decision doesn’t have a fictional position. The point of the exercise is to make the player feel the danger, weigh how much they want to do something against how dangerous it is to even try.
If you hit the danger number of GM stones, well, you’re out. But you only need to draw one of your own stones to succeed. Mostly you end up with lots of “yes, but” type outcomes. A single player stone means success, with additional stones providing either additional benefits to the success, or a marker on a trait they used for a future bonus. The player decides how the GM stones they drew get used, either assigned to “adrenaline” (the next draw you make will be four stones) or “confusion” (tally up the total number of stones in the bag, the GM randomizes the colors, and then you draw), or handed to the GM with an instruction to receive a Misfortune (a negative trait that will drop more GM stones into the bag when the trait impacts the action) or a Complication (the GM introduces a twist that increases the difficulty or danger of the situation).
One fun twist: if, after you’ve drawn the number of stones you’re committed to but want a better result, you can call the whole thing “risky” and automatically draw a total of 5 stones. Then you give the GM their stones, who then gets total freedom to do with them as they wish.
So lots of push-your-luck, a fun player-facing bit of tension that reminds me of Epidiah Ravachol’s Dread (and later, Alex Roberts’ Star Crossed) with the Jenga draw, and tons of free-wheeling characterization around character traits.
The Character Hexes
The bag-building push-your-luck system is the most novel bit of the game, but character creation is worth talking about as well. You start with an archetype, a broad short description of your character based on the premise you’ve agreed to. We played a “go investigate a rescue beacon that’s been set off on not-Isla Nublar where a not-Jurassic Park catastrophe took place decades ago” premise, so the players picked things like trail guides, scientists, trophy hunters, and hackers as archetypes. Easy enough.
The next ring of hexes around the archetype are your Qualities, adjectives that describe your archetype. And then finally, the outer ring is Abilities, specific things your character is good at. If you look at the sheet, you’ll also see that many Abilities have pairs of Qualities connecting them. The idea is to be inspired by interesting or surprising match-ups of Qualities: you might be “Cunning” and “Frightening,” and those things point at “Interrogate” as an Ability, as one example from the book. The connections mean nothing mechanically, but they prompt interesting thinking around how to describe your character.
Not The End isn’t the first game to feature freeform trait creation, of course. And to make the most of a game like this, you need to want to be constrained by your traits. It’s all too easy to weasel your way into anodyne phrases like “Driven” or “Brilliant,” thinking rightly that they’ll be useful darned near every time. But that’s pretty boring to play because you’re gonna go back to those easy choices over and over. I think for competitive players, Not The End isn’t a great tool.
That said, talking out your traits at a free-wheeling table can get everyone on the same page. As a pregame conversation starter, I thought the character creation process was a fun exercise. But sometimes it can be hard to calibrate just the right adjective or verb, something with an interesting texture that can be useful but not every time.
Not The End has a slick little advancement system as well, and you can even make it fire off in a one-shot environment. At any time, you can declare a test you’re about to make is “Crucial” before you make it (they recommend once per session). Then you make the test and change something on your character sheet to reflect how the test played out. You can add another trait to your hexes, you can swap a trait with something that better reflects how your character has changed, you can take a Scar (kind of an anti-trait that gives the GM a stone in the bag, but also gives you a place to put drawn GM stones), or learn a Lesson. I love the Lessons! It’s a deck of 54 cards with special game-changing rules, three lessons per 18 different themes. Might be a new hex for you to put a stone in for some benefit, might be some change to the normal rules. I dealt random Lessons out to players for our one-shots because they’re fun toys to have available.
What About Long Term Play?
I don’t have direct experience with how Not The End may play out across sessions. The character advancement rules are exciting to me, and I do think with the right table you could see some interesting evolutions happen. One trick I keep thinking about is how you might add a couple Abilities and later backfill the Qualities that point toward them. Or you might make meaningful edits to your traits that just feel good at the table. But none of this is aimed at making your character “better.” It’s all about adding texture and description.
If I were to run Not The End in a long-term game, I would look at stricter lists of Archetypes, and possibly Qualities and Abilities. Or perhaps make Abilities contingent on particular Qualities, and make Qualities contingent on certain Archetypes. You could easily hack out something like a playbook/class system with this! And you might end up with a more clearly defined set of Traits that vibe right with the tone and style you want to play toward.
Being able to tune your tonal range is a strength of a freewheeling trait type game, but it inevitably runs up against the players who want their characters to be better. Everything is a tradeoff in games, and this is no exception.
The Stories Book
Coming from a graphics-intensive publisher, Not The End is gorgeous in PDF and I assume will be just as gorgeous as a physical artifact when it delivers. But there’s a second book for the game, Stories, which looks even more lavish.
Stories includes 15 settings/scenarios/premises. I worked from the Evolution Island set for my test games, and it was … okay. Not great! I never quite understood whether we should be leaning more toward survivors on the island during the dinosaur catastrophe, or many years later returning to the island. I mean, it’s not a big deal, I made a call and adjusted accordingly. But all the scenarios in the book feel undercooked. In some cases it’s clear the story got edited but didn’t go through a final review, with missing NPC references or stubs of storyline just hanging out there. In others, you get a fascinating setting but no actual scenario. But it’s packed with interesting ideas, more colorful and weird than most anything else you’ll find on the shelf. And that’s another strength of coming up with your own Traits: whatever setup you dream up, you can easily come up with natural-language descriptions that just plug into the game and work.
One of the sample scenarios from the core rulebook has since been expanded into a freestanding game, Kickstarted, and is now available in PDF: Knights of the Round, an Arthurian-esque anime-style game featuring high schoolers piloting mechs. Yeah it’s as bonkers as it sounds. The Sax’on Empire is, apparently, the primary enemy of the heroic Bret’ons. Oh yes.
Other Tools In This Toolbox
Not The End is, of course, not the only way to improvise a session of play with minimum viable rules. Here are some others I’ve personally played, and how they compare to NTE:
Archipelago
In this four-player GMless (or “GMful,” if you prefer) game, players decide on a premise – the assumption is a journey between two places, not sure why – and figure out how to break the game up into four broad areas of authority. When I played this, we told the story of a rolling ultramarathon across the country and the misery the runners were going through to finish. So we broke the game up into things like “the road,” “the weather,” “the other runners” and “the race officials.” Whenever we had a question come up about those things, the player in charge provided an answer. The game is mostly driven by cards with random prompts, as well as a set of ritual phrases to nudge folks toward or away from certain outcomes (for safety or creativity reasons). Easy, affordable, I always have an Archipelago deck in my con go-bag.
The discussion of how to divvy up narrative duties feels creatively related to working out the traits (archetypes, qualities, abilities) in Not The End. In terms of actual play, Archipelago requires more collaboration than Not The End but also requires the players to share at least some understanding of the scenario or premise, since there’s no authority figure there to provide canonical answers.
Primetime Adventures
In this GMed game, the conceit is that you’re playing out a TV show. Everything in the game is framed in TV terms, with the GM as Producer and everyone taking a character in the show. The premise itself is what makes the game so wonderful for pickup play, assuming you’re dealing with folks who have ever watched television. The game’s core economy revolves around Fan Mail, little beneficial tokens you pass around for cleverness and principled character play. Like Not The End, Primetime Adventures features free-form traits, and all the strengths and problems those entail. Truly one of the most innovative of the previous generation of indie games.
I think the big difference here is the metaphor of play. PTA is a TV show, with all the abstraction that comes with that. It uses card draws to work out resolution, and that felt to me less like the Jenga-like experience of the player manipulating their own risk-taking threshold. It’s also quite exterior-focused, if that makes sense, because of the TV show metaphor: how do scenes look, what actors are present, what does the show require? Different than looking at your character’s description and working out how they perform from that.
Fate Accelerated
This extremely stripped back version of Fate also features freely created traits (called Aspects here) and a little ecosystem of Fate Points that go either into manipulating the narrative through adding new scene elements, or paying players to invoke existing elements. Lots of fictional-positioning manipulation. When I’ve played Fate, it feels very much like the Aspect-creating bit of play is about directing the game’s camera, as it were, toward things to make them “important.” Fate also uses little bonuses called Stunts, which are combinations of a small bonus used in a specific situation. Stunts strike me as something an experienced GM would be able to quickly describe back to a player who had a vague idea, and not necessarily a barrier to a truly improvised session.
Go Explore!
Here are some others I have not played, but the IGRC Slack community brought up. If you know more, write back and tell me about it!
- Universalis
- Simple World
- Cartomancy
- Arium: Discover (and Arium: Create, a worldbuilding side game)
- Vice & Virtue
- Charm
- PDQ
So About That Rorschach Test…
With nothing more than a handful of descriptors and a way to inject unexpected outcomes into unresolved moments, here’s what Not The End highlighted for me about my roleplaying baselines:
- It’s hard to get everyone on the same creative page under time pressure. Probably the toughest challenge of a literal “hey you want to play a summer slasher story? Great, let’s go!” event. Much to my chagrin, mood board GMing would probably help here.
- I personally like specificity because constraints prompt creativity. Of course it’s a continuum, extreme constraint just strangles everything, but NTE’s amount felt good. I’m also reminded that some folks naturally prioritize effectiveness over specificity, and that’s a tough circle to square.
- When I’m forced to improvise across many hours, my brain naturally either goes toward tropey cliches, or wanders so far afield into weird territory that all that “same creative page” nonsense I worked so hard for goes out the window. This is a place where I appreciate PbtA style moves or other rules that prod the conversation toward surprising places (and makes me sigh in resignation when those rules just further reinforce tropey cliches – turns out I’m already pretty good at that).
- Having some kind of randomizer at hand to inject uncertainty is good for me. I liked the visceral feel of the uncertainty as well, although the fact it’s semi-isolated from actual character competency feels a little weird to me. Not a show stopper! But it’s a distinctive style of play.
- Of the myriad ways to structure The Conversation of roleplay, I really do like prioritizing description over competence, adjectives over stats. But I also like the process of confirming that everyone at the table is there with me, or can quickly throw up a flag letting me know they’re not. Which, honestly? Is absolutely fine as long as I know. And a game like Not The End is quite good at highlighting that gap.
- Gosh is it nice to not have to think about how to mechanically balance threats. I’ve never loved the math side of trad gaming and all that it entails: does this threat feel dangerous? Will it straight kill the characters? Do I care about a fair fight or are we gonna let the players decide that for themselves?
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Interesting. It is a little like reading something by someone feeling their way towards the FKR, or perhaps purposefully circling it whilst looking the other way and pretending there’s not a whole load of folks freestyling mininal viable games already.
With a couple of guys I started with as a player in a brilliant BW game, I’m now running a game with one player facing mechanic, and lots of setting specific stuff for me. It turns out that building a game around Primal 2d6 that provides amazing, really low prep, potentially long term play, is quite straightforward, if you have the buy-in, the players, and the confidence to really referee instead of only referring to the “complete” tome of rules.
NTE and KotR:A are not from Mana project but from Fumble GDR!!!!
Ooh, I can update that.
We played four sessions of Tales of Xadia over the past couple months. Tales is the first complete and self-contained game to come out of Cortex Prime, the third generation of the Cortex ruleset by Cam Banks. My personal experience with long-form Cortex play was a rough start with Serenity way back in the day, and Firefly when Cortex came back out in revised form. I’ve played a bunch of Cortex stuff through the years as one offs – Marvel Heroic, Smallville, Leverage – but Tales was my first hands-on experience with Prime.
I’m not a close follower of Cortex games. Not sure why not! I like Cortex better than any edition of Fate, probably its closest relative. It handles PvP conflicts quite well, always a good thing because so much good tension can emerge between conflicting PCs. And the little dice game you play as you work out rolls is genuinely a fun time.
I think my hesitation is because everything that comes out for Cortex is attached to an existing license: Firefly and Marvel and Smallville and Leverage! Turns out I’m frequently allergic to license-based games. (Timely: check out Jahmal Brown’s Kickstarter for Lifted, a Cortex-based supers game completely detached from a licensed setting!)
Not that I won’t play them. We ran Modiphius’ 2d20 Dune and liked it okay (it cribbed ideas from Cortex but left out its economy, so Dune ultimately fell flat for us). I’ve played a ton of Mouse Guard and Burning Empires, although you wouldn’t be blamed for not thinking of those as licenses (they’re both based on obscure-ish comics). But given the choice, I almost always pick games that aren’t based on existing properties.
Tales of Xadia is based on The Dragon Prince, an animated series on Netflix. It’s good! I like The Dragon Prince, but I haven’t consumed every scrap of lore or really spent any time imagining what play might be like in Xadia, the show’s setting. But the show is well executed, has lots of Avatar: the Last Airbender vibes, great inter-character tensions and a visually appealing setting.
Cortex 101
Every Cortex game consists of a subset of rules from the Cortex toolbox, all of which work with any other part. As a toolbox, Cortex is smart as hell and firmly in trindie territory. Most of the rulesets don’t bother with modeling physics (a la Hero or, to a lesser degree, GURPS), but rather model thematic ideas and how they interact. If you already think about games this way, Cortex is awfully fun to fiddle with. But if you need your game to be a physics model, you’re going to be disappointed.
The Cortex transaction is straightforward: you build a pool of dice out of your various character bits, roll and add together the best two. Or the two dice that beat the other side’s best roll (usually either the GM rolls a pair of dice sized to represent the difficulty of a task, or another player starts shit and they roll to set the starting difficulty of a longer contest). Then there are some tricks you can do with plot points to buy more dice, or more effects. Big margins of success get you some game effects, and the biggest die size of the dice you didn’t use to succeed at a task becomes an “effect die” that may let you do stuff as well. It’s modestly elaborate, with several levers you can pull each time you roll (plot point spends, special abilities that trigger, and so on).
As a game-game, Cortex’s dice and point manipulation is fun even though all that manipulation doesn’t “look” like anything in the fiction as you do it. It’s the internal player feeling of pushing their luck and weighing their options, combined with how the fiction shakes out after the roll, that makes the game engaging.
A Closer Look at Tales of Xadia
System-wise, the Cortex ingredients in Tales are:
Attributes: a typical traddy spread of character descriptions, like agility and awareness.Values: five different ethical categories you use in combination with Attributes. You have to decide what’s motivating your character for any given role, possibly guided by or contradicting a “value statement” that each Value has. You can also stake out goals you want to achieve, constrained by your Values – low-ranked Values limit how “important” a goal you can set attached to it, prompting you to take bigger goals for your higher-ranked Values. I dig this bit quite a lot.Distinctions and SFX: stuff that models your upbringing and vocation. “SFX” in Cortex-speak are neat little rule exceptions or dice tricks.Assets: something or someone that helps you in the moment. This is also where spells show up, although the way they’re treated in the game is super open-ended.Specializations: three “skills,” more or less, more narrowly defined than your vocation distinction.Stress Tracks: there are five hit point tracks (more or less) that give your opposition dice to roll, and can evolve into Trauma, a permanent(ish) source of Stress dice. The characters are wreathed in a ton of plot immunity mostly via the Stress/Trauma system.
There are some interesting bits missing from what experienced Cortex folks might think of as core, as well as a couple original inventions that don’t appear in the Cortex Game Handbook (the overarching source document from which all Cortex Prime games are based).
The most notable missing bit is Complications: normally when the players roll 1s, the GM gives them Plot Points (PPs) and introduces a new play factor, with a die rank attached to it and the possibility that clever players might turn those complications back against the GM. This is also how you might model an injury: broken leg (d10) means every time your broken leg might impact your ability to do something, the GM gets to roll another d10 in their pool.
That doesn’t happen in Tales of Xadia. Generally the only mechanical result of conflicts in Tales comes in the form of Stress: the character is now afraid, or corrupted by dark magic, or, yes, injured. I think it plays out mechanically similarly but it keeps outcomes focused on a narrow range of characters’ internal states. External complications might show up in the course of a Challenge, though, in which some very large goal “hits back” against a PC when it’s the goal’s turn.
The big innovation over the basic Cortex Prime toolbox is Catalysts, ie boss-type NPCs that are important to the scenario. There are some interesting emergent properties of the Catalyst rules. Most notably, there are always at least two Catalysts, typically headed toward, or in, conflict with each other but neutral to the PCs. This aims scenario design toward the PCs being interlopers into other folks’ problems in the course of their travels, interacting with one Catalyst or the other to work out their problems, or bring the Catalyst(s) more in line with what the PCs need. The game focuses heavily on social interactions because of the requirement that “Tales” (ie scenarios) have these characters.
What Do You Doooo?
There’s a lot to like about how Tales of Xadia plays out, but the setting left me cold. For one, there is no premise to the game other than “having adventures in Xadia.” It’s very much A Fantasy Game™ in that regard, quite generic despite all the nice art they use from the show. I had a hard time dredging up the setting’s essential tensions and themes: humans and elves distrust each other, human society relies on the deeply unpleasant consequences of
capitalismDark Magic, there’s a dangerous borderland separating the human and elf halves of the continent, and there are five human kingdoms that mostly get along with each other except when they don’t.There’s a lot of material in Tales that I had no idea how to use: lengthy chapters about the dragons of the show, lists of magical creatures, little rumors attached to each of the elven tribes and human kingdoms, and a weirdly comprehensive discussion of the game’s metaphysics that have literally no bearing at all on how the game plays out. But no guidance as to what a typical scenario might entail beyond the sample scenario in the book, or what themes the game is designed to hit (other than dealing with other folks’ problems in the course of your travels). It was a good IKEA catalog of material, but incomplete instructions.
In our game, we contrived reasons for three disconnected characters (a hard-bitten Katolian explorer, a Durenian farmboy with a Dark Magic gift, and a homesick elven mage) to be searching for the lost ruins of Elarion, birthplace of humanity and the origin of Dark Magic, hidden somewhere in The Border. Pretty straightforward quest-type stuff, complicated by two Catalysts with very different plans of their own for Elarion. Every session was fun, the showdown at Elarion was pretty good (and a bit frustrating: the game doesn’t handle PC team-vs-boss conflicts very well), and after we were done I just didn’t feel inspired to cook up more reasons for these three characters to continue their journeys.
I was left with the feeling that “be a huge fan of The Dragon Prince” is the expected prep. Despite having watched the available seasons some time ago, I’m not a huge fan of the show and don’t feel inspired by the setting when it’s not centered on the show’s plot. Xadia as a playable setting faces the same challenges of character-driven IPs like Star Wars (ep IV era): if you’re not Luke, what’s motivating you? Star Wars now has literally thousands of hours and millions of words that answer this question, and Xadia doesn’t.
Deciding to play a bunch of humans simplifies the question, because now the elves can be outsider opposition and kingdom politics become more straightforward. And vice versa. What the game invites you to do, because look at these marvelous rules, is to mix it up with human and elf characters together, as of course we did. But to do that you need a real strong premise. The TV show provides one. Tales of Xadia does not.
Next up for me is digging deeper into Magpie’s treatment of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra in their PbtA game Avatar Legends. At first glance it looks more flexible and more tightly constructed around the practicalities of answering the oldest and arguably only question in RPGs: “what do you doooo?”
Playing With Canon
So how do you make the most of games that are set in pre-existing settings or properties? Depends on the game of course. Some properties are just better suited to open-ended invention and play: Star Wars is a billion-dollar industry now built around open-ended(ish) invention, and the setting is purposefully designed with lots of affordances and more canonical material than any human could consume in a lifetime. Dune is trickier, but I think Modiphius did a sharp job of creating a game where the machinations of your made-up House are always going to be interesting, despite the galaxy-spanning implications of a weirdo Space Messiah.
Some settings, I think, come with clearer baked-in story premises than others. Dune is about political ambition and space feudalism (although it really should be more about anti-colonialism in this day and age: I would play a “Fremen wreck the Empire’s shit, a theme and variations” game all day and night). Star Wars isn’t really “about” much other than the ever-present threat to personal freedom from fascists and the perpetual fallout of that (robust black markets cropping up in the face of oppression, leading crime both organized and freelance to thrive, bam, now you’re playing Edge of the Empire).
Some properties are defined by their premise, and not canonical setting material. The Terminator, for example, has an open-ended premise and not much setting: if the future wants you dead, can you fight back and make something better? Really the only “setting” in The Terminator is the ever-present threat of a malevolent AI arising in the future and inevitably deciding to rid itself of humanity. The Marvel games I’ve played reward, but don’t demand, deep fidelity to established canon – and happily, comics are notorious for tossing canon out the window at regular intervals via multiverses or relaunches or whatever. The only canon is that you have license to toss out the canon.
And of course there’s Call of Cthulhu, the most globally successful property-based game of all time, and it’s a mix of premise (what if the universe just didn’t care, and was inhabited by incomprehensible beings that humans are stupid enough to think they can bargain with?) and setting (ie the various critters and gods and whatnot). There’s a little physical setting as well, stuff like the Dreamlands and the weird alien complex buried in Antarctica. But it’s the compelling premise that keeps the Mythos games rolling, more than yet one more game of battling the Mi-Go or whatever.
Many settings (like Xadia) rely on the enthusiasm of its fandom to find its way: if you’re not a G.I. Joe fan, what is a session of the new G.I. Joe RPG “like?” What’s the premise beyond beating on Cobra baddies? Maybe that’s enough, the attraction of creating and recreating familiar thrills. Is there enough hook to A Song of Ice and Fire to make it something other than A Grimdark Fantasy Game if you’re not super into the books/show? Is the Peacekeeper government and mix of wacky muppet-alien species enough to make a Farscape game go? I’m a fan of the last couple, and even then I’m not sure I’d be eager to just keep reiterating the things I already love about them. High-fiving each other through familiar territory feels like a squandered opportunity to invent something new and personal.
Given a rich canonical setting or a gripping canonical premise, I’ll take the premise every time. But not all games are for everyone. Is it unfair to expect that a license-based game appeal to non-fans of the license? Oh totally. But I would also propose that any game needs to provide clear guidance and procedures for what you’re about to spend hours playing. Or trying to.
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