We’re still playing Godbound here and I’ve noticed the most interesting table phenomenon. I think it has to do with the OSR-style framework the game is built on and the players’ relationship with it. I’m going to poke at that.
This week’s session, we introduced a fifth player to the game. Five is a lot, and we’re eight-ish sessions in, so the learning curve for our specific setup is nearly vertical. So I thought, hey, let’s start by introducing everyone else’s characters and how they’re embedded in the fiction.
Me, to the table: “Okay so it’s been a few weeks since you dealt with your last major challenge. I took the time to run another faction turn, so some stuff has shifted.” I go over the setting changes, folks take notes, ask questions. I continue. “But let’s talk about what you’ve been doing the past couple weeks.”
Me, to player 1: “Where do you think you’ve been spending your time?”
Player 1: “Yeah, I’m ready to spend my Dominion to … “
Me: “Wait. I meant, like, in the city. Where do you live? What does that look like?”
Player 1: “Oh, with the troops I guess. Anyway, I’m going to spend Dominion…”
Me: “Hold up! So, like, with the troops. Fine, good, makes sense. So what does that look like? Just bunked with the soldiers? Have your own space?”
Player 1: “I was gonna spend that Dominion…”
Me: “Oh my god! Stop! Who are you spending your time with? Are you withdrawn from the rest of the pantheon? Do you guys hang together? What does that look like?”
So player 1 finally slows down a little, gets out of that mechanics-driven mode, and talks with the other players about what his character’s daily life has looked like as time passes. Physically, I keep redirecting them to talking to each other, rather than using me to relay their direct communications with each other. I’m not the hub! The players can talk to each other!
So after we do that, I move on to player 2.
Me: “Alrighty then. You and player 1 have been hanging out, great. Your magical medicinals are useful to the troops, and his troops can protect your cult. Good good. So where do you live? Where and how do you spend most of your time?”
Player 2: “Yeah I had this idea for how to spend my Dominion…”
Me: “Auugggggh!” Charlie Brown style.
I get that everyone is eager to engage with the game. Cool. Great, in fact. But boy howdy is it hard to get anyone to slow down and engage with the game’s fiction. To my mind, all the mechanisms they’re trying to grab onto are in service to that very same fiction! I’m not even sure what they’re trying to accomplish when they jump right into the rules and keep veering away from the context.
After about 45 minutes, I was able to get everyone slowed down. I felt like a cop in a school zone, holding up my hand, flashing my cop lights, handing out warnings. Slow, slow. We have time.
Finally, I brought up last session’s plan. In Godbound, in service to the difficulties of spending time efficiently prepping for a sandbox, the players always give the GM a plan for what they intend to do next session. Smart policy, and I end up prepping much more interesting stuff when I do it iteratively, rather than in one huge chunk. Last session ended with a plan to complete their first Impossible task, clearing out this alchemical miasma that clung to their nearly-liberated city.
That’s when they fell into the Planning Fugue.
I’ve seen this in the past when I played a lot more conventional RPGs, but in the past decade-and-some of storygaming that ceased to be the air I breathed. I’m sure you know the Planning Fugue: the players look at a big upcoming task – a dungeon delve, a major obstacle, a known upcoming boss fight – and brainstorm a solution. They pool their resources, math stuff out, talk through contingencies.
This all happens at the player level. In fact trying to drag this planning back into the fiction is so disruptive that I’ve given up even trying. This week’s game, when I asked “okay so where is this planning taking place?” the answer was a general “Oh in the city somewhere.” Yeah, fine, okay.
Like, in-character planning embedded in fictional context is just too hard. It’s too distracting to the players, who just want to beat the thing. So they pull all the way out of the fiction of the game but remain within the magic circle of the play session. It’s a fugue state, like group hypnosis.
Here’s why I think the system itself lends itself to the Planning Fugue.
One place trad-style game designs excel is that players can actually plan things. I propose this is because resources are explicit and mechanical. In D&D it’s hit points and armor class and spell slots. Adding in Godbound, it’s Effort and Dominion and the Words themselves. Then, when you go off to execute your plan, the scene in which the plan happens doesn’t veer off course. You might lose some HPs but you’re still entrenched in the scene. You might have spent Effort and had Effort spent against you, but you’re still on target. Some of that is the blow-by-blow scale of play in these games, some is the binary success/failure of each roll, and some is play tradition. “Missing a roll always means a consequence” is a fairly recent addition that’s becoming more common in conventional games, and it is enormously important.
I can’t help but compare this to storygaming, where I’ve found planning to be difficult if not actually pointless. Obviously “storygaming” is a huge sprawling thing, and in many cases accomplishing things isn’t even the point. But let’s look at the big dogs: PbtA and FitD games.
In both cases, misses come with consequences. In the case of an Apocalypse World style Move, there’s also a structural imperative to constantly spin the fiction, to snowball, to literally move the fiction in a new direction. Repeatedly, my players (raised on decades of conventional ttrpgs) have expressed frustration with their inability to see things through in any of the PbtAs we’ve played here. If the GM/MC tilts the action somewhere new, that’s where the action goes. The players could probably dig their claws into their plans a little more, but fictional snowballing is a constant pressure. It’s exciting and very satisfying, story-wise. Totally frustrating if you want to get anything done.
Blades in the Dark evoked an even stronger frustration from my players the first time we played. The holding environment of the game is gangs doing jobs, right? But the game itself says “don’t plan your job.” Instead, you get injected into the job at some critical juncture as determined by your Engagement Roll. Then, you backfill the planning by using flashbacks. It’s very cinematic and you get into play right away. But I swear on my B/X book I had players ask, “But where’s the roleplaying?”
Blades was designed to bypass the Planning Fugue and by bypassing it, the players decided the Planning Fugue is the roleplaying. Even though everyone’s perfectly clear on the fact that the planning happens purely between players and not characters. Wild.
This tension shows up in our Godbound game quite a lot. I’m running the game with a lot of PbtA-style agendas and principles at work, because I find the game both more satisfying and easier to make rulings on when everything is embedded in the fiction. I regularly have players try to drag me into the Planning Fugue by asking me to hypothesize and math out stuff they want to try. I push back with “I’m not going to pre-play this. Play to find out.” They want me to make rulings out of context of actual play, right? I’m sure if I recorded these conversations, a full third of our time would be spent in this uncollapsed wave state of pseudo-play.
Sometimes I wonder if pushing a fiction-first agenda through any trad game is fair play. Like, that’s just my aesthetic preference, but it’s not necessarily supported by the system we’re using. Folks, including the creators, will point out that Apocalypse World is a fairly conventional game. And it is, in some obvious and maybe inobvious ways: there’s still a strong facilitation role, there’s still character monogamy, there are still tasks being resolved. But PbtA-style games disrupt the conventions in big ways: system engagement is constrained to specific fictional triggers, most outcomes are defined by the move language, and more often than not the system adds fictional twists that trigger new engagements that add more twists and so on.
Can you still “play to find out” in a trad game? The meaning of failure and the lack of system-driven fiction-twisting (misses complicate, 7-9 “yes but” type outcomes, and so on), I think, means modulating that a bit. Talk a little but not too much, get your ducks in a row, and then play to find out.
It’s hard, but I’m going to keep dragging everyone out of their fugue, their uncollapsed wave state, and get them thinking about their plans and their actions embedded in fictional context and filtered through their characters’ priorities. Maintaining a fiction-first focus is hard in a game where failure stakes are explicitly higher than in most storygames, although at least in Godbound if you zero out your hit points, you get one last blaze (divine fury) to finish your conflict. It’s pretty hard to straight-up lose via character death, but it’s always on the table. I speculate that this is why the safety of the fugue state is preferable to just playing to find out. Storygames are frequently pretty safe failure-wise, which is such a frustration to the folks who want to feel meaningful risk. “Meaningful” of course meaning “did my character die,” not “can I achieve my goals?” or “was I true to my characterization?”
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It was my 50th birthday last week, so here are 50
lessons I’ve learned about roleplaying. Some of them might be short lessons! If
one of these jumps out as interesting, let me know and I’ll write a longer
piece about it.
You can’t fix real-world problems between players in your make-believe space.Enthusiasm will paper over any hiccups you may have about formal procedures.No idea is so great that you can’t rewind and do something different. Ideas are cheap and easy. Play as many different kinds of games as you can to learn more about your favorites.Nothing hits your players harder than reincorporating their ideas in surprising ways.Game designers are usually middling-fair GMs at best, and discovering they’re downright terrible (even at their own games!) should not come as a surprise. Every designer I’ve met is perfectly nice and talented! But actually running a game is a different core competency.Always roll out in the open.Be transparent about your intent, both as a player and a facilitator. If transparency fucks up your game then something weird is probably going on.Streamed games are a related but different activity than games played at home for nobody but you. You can enjoy both separately. When it’s time to spotlight a character, reframe the game situation so they’re clearly, obviously the primary protagonist. Treat every player like a star when it’s their turn.Playing, engaging, evaluating and listening in good faith is a skill worth practicing and mastering.If you want to get better at playing, facilitate more. Feel the freedom of playing your NPCs to lose, and bring that back to your own playing.If you want to get better at facilitating, play more. Feel the constraints around you when you’re a player, and think about how to address those constraints next time you run.Always have a visual focus in the middle of your table is powerful: a map, a prop, a relationship map, anything. Everyone stays more focused on the game when they have something to look at together.Change your seating arrangements to manipulate your social space. I sit at the end of the table when I want to project authority and at a long side when I want to invite collaboration. Break up the players who are thick as thieves. Arrange players to be near who they’re emotionally closest to in the game.To learn a new game: read through, cover to cover, once. Make two different kinds of characters (if it’s that kind of game), without looking up answers to your questions. Read a second time, keeping your unanswered questions in mind. Play the first session. Afterword, read through a third time with actual play context.To understand a game: synopsize the rules for your players in the clearest, shortest cheat sheet possible. Teaching is learning. To master a game, pay attention to: reward cycles (ie what incentives the players receive for various intentional actions), fulfillment cycles (ie what patterns the players complete through play), and the frequency of intermittent rewards (ie random prizes). Sketch it out if you need to. Recognize that not everyone is incentivized by the same things. Advancement and empowerment aren’t the only incentives! Sometimes folks are so surprised when players don’t chase obvious carrots.If you’re the type of gamer who reads blogs like this, or Twitter, or fan communities, or publisher forums, understand that you’re 100x more invested in this activity than anyone who doesn’t. That is, most players. Don’t be disappointed that they’re not up on the latest talk, theory, design, etc.The best part about going to conventions, for me, is being reminded of how good my home game situation is. The creative and social challenge of playing with strangers or friendly acquaintances is fun! But it’s not as consistently good as playing with the folks I know.“I don’t play board games” is the roleplayer’s version of “I don’t watch television” snobbery. Board games are orders of magnitude bigger than all of roleplaying. Indie games are a rounding error under the D&D umbrella. Storygames are a tiny subset of indie gaming. This thing we’re talking about is a fringe of a fringe activity. We have so much to learn from the wider gaming world.The absolute best players you’ll ever have at your table are the ones who have never played before. Old calcified gamers are the literal worst. Deprogramming bad habits is a lot of work.Occasionally recontextualize the abhorrent acts players put their characters through. Go ahead, yes, put this village to the sword. Later, remind them how civilians feel about genocide. Go ahead, yes, tromp around your fantasy village strapped for war. Remind them of how folks react when someone open-carries an assault rifle into a grocery store.Children are part of any believable make-believe world. It is startling how many folks forget this.When you’re facilitating and get creatively fatigued, ask the players for ideas. It’s really okay. You don’t need to be infallible. Everyone knows we’re all just making this stuff up anyway.Do not fucking make fun of anyone’s play. Ever. Don’t draw attention to their inconsistencies, or hand/body/facial gestures, or anything. The magic circle we draw around our game relies on trust. You will have a devil of a time redrawing your magic circle once you’ve lost it. I GM at my best when I start prioritizing good questions over good answers.Good, engaging facilitation is as much about table theatrics as it is about knowing the rules and maintaining pacing. I don’t mean funny voices (please no)! I mean drawing new additions on the relationship map with a flourish, or dramatically dropping a new clock on the table, or quietly placing a sad index card somewhere prominent. Everything a facilitator does is a show.An oldie but a goodie worth repeating: finding the right matches of system, players, and runner is an art. If any of those things is a mismatch, it’s going to be more work. System matters (but it’s not the only thing that matters).Play with as diverse a range of players as you can find: gender, age, culture, disability, anything and everything. Go to conventions if you don’t live in a place conducive to variety and can afford it. Play online if you can’t go to conventions. Challenge yourself and your play will improve, because roleplaying is a fundamentally human activity and being a better human makes you a better player. You’ll make mistakes and that’s okay. Nobody is going to cancel you if you’re playing in good faith.Give folks at least 30 minutes to bullshit before settling down to play. Try to get them gathered early to make that happen.Debriefs after sessions are so important that you’re better off cutting the game short 30 minutes just to fit it in. Probably most of my adjustments and ideas come from debriefing, not the session.Give everyone at your table the explicit privilege to stop the campaign at any time for any reason. Life is too short to be bored, or frustrated, or angry about games……but don’t give up too easily. My biggest gaming regrets always involve stopping a game too soon.No matter how deep in the weeds you get with procedures, no matter how antsy you get to get through a scene or a moment, always ask: what does this look like? The minute you decouple the rules from the fiction, things get weird. Even if the players slip into a planning fugue, ask: where is this taking place? What is going on around you? Grounding everything in the shared fiction enriches everything, even if it takes more time.Tent cards for character names and pronouns, every game, no matter what. Put the names on the back as well so the folks next to you can see too.A break every hour works magic. Not sure why we think we need to muscle through every minute of a session. Take a break, let things percolate in your brain.Unless you’re playing in a morally stark setting (like our current campaign, Band of Blades), villains and heroes are super boring. Anti-heroes are the worst! Relatable people with incompatible goals, that’s where the good stuff is.Don’t run a game when you’re not feeling it. Take breaks. A week or two won’t let the fizz out of the bottle, but if it does then maybe there wasn’t that much fizz to begin with.I used to get really upset about folks fiddling with non-game stuff at the game table (phones, doodles, knitting for crying out loud), but I’ve made peace with the fact that sometimes players need small distractions. Still, check in and make sure they’re still engaged.If I don’t have an RPG in my head – if I’m not thinking about it, chewing on it, obsessing – in a couple weeks I start feeling uncentered. Like the gyroscope of my life has tipped over. Weird! But it’s proven to be true over and over, even when I’m feeling burned out. If I want to generate interpersonal heat or a big reveal, sometimes I’ll just start tossing in topics and ideas that are just adjacent to the characters’ backgrounds, cultures, affiliations, existing relationships, whatever. You don’t need to set up the heat right out of the gate! Once that ingredient is on the table, the table takes over. The heat will reveal itself. The fact you look like a genius who knew what was going to happen all along is a bonus.Bait and switch in RPGs! Just … no. It never works. It doesn’t work out the way you think it will. The players resent it. Don’t hit them where they’re weakest.Players, thank your GM and each other. GMs, thank your players. Recognition is rare but so nice. Splash it around! It’s free!Biggest red flag at new tables: when a player acts squirrelly about the inclusion of sexual relationships as a factor in the game setting. Not even the sex itself! Just repulsion or fear of the idea that fictional characters have intimate relationships.As a player, I find procedure and embodiment are a zero sum game. The more procedurally intense the game, the less embodiment I feel, and vice versa. As a GM I anticipate that behavior from the players as well. Try running sessions of an ongoing campaign with the same intensity as you would a one-shot. Play for keeps! Don’t be afraid to crank the stakes up! Try running one-shots with the same intensity as you would a campaign session. Play for investment and satisfaction! Not every one-shot needs to end in a blood opera!GM from the bottom of the org chart, not the top. You’re there to support your players. Give until it hurts.
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Speaking as a Trad games guy, have you considered that your players are doing what they find interesting or fun when they plan? They’re interacting with the fiction as if they actually had to execute on the plan, and planning is part of that core gameplay loop that is a kind of fun of its own in these sorts of games.
I posted the 2014 edition of my ongoing “Best of the Twenty-Teens” series recently. In it, I called 2014 “The Year of the Trindie,” which got me thinking about what trindie even means. There’s quite a lot in that space as I conceive it: conventional (“trad”) power and resolution arrangements paired with unconventional (“indie” aka storygame) solutions to long-standing problems. Or sometimes just nifty new tech.
It’s tempting to go looking for bright lines between categories of design and play. If you’ve been reading my blog at all you know I’m not here for that. I’m not going to define one game as “trad” and another as “trindie,” good grief. I’m also not particularly coming from “here’s a trad game with indie tech” angle, nor “here’s a storygame that plays pretty trad.” The cross-pollination is the point, not who came first and who deserves which bit of credit.
I’m unable to provide a perfect and uncontroversial history of these trends and designs. Sharing, stealing, and parallel development make it nearly impossible to know when an idea first appeared, or first appeared in a way anyone cared about.
In short, please read charitably and ask questions in the comments if you have ‘em.
That said: Here are some of my favorite things I’ve found in games I call trindie. If you find them, you might be playing a trindie game!
The Rules Get In The Way
I’ve used the phrase intentional design before and maybe it’s worth unpacking a bit more. This is the general trend I’m talking about: rules that purposefully create specific play experiences, and not just default to a “players try to beat the GM’s obstacles with a combination of capability and luck” frame. If you’re the sort of GM who prefers to present their story their way, new-school rules feel like they get in the way.
Personally? I love rules that get in the way. Rules can surprise me when I’m facilitating, which is both an exciting creative challenge and alleviates most prep. I’ve never had a good head for prepping with interesting combat or obstacles in mind, so those rules that are “in the way?” I’d rather put my creativity toward things other than balancing fights.
Intentional design shows up all over the place now and for various reasons: genre emulation, or strong emotional response, or enforcing tempo. Redistributing creative responsibilities in surprising ways. Gosh, even just to de-prioritize violence as the main way to get what we want.
GM Doesn’t Roll
The first game I ran into where only the players rolled was Apocalypse World. That does some interesting stuff, largely in that it leaves results in the hands of the GM, along with some guidelines (GM moves and principles). I don’t include Amber, Theatrix or Everway here because those games are entirely diceless. Fully diceless play accomplishes something different than GM-doesn’t-roll: the players generate external uncertainty and often make choices based on their rolls.
GM-doesn’t-roll today shows up in Monte Cook Games‘ Cypher system (Numenera, The Strange, No Thank You, Evil!) and Cypher-adjacent games like Invisible Sun. It’s also how all the Forged in the Dark games I’ve seen thus far handle things: the GM’s adjudication is constrained by the position and effect the player negotiated.
The cross-pollination works both ways! Under Hollow Hills, Meg and Vincent Baker’s work-in-progress about carnival performers in fairyland and solidly in the storygame end of the PbtA pool, hands the GM (the Mistress of Ceremonies, tweaking the MC role in Apocalypse World) the opportunity to roll dice for NPCs making common plays (“moves” in UHH’s frame). Storygames sometimes get re-tradded.
The Say Yes/Declare Intent/Let It Ride Triangle
One of my favorite bits of design I first saw come together in Burning Wheel was a three-fer:
Roll the Dice or Say Yes: frequently flipped (“say yes, or roll the dice”), but the idea is mostly the same. That is, only introduce uncertainty when uncertainty is interesting. It’s a reminder that the GM can and should say yes to everything except the most pivotal rolls. To use discretion rather than calling for rolls all over the place.Declare Intent: this bit requires the player transparently explain their goal to the GM. The action your character takes matters in terms of consequences, but intent and action are formally separate things. This bypasses lots of miscommunications, and helps the GM shape the final resolution.Let it Ride: You roll once and whatever happens, happens. No rerolling until the situation changes.
These three small bits came together in a way that transformed our very trad table: Transparently explain what you want to accomplish, the GM decides whether to just say yes to that or make you roll, and if you roll, it’s one roll and then it’s over until something changes. Together, those three rules stripped out tons of arguing and dumb, pointless rolling and rerolling, and made each time we touched the dice matter.
The Triangle shows up again in both Mutant Year Zero and The One Ring. The Triangle is a fundamentally different way of engaging with the rules than “when it’s your turn, declare your character’s action and roll to see if you succeed.”
The Triangle is part of a larger trend: explicit rules about when to roll. Many, many games never define when you’re supposed to roll (outside of combat). If you do a thing, you roll, right? Or whatever other culture you grew up with. It’s a direct refutation of “we played all session and never even rolled.”
Democratized Fictional Authority
“The GM runs the world” has been such an assumed structural requirement of ttrpgs that anything else was very nearly unthinkable for decades. Decades! What would keep the players from cheating? Who will think of the children?
It turns out the children are just fine, and distrusting your players is only elemental when competition to overcome obstacles is the core play experience.
Burning Wheel is the first game that comes to mind where declaring facts about the setting can be a player thing. Skills called wises let the player declare a fact, the GM determines how narrow, rare or otherwise difficult that declaration should be, and you roll to see if the character was right or not.
Player authority over the fiction shows up in quite a few places now. A recent one that comes to mind is the Loremaster role in Band of Blades, in which the player is responsible for inventing the history of the Legion and calls upon it now and again. The Loremaster also frames camp scenes, which is the open roleplay portion of the game.
Interlocking Economic Cycles
Many trindie games have experimented with incentives other than bildungsroman character advancement, where the players chase experience points or their equivalent and enjoy a steady progression in effectiveness in power. My favorite early exposure to this was how Burning Wheel offered several different economies (Artha) to incentivize players to engage with their Beliefs and Instincts, but engaging with those thing didn’t directly advance you. Instead, you had to use the skills you wanted to advance (not a new idea), with Artha being how you avoided catastrophic failure when you used them. To advance your skills, you must engage with obstacles that were mathematically impossible to succeed at without Artha.
My latest favorite indirect-advancement thing was, believe it or not, Godbound. Not only do you earn XPs in the usual way, but you also have to spend Dominion (your divine energy) changing the world. Succeeding isn’t enough, you have to go be godly as well.
Narrative Playbooks
Not only awesome at driving, but also holding lovers at arm’s length.
An interesting thing happened when Apocalypse World introduced the world to playbooks. They looked an awful lot like plain old “classes,” but played in a much more narratively intentional way. The Driver, for example, isn’t just skilled at driving The Last of the Interceptors across the wasteland, they were also emo loners. That is a result of the Driver’s moves, which had nothing to do with professional capacity and everything to do with the Driver’s narrative role in a well-known postapocalypse franchise.
Mutant: Year Zero meets this approach halfway, with classes that tell you what you’re good at but also gives you special abilities and advancement triggers that are tied into characterization. And not just “good roleplaying,” which honestly is the weakest punt in all of gaming. The One Ring hides this inside your “calling,” which looks diegetic (you’re a wanderer or a monster slayer or a treasure hunter) but is really a narrative declaration.
Relationship Maps/The Death of the Party
R-maps! Oh how I love thee. Many games now include a “I know X character because…” element, sometimes building connections between PCs and sometimes invoking an implied web of NPCs.
Yessssss
This wouldn’t have ever been a thing without holding environments where exploring interpersonal relationships was the core play experience. When you’re playing a unified party, relationships might evolve organically but if they don’t, nothing is lost. None of the narrative was expected to come from PCs squabbling or being friends or fucking (or, ideally, all of those).
Driving a stake through the heart of party-centered play has been one of the most refreshing things in trindie games for me. Your various ghosts and ghouls and vamps in Urban Shadows might occasionally join forces to face a common enemy, but just as often they’re dealing with each other’s daily lives. The magical weirdos of Invisible Sun are just living their lives and maybe helping each other out. The gangs, crews, and families pursuing a common enterprise in Forged in the Dark games look like a party on the surface, but they’ve got their own relationships and goals as well.
No doubt, though: unified party play is easier! Ongoing play about interpersonal relationships takes more work. The players need to not only engage with the premise, but a willingness to start trouble for themselves and others in pursuit of their needs.
Phases of Play
Conventional RPGs usually have detailed, interesting rules for combat, and then rules for everything else. You might cast a spell here and there, maybe have a special rule for dealing with sneaking or traps or whatever. Mostly pacing is left to the discretion of the GM, who would either play out the lives of the characters in detail, or if they were very adventurous and daring jump events ahead to the next conflict. I think of pacing as a point of distinctiveness between traditional GMs.
There have been games around for quite a while that helped create, even mandated, a particular mechanized pace. The earliest one I can think of is the passing of the years in King Arthur Pendragon: each winter, the GM rolls on a series of tables that inject a bunch of interesting new fictional development. It’s a completely different set of rules than the rest of the game. There may have been other games that provided this sort of set-aside mode of play but darned if I can remember any of ‘em.
The first storygame I personally ran into with distinct phases of play was Jason Morningstar’s Night Witches: you played the lives of WW2 Soviet airwomen during their days using one set of moves, then switched to a different set of moves as they went on raids at night. They were practically two different games, each informing the events of the other.
Mutant: Year Zero does the phases-of-play thing by dividing play into events in the Ark, and events in the Zone. They both use identical systems, but they’re both framed in very different ways. When you’re in the Ark, the action is usually driven by the relationship map, or by existential crises facing the mutants…that can only be addressed by sending expeditions out into the Zone. Once you’re in the Zone, the GM has tools to procedurally generate the wild and random things the mutants might find out there. The feel of the game is quite different at that point, switching to a grindy survival game. The shift in style and tempo is signaled on their return by dealing with the Rot they’ve accumulated out there now that they’rehome.
The One Ring breaks down all play into journeying, combat, or encounters. That’s it. There are no other kinds of play time. Each one has its own subset of rules that sit atop the general conflict and advancement stuff. There’s even a nod back to KAP, the Fellowship phase, where the characters explicitly stop adventuring, rest and recuperate somewhere safe, and advance the clock and the fiction a bit.
Forged in the Dark games like Blades in the Dark or Copperhead County thus far have a clear split between being on and off the job: the downtime phase. The job tempo is set by an engagement roll that drops you right into the action, and the job is over when it’s over. Then the characters deal with the fallout of their actions, get paid, manage the growth of their gang, take on personal projects. If there’s going to be any “open roleplay,” away from the pressure cooker of being on the job, this is when it happens.
Grinds
Another case of cross-pollination: when Torchbearer designers Thor Olavsrud and Luke Crane tore into B/X D&D, they rediscovered the mechanical grind of surviving a dungeon delve: light, food, water, rest and carrying capacity. These existed to create verisimilitude, but that verisimilitude created a diegetic sense of urgency. If you need to kick the players in the ass to take action, mechanical urgency is a good way to do it.
This is one of those places where old methods, I think, got a modern reframe. I suspect the old realists felt like the grind was oppressive and an impediment to beating the dungeon. I know I spent a lot of years playing D&D and just not caring what my carrying capacity was, or whether we had enough torches packed. Hauling around lamps is not heroism! Somehow, decades later, we’ve unearthed this idea as fun and motivating. Winning might be fun, but have you tried not losing?
(If that last line makes your skin crawl, you probably aren’t a trindie fan.)
Now you’ve got the constant threat of your lenders coming after you if you miss a payment on your ship in Edge of the Empire, the careful balance of food and time necessary to keep the Legion moving ahead of the zombies in Band of Blades, trying to stay hopeful enough to outrun the Shadow in The One Ring.
Embedded Campaign
One more: the game that’s designed with a campaign already baked. When was the first one? Polaris, maybe? The Mountain Witch? The idea here is that the game isn’t designed to be a toolbox for open-ended campaign play, but focused on a particular narrative arc.
My current best-in-class in the game-as-campaign category is the Eden storyline that comes with Mutant: Year Zero. Through a combination of card draws, map prep, and procedural generation, the mutants’ search for Eden gets delivered piecemeal to the players. You can totally just bump around in the Zone indefinitely when you play MYZ, but its highest and best application is watching the campaign play itself out without having to do anything specific. Other Year Zero Engine games have attempted something similar, but MYZ is still the best in my book.
Band of Blades is another game wrapping an integral campaign: the Legion is falling back toward its headquarters at Skydagger Keep, while The Cinder King and his endless zombie hordes implacably march across the world. It’s grim and dark, and very tightly structured. The Legion proceeds from location to location on a map, engaging with missions along the way. You can play, dunno, Legion adventures outside of this I guess, but most of the interesting gameplay becomes irrelevant.
Last Thoughts
I could keep going with the innovations that have happened in storygaming that found their way into mainstream, conventional ttrpgs. I left a bunch out because the piece was getting long – the rise of minigames, mechanized flags, an appreciation for fictional positioning as its own goal – when I realized that hardly any part of mainstream gaming remains untouched. Games are good and they’re constantly evolving to be even better. Even the folks who proudly declare themselves part of a renaissance of the old school are creating some genuinely creative, weird, new stuff. What a time to be gaming.
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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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I’ve seen that uncollapsed wave-state of playing without any fiction called “play before play” in storygaming circles. I find it particularly frustrating too in most games.
There are a few that I don’t—in B/X D&D I don’t because the content of their planning is almost always grounded enough that I can enforce context easily. If the party is debating how to proceed in the dungeon, I can break in gently to say “Okay, you’ve spend a turn discussing planning so far. Mark off torches.”
I think that works because while they’re discussing resources and planning, if I interject about time passing, that’s another very important resource that they’re using up, real-time, in order to plan, and it makes them focus on coming to conclusions before something untoward happens to pre-empt their planning. Planning is part of the resource game then. And in a game like B/X plans are particularly important for avoiding danger they can’t handle mechanically, so planning is already fictionalised naturally and usually in a specific location: the dungeon corridor you happen to stop in.
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