Today’s thing is “Which game mechanic inspires your game the most?” Weird question once you get out of the trad/conventional play bubble, but it did get me thinking. Mostly I got hung up on “what even is a mechanic?”
My pedantic game-theory brain hates the word right out of the gate; it’s a mechanism not a mechanic. A mechanic is somebody who works on your car. That’s never caught on and it’s not really the hill I wanted to die on, so I’ve always fallen back to “procedure.” That also kind of opens up the topic in my head beyond, you know, death spirals and escalation dice and aspects and flags.
I think the one procedure, which is more like a guiding philosophy, I guess, that is most present in my mind no matter what kind of game I’m running or playing, is the idea of Radical Transparency.
This came to me via several concurrent threads I was chasing down, oh, maybe a decade ago. One thread was wrapping my head around the task/intent split in Burning Wheel, which absolutely requires the player be honest and explicit about what it is they want out of their effort. Another thread was a really great grid I saw someone put together that looked at explicit intent versus transparency, I think. Gosh, I went looking for it online but heck if I can remember how it went.
Anyway, the “procedure” (such as it is) is super straightforward: if you’re a player, let the other players know what you’re going for. If you’re facilitating, keep digging until you’re super clear on what the player is getting at. This sounds pretty fucking obvious but it’s transformational when you’ve been breathing trad air for decades. This means no more gotcha moments from the GM, no more acting pissy because you were trying to psychically project what you were going for but didn’t want to “break immersion” or whatever. My younger readers might be horrified to read that both those things are awfully common out in the big trad ocean.
This one change to how I approach play was probably the single most bad-disruptive event in my ongoing gaming scene. Players suddenly needed to take a lot more responsibility. Everyone suddenly needed to trust each other: nobody can “beat” anyone else at the game when there are no gotchas. And as the GM most of the time, I really needed to take player goals and desires into account rather than performing a (not really) “neutral” refereeing job around the pure physics of the game.
Ironically, some of my favorite current games actually don’t work that well with explicitly transparent intents getting spelled out. Apocalypse World and most of its offspring doesn’t need or care about intent: you just trigger the move, or the move is triggered, and fuck your intentions. And yet our local play habits have so thoroughly absorbed the lessons of radical transparency that we end up talking about intent in sidebar all the time: “Okay so what I’m trying to get Balls to do is just walk away from protecting the hardhold. I so do not want to start shit.” “Okay yeah then you’re really not gonna Go Aggro, right, you’re manipulating.” Whatever. That conversation happens a dozen times every night, no matter what we’re running.
What’s funny about internalizing Radical Transparency is that it’s so very obvious when you’re playing with someone who has not.
I had a gaming buddy, one of my best, playing with his wife and my wife in an Urban Shadows game before they moved to another state. And in that game, he was playing a ghost. Well, so as GM, I’m having to pay attention to a lot of stuff and I haven’t memorized everything about every playbook in the game. So we had this scene where a ghost gang basically cornered his character to beat on him. I know they’re all ghosts and the damage isn’t real or permanent, and I explain (for transparency reasons) that they’re really just showing him that there’s more of them and they’re tough guys. Anyway, when I ask what he does about he just says “nothing,” and sits back with a smug look on his face. I’m not sure what to do about this! So I’m like, “Um…nothing? Just take the beating? I feel like you’re not participating because you got cornered and outnumbered.” He just shrugs. Well, what I had forgotten was that ghosts always return to some anchor point in the world, rather than taking lasting damage. He figured out how to “win” the scene but didn’t want to say it out loud until he could show off that he’d outsmarted me, I guess.
It was a weird moment! Like, it was more important to him to win the scene than it was to just say “oh, I’ll just let myself rematerialize back at the church” or whatever. At least that’s how it felt. And that’s the big split when you’ve got folks who have not bought into the idea that Radical Transparency is how I’m operating. When you’re the transparent one and they’re not, it’s easy to feel taken advantage of.
I’ve had folks act surprised at this approach at conventions, which I’ve come to expect. Especially true from the mostly-Pathfinder folks who want to drop in on some weird indie shit for a session just to see. It doesn’t always work out; sometimes they don’t feel good about the lack of surprise and gotcha, the creative and intellectual combat mode of play between the player and the GM. I still feel like there’s a lot of good creative tension between both roles! But it doesn’t rely on opacity about intent.
I don’t know that this is a “mechanic” (mechanism, procedure) really but it’s what came to mind. Fight me.
(Don’t fight me.)
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Had a chance to process some more of how our Firefly game went down Saturday night. So here’s an interesting thing, mostly due to debriefing with my wife Karen, my favorite new player.
K: “You know in the game where you told Emily (my 14yo niece) a bunch of secret stuff?”
Me: “Yup.”
K: “And then at the end you said Now, this is all stuff that only your character knows. How much of this do you want to share with the other characters?”
Me: “Yeah. I do that on purpose.”
K: “But why? I think it was confusing to her.”
Me: “You think? It’s important she get the difference between players and characters.”
K: “But I thought the fun part was pretending you’re someone else.”
Then we talked a while about immersion, bleed, and author/actor stance stuff. Which to a noob? Holy shit, really really obscure high-level considerations.
Once upon a time, I looooved using all the actor-stance immersion tricks. All of them! I’d pull off players to give them secret information, I’d pass notes, I’d encourage players to secretly discuss stuff. Secrets secrets secrets. I’d coordinate with players to give an unreliable account to a player whose character was “insane” or drugged or in VR or whatever. Pull out all the stops. Huge fun. Hugely problematic.
Karen is sad that I don’t do that stuff any more. She thinks it sounds awesome. And here I am, more than 3 decades into this experiment, thinking nooooo…
Right around my time tearing apart Burning Wheel, we flipped the script and went for total, radical transparency. GM shares the “secret” stuff with everyone, treats the players like adults who can separate fantasy from the people at the table, rely heavily on dramatic irony, very firm author-stance play. Hold your terrible flawed character out there at arm’s length and play as true to them as possible. Advocate for truth, not for effectiveness.
Now, talking through this stuff with brand-new players, I wonder if that entire radical-transparency approach only works once you’ve gotten immersive actor-stance play “out of your system” (pejorative I know!), or seen the problems that can come out of it, or whatever. I wonder if the normal default reflex is for total immersion and close character identity, and arms-length authorial play is just mental gymnastics we’ve invented to create a layer of safety (one interpretation) and/or a way to dig more directly into the story-stuff of theme and clear lines of conflict (another interpretation, not necessarily incompatible with the first).
I just thought it was interesting. Given literally no other instructions, the assumption is that you should “be” your character. And that doing otherwise is less fun.
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I believe that Fred Hicks created that intent grid, IIRC. I remember it being posted on RPG.net back in the day.
Yah, I was thinking it was Fred or Rob. Smarties.
This has been hugely helpful to me too, but I still struggle sometimes to balance this kind of radical transparency with something I find especially engaging about RPGs: the delivery of surprise.
So, like, your ghost example? I have been that player. Not for that specific scene, mind you, but I’ve deliberately not reminded anybody at the table about what’s on my character sheet, or even in the rules, because I’m hoping that after I do the big reveal, everyone laughs or cheers or whatever. It’s not about outsmarting anybody in that case (at least I don’t think), but about subverting expectations in a way that releases tension.
By the same token, I’ve noticed it just doesn’t necessarily work every time, and the times that it doesn’t work, you leave people scratching their heads at why you didn’t just say what you meant from the start. Or worse, you leave your GM thinking you’re being smug and trying to outsmart them, which feels like an awkward mismatch in goals. I can’t claim to have figured out yet the pattern to differentiate “everybody’s gonna love this” situations from “nobody appreciates your secrecy” situations, and this bothers me.
i wonder if the difference between a “mechanic” and “play culture” is that a mechanic is something that you think is good in some games and not good in others, and something becomes “play culture” if you prefer to use it at all times (i.e., you’ve internalized it).
Jason Tocci yeah I totally understand where you’re coming from. No idea what the difference is, although in the ghost player’s case it was his established mode. I just assumed that’s what he was going for, since he’d been the one holdout during the Great Burning Wheel Purge of 2008.
So, Paul, I’ve been dipping my toe into the “indie” game scene for a few years but I feel I’m still pretty grounded in the “trad” market. I’m assuming that by “trad” you mean those games that rely on a fixed task resolution system and are, as you say, non-transparent in GM/Player interactions.
David Benson oh that’s a bigger discussion for another thread. That’s a pretty conventional design approach for sure, though. Also: GM runs the world, character niches defined by ability or schtick, sometimes an adversarial gm-player relationship is assumed. EDIT but yeah, I feel like players and facilitators are not expected to be transparent about their goals in a trad game. There are almost certainly local exceptions.
I’m not super in love with “trad” as a useful descriptor but I haven’t gotten any traction on “conventional” either.
Paul Beakley Is there a story behind the Great Burning Wheel Purge? I’d love to hear it. Burning Wheel is the game that broke me from my rigid adherence to trad games.
Always sub
Yeah procedure is a better term.
Graham W’s book Play Unsafe has a section, as I recall, on “open secrets,” which is not the same as your radical transparency, but I think is adjacent. If I’m reading you right, you’re talking about saying aloud “this is the in-fiction result I want from engaging this rules mechanism, and we’ll all have more fun and dial the procedures in tighter if we understand what’s at stake” and open secrets is the roleplaying parallel. “I am acting this specific way because my character is motivated by this big secret, which you don’t know about, but player-as-audience-you will appreciate this more if you know it, even as player-as-character-you does not.”
me·chan·ic, game
noun
1. A person who fixes broken games.
2. A person who “fixes” “broken” games.
this game mechanic just isn’t working; it’s been months and we still don’t have a revised draft
Somewhat related to the idea of proceduralism, which I think such transparency may encourage:
necropraxis.com – Proceduralism
http://www.necropraxis.com/2014/05/22/proceduralism/
FWIW, I don’t think transparency is at odds with surprise at all. You just get to be surprised by outcomes instead of surprised that you’re playing game B when you thought you were playing game A.
Mark Delsing known unknowns versus unknown unknowns.
Mark Delsing you know who really impressed me with that? Thor Olavsrud at the last Burningcon. Totally transparent as far as table-level intentions of outcomes, but so good at throwing narrative curve balls. He never relied on the system to keep his secrets, like, knowing edge case rulings in Fight! scripting or hiding the fact that his NPC could one-shot me with a Dismiss. He put everything on the table and could still surprise us.
Paul Beakley He’s the exception that proves the rule! (From your last post, about how designers are terrible GMs.)
Some of us are just better.
The first time I trotted out an indie game for the gayboy group, Lady Blackbird, someone handed me a seeeeecret note and I was all, “what the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
Secret notes! Ugh, awful. But then they’ll know what I’m up to and stop me!
Thanks Paul Beakley! That means a lot!
.sub-ba-dub-dub
Man, I played a convention game where the GM kept taking people out in the hall to talk about stuff
Aaron Griffin That was pretty standard procedure in my old HERO and D&D groups.
Years ago I ran a Sidewinder: Recoiled game at Dragonflight where I took each player into the hallway and detailed their private motivations and conflicts with the other characters. It worked wonderfully…for me. It would have worked better for the players had they been aware of the conflicts and could appreciate the role-playing going on as I could. This was before I was even aware of the concept of transparency. I sure would like to run that scenario again with the players being aware of each other’s personal conflicts and motivations.
.
Apocalypse World does say to be clear about which moves you’re trying to trigger (with an example of correcting it after a misread by the MC). But as far as goals and outcomes I think you’re right. As a player I say what I want anyway, so everyone can play to that (whether helping or hindering for drama). It’s usually just more fun for the players/audience to know what’s up.
I do think there’s no problem in the situation when the GM is cagey but the player is transparent. So go forth to convention games and spill your guts. (Just be prepared for nobody to listen.)
One of the biggest procedures/mechanisms that has impacted me (beyond the BW transparency) is “play to see what happens” or “plan the scenario, not its outcome.” Seems rudimentary, but again, in a lot of trad games and groups, the cult of the GM is so strong that things can get screwy if you aren’t resolving situations as the GM planned or wanted. Dogs in the Vineyard was eye-opening to run. That game changed a lot for me.
Also, your differentiation between mechanic and mechanism is how I feel about comic vs. comedian in that, as far as I’m concerned, you read the former and listen to/watch the latter.
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We started playing Nathan Paoletta’s Imp of the Perverse last week. It’s a funky, specific horror game that evokes Edgar Allan Poe vibes in 1830s-1850s Jacksonian America. Playing the first session reminded me about how hard I find conflict resolution games. Imp of the Perverse is squarely in that camp of design.
Conflict resolution is where the entirety of a “conflict” gets resolved at once, typically a single roll/draw/pull/moment of fortune. The relative inverse is action or skill based resolution, where each resolution re-positions objective elements of the fiction (somebody is hurt, a spell is cast, you jump over a hole) but doesn’t address the “conflict.” It’s a deep rabbit hole, and folks have argued (stridently!) about what “a conflict” is. There are lots of specific ways games go about resolving a conflict. The interesting/aggravating commonality is how resolution always revolves around the table arriving at a common understanding of the “conflict.”
Conflict resolution is indie-style roleplaying on hard mode.
Why It’s Hard
I’ve played conflict resolution games on and off ever since the first ones showed up, games like Dust Devils, Sufficiently Advanced, and more modern designs like Goblinville, The Clay That Woke and Primetime Adventures. Old or new, they feel hard to me in related ways: you need to think critically and abstractly about every scene, you need to carefully frame scenes based on that evaluation, you have to know when to engage the system, everyone has to be on board with the difference between authoring and advocating, and everyone has to be transparent. And all this happens with very few check-ins from, or with, the system itself.
Any one of these elements feels like it requires advanced, 400-level experience just to execute, much less to make fun. So let’s unpack them all and see if the work:fun ratio makes conflict resolution worth it.
Abstract Critical Thinking
Actually a pretty good breakdown!
This is the hard one, and it’s been hard ever since the earliest days of indie design: what is the salient point being argued over in this moment of play? Roleplaying is a conversation, and disagreements are where the conversation gets interesting. Sometimes those disagreements are around the details of a shared understanding of the game state, which is easy. We all agree the Stormtroopers got the jump on us, but do we get away? But sometimes players disagree about the premise of the conversation itself.
The game design may or may not have a specific idea of what “conflict” means for itself. Is “conflict resolution” just large-scale abstract action resolution? Totally fair and reasonable interpretation! A game might totally view many small moments as adding up to “a conflict.” In those games, the GM needs to apply critical thinking to the question of how much can one resolve in a single moment. The game might have guidelines to how much one can resolve, but I’ve never seen a system put hard limits on that. There’s always the need for authoritative human evaluation, which is laborious relative to, say, players reaching for abilities to resolve actions, or moves to resolve fictional triggers.
Another necessary critical thinking skill is being sensitive to the “about-ness” of the scene. Why is this scene happening? What’s at stake? A scene might be happening because prior fiction mandates it, or because the players are excited by the implied uncertainty of it, or because someone wants to make an aesthetic or ethical statement. And each of those scene types need a different evaluation of their about-ness.
I don’t have a good formula for any of this. But I know that, when I’m playing a game with conflict resolution and/or “very abstract resolution,” I need to spend a lot of juice thinking about every scene’s about-ness, so I know how to guide the players toward a common understanding.
Scene Setting as Sales Pitch
What will it take for you to buy that this scene’s actually about the romantic tension between …
The next step to applying one’s critical thinking to the about-ness at stake is that the GM needs to set really clear scenes. And this needs to happen not only because everyone’s at the table/Zoom meeting/chat and are eager for things to happen, but because scene-setting is the GM’s primary sales tool.
When the GM has a clear sense of the themes, disagreements, metaphors, or stakes, the way they explain their sense is via how they set a scene. In a lot of cases the GM might not know what’s at stake, and has to work it out as a scene plays out. Also legit. But the scene as a facilitator (or fellow player, in a GM-less conflict-resolution game like Durance) initially framed it is still preparing the eventual sales pitch. Call it marketing if you want: you’re creating a fertile field for future sales.
This is all pretty instinctual, I fear. I’m just highlighting the fact that if you want to bring players onto the same page in a conflict resolution game, it starts with how you set scenes.
When To Pull The Trigger
I mean, who doesn’t?
There’s always a tricky balance to strike when you’re playing a conflict resolution game: how long do we keep talking, and when is it time to stop and resolve the conflict?
This bit is especially hard on me, personally, because I greatly prefer to keep the action grounded in the fiction. I prefer to keep players in-character than let them slide into a planning fugue. I actively dislike the tendency for argumentative/competitive players to avoid engaging with the system (i.e. uncertainty) by sidestepping it in the just-talking step.
Old-style conflict resolution games like Dust Devils (second edition came out in 2006) typically included a whole essay about what “conflict” entailed in this specific game. Dust Devil’s very short version is: “Conflict is any point in the game where at least two players (and usually more!) have different ideas about ‘what happens next’ in the story.” As a practical matter, though, there was always a lot of talk leading up to that moment. To be clear: Dust Devils is one of my favorite-favorite indie RPGs! But nailing down exactly when to stop talking and start drawing cards is a skill I needed to learn.
Sometimes conflict resolution-type games, like Imp of the Perverse and The Clay That Woke, provide the trigger. But they’re still quite abstract relative to the precision of a PbtA style fictional trigger.
Imp first says “Whenever your protagonist takes risky action or engages in struggle,” and later “When your protagonist imposes their will upon the world.” But then there’s an admonition to not roll merely when an outcome is uncertain. So when do you roll? It’s up to the GM, ultimately, to decide what risky entails. And if they’ve sold the scene correctly, there should be something clearly at risk in a scene. It’s pretty good, and more explicit than many “to resolve a conflict…” type language in older games.
Clay is a bit more specific, calling out four “inflections:” dangerous situations, violent conflicts with beasts or NPCs, unnatural encounters, and interpersonal disagreements with NPCs. Cool, pretty specific, but there are still several paragraphs further clarifying when and how to engage the game’s resolution system (a chit-draw, set-building minigame called the Krater of Lots), with the most actionable-yet-subjective advice being “You know you’re using it too soon if your situations don’t feel dramatic.” So, really, hit an inflection and wait within that moment for it to become dramatic. Fair, but subjective.
Player Authorship vs Principled Character Advocacy
Will is my fursona.
Because of the necessary abstract thinking needed for the GM and players to engage with conflict resolution (and/or “very abstract resolution”), I’m always sensitive to the players being pulled in different creative directions. On the one hand, the abstraction can help you shape scenes in a very authorial way: this scene is about the two brothers’ longstanding rivalry coming to a head, this scene is about whether the Bandit King drives the old regime out of the castle, this scene is about the impact of a long journey on the fellowship. Conflict resolution is a great way to give players a lot of authority over a scene, in no small part because there aren’t so many smaller moments that may derail their vision for the scene.
But there’s something to be said for the immediacy and investment of advocating for What Your Character Wants. Or if you’re feeling iffy about the player/character split, What You Want For Your Character. It’s exciting and competitive and sometimes it just feels good to embody a character’s drives. It can also feel good in a pattern-completion way to watch a well-designed character’s needs play out in the fiction.
I’ve found those two impulses frequently hard to reconcile: player-as-author and player-as-advocate. If you’re constantly authoring scenes with an eye toward advocacy, are you really making an interesting story? Is “interesting” even on the agenda?
Radical Transparency
Last bit, mostly an issue for trad/conventional players being introduced to conflict resolution or “storygames” in general: if you’re going to even begin the conversation about the about-ness of a scene, what you or your character want out of it, everyone needs to be very transparent. No playing close to the vest, no trying to outsmart each other. It’s a very collaborative play style, in contrast with an adversarial-GM play style and adjunct at best to an impartial-GM play style. Old habits can be really hard to break, is all I’m saying.
System As A Validation Tool
Game design in a nutshell
My theory about players interacting with systems: Each interaction is a validation for the player that they’re on the right track, that they’re adding something tone-/canon-allowable, that they’re reinforcing and meaningfully enlarging the table’s common understanding of the fiction. It can be reassuring to do a small thing, earn a small currency perhaps, or see a small shift in the fiction. It can feel less fraught to make some progress toward your goals, action by action, than have everything ride on a single moment of uncertainty. When a player resists engaging with a conflict resolution system, their desire for system-validating moments is something I feel out.
Three Conflict Resolution Tips
These are all pretty old conversations if you’ve been in storygaming spaces for a while. But if you haven’t, here’s some advice:
Have a firm sense of what meaningful conflicts look like in this genre, setting or situation. Meaningful, in this case, being “the fiction takes an assertive new direction.” Sometimes your instinct about meaningful conflict disagrees with when the game tells you to resolve: this is the designer’s opinion, their take on the subject matter. Followup: frame scenes really hard, ideally with more than one player character, with a conflict-rich situation already in mind. Don’t preprogram the conflict! But think about situations that can (probably) only be resolved by eventually going to the game’s system. Many conflict resolution games have external economies that rely on engaging the system at some point, so you can’t bop along freeforming forever.
Say yes an awful lot more than you’re accustomed to. Conflict resolution games are, I think, very freeform most of the time. That means the players need a clear sense of their own agency most of the time, because there’s no validation of their choices coming back to them (see above). The only way I’ve come up with, as a GM, is to say yes a lot. It also means gently, conversationally redirecting if a player suggests something that’s off-tone or violates what I feel like is the shared understanding of the game state. There’s still a need for facts to become part of the game’s permanent record even when we’re not invoking the system. And everyone needs to agree that the fiction can be positioned outside of the system.
Be uncomfortably up-front about what’s at stake, win or lose, in this conflict. Well, I mean: maybe you won’t personally be uncomfortable with that level of transparency. But if this is a new thing for you, expect discomfort. Talk about not only what Your Character or The Situation stands to gain, but describe your own understanding of what Your Character or The Situation stands to lose. Make sure both sides of that equation feel equitable to both parties.
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