Earlier this week, I was having lunch with Marissa Kelly and Mark Diaz Truman of Magpie Games. Like helplessly addicted roleplaying nerds do, we were talking about games and all the adjunct bullshit. I mentioned in passing the transaction, which is a term of art I toss around without realizing it (it’s even on the revised glossary I’m working on). Mark wanted details, and that inspired me to unpack that idea here.
Definition
When I mention transaction or the transaction, I’m talking about the steps players engage in to settle outcomes in the fiction. The transaction, when I say it, is a subset of the much larger conversation in which all the play takes place. It’s also kind of outside “the conversation” since any given transaction invokes internal as well as external stuff. I feel like it’s important to call it out as a specific thing, and it’s become the nugget around I understand the fundamental characteristics of any game I’m playing.
For me, the transaction is the main thing I want to master if I’m looking for mastery in facilitating any kind of make-believe game. There are formal, mechanical transactions in almost all tabletop games I can think of, but there are also predictably functional and productive transactions in all the freeform and larp spaces I’ve been in as well. Discovering or developing a game’s transaction is what makes an experience work for me.
Every game or family of games has a distinct transaction. I strongly believe that attraction to or revulsion by a game’s transaction is at the heart of many “schools” of play and folks’ play preferences in general. But I also believe that a game’s text by itself cannot define the entirety of its transaction. The actual transaction is an alchemy between the rules and the players, and mostly the facilitator since they’re usually the ones tasked with mastering the most common transaction: the ones between a player and the facilitator.
I’m going to describe a few different transactions I’ve developed, to illustrate what I mean when I say they’re distinct rituals.
Scum and Villainy/Forged in the Dark
I’ve played enough of Scum and Blades now to see that their transactions are largely identical. That makes them pretty interchangeable, easy to learn one if you know the other, and so on.
The Scum transaction starts and ends whenever a player needs to resolve an action. So, like, this is not the same as me going to a Fortune Die roll or asking for a resistance test. Those are usually so small and one-sided that I wouldn’t call them transactions.
1. I present the situation, which usually includes either an obstacle to overcome or an immediate threat to deal with. “The Vignerions are on to your bullshit! Their clock filled up. So their supersoldiers lock onto the team. You’re caught inside the auction house warehouse with the security shield up.”
2. I ask the table in general (if it’s a group-wide obstacle/threat) or a specific player how they’re gonna deal with it.
a. I start in the fiction, and return to it as the players offer up actions they might roll.
i. If the action fits and is an obvious choice, I’ll stick to the established Position (controlled, risky or dangerous)
ii. If the action is not what I was expecting, I might consider changing the Position. So there’s some advantage to the players to do this.
b. If the players are stuck, I’ll offer obvious choices but always say “but I can’t tell you what to roll.”
3. The players put the chosen action’s dice out.
4. I state or restate their Position, and check in that everyone’s on the same page.
a. I’ll lightly sell my Position statement as naturally correct, because I’ve got the best perspective on the whole thing.
b. Other players might mention things I’ve forgotten (unpossible!) and I might change my mind. Mostly, though, I ask them to hold those ideas for the Effect bit down below.
5. I ask if they’re pushing for a die or if they want to hear a Devil’s Bargain.
a. If they’re pushing, they mark the stress
b. Mostly they’ll ask for a Devil’s Bargain. I’ll look at my obvious go-to Bargains: heat, use up a resource, start or tick a clock. There will probably be others but those are all easy in the moment.
i. They say yea or nay to the Bargain.
6. I ask if they’re using a Gambit. Table talk usually ensues because it’s a shared resource.
7. I ask if anyone is helping, and/or if anyone has a flashback they want to do to execute a setup.
a. If someone helps, I ask how and push them on the fictional position of that help. Sometimes they’ll withdraw the help if it doesn’t make sense.
b. Occasionally I’ll remind them that they’ve already set up due to a previous roll.
c. I’ll do the Flashback, nesting this entire transaction inside the bigger transaction: build a pool, push or bargain, ask for help, gambit, usually no Effect to speed things up, roll.
8. I state the effect level, which ends the die pool assembly. This is usually Regular, unless we’ve established the whole Job is at a higher Tier. If they’re facing something specific and new of higher Tier, this is where that fact is revealed.
a. I also check in about anyone’s relevant Fine gear in play. Fine gets you an effect level. Some playbook powers also do, but when I ask for gear that gets them looking at the playbook as well.
9. I describe what they get as Regular, then Lesser, then Greater effect levels. I’ll do this no matter what level they’ve started at, but if it’s not Regular I’ll reiterate along the lines of “so if you roll right now, it’s risky position with the lesser effect” or whatever.
10. I ask if they’re pushing for Effect. They mark stress as necessary.
11. I ask if they’re shifting position for Effect.
a. I mention again what position they ended at after step 6.
b. They decide in either direction. Usually there’s a little table talk.
12. I restate the final position and effect and ask for the roll. Super important step to solidify everyone’s buy-in.
13. If they rolled under 6, I look at the position’s table for the outcome. 6 and crits are easy.
a. If it’s higher than a 3, the very first thing I’ll say is “yup, that happened.” This is mostly for me so I don’t step on their success if there are also consequences.
b. If it’s a 4-5, I’ll read the consequence line verbatim. “Desperate says severe harm and or serious complication …hmm.” This is mostly theatrics because it puts them in a good head to resist a little later.
14. If it was risky I’ll mention earning a gambit. If it was desperate I’ll mention the XP. So important for door-prize reasons.
15. If they didn’t roll a 6, I’ll immediately ask if they want to resist.
a. I do this every time because I want the players running their stress clocks all the time.
b. Unless it’s a Controlled roll, in which case I’ve decided any resistance resists the whole consequence, I’ll also state what they’re left with even after a resistance roll. We’re running a “gritty” game and resistances almost never get you away clean.
c. Each consequence gets its own resistance opportunity.
16. If they roll to resist, I’ll immediately restate what they’re left with, and then restate their success per step 13. If they critted they reduce stress by 1. More huzzah! This is the step at which I get to really play up their badassery. This and a well-executed flashback.
17. If they trauma out, we talk about how they’re taken out of the scene.
18. I’ll check back in to make sure everyone got their gambit or XP.
Spelling it all out in excruciating detail like that sounds awful, amirite? And that’s why this is the thing I aim to master when I’m developing system mastery, so this transaction happens fast, nobody stalls out at any step of it, and there’s minimal weaseling around any given step. If stalling out does happen, that usually means the players have also mastered the transaction such that they’ve got a firmer grasp of the negotiable steps – position, effect, or resistance outcomes in this case – and that means I’ll need to evolve the transaction a bit to accommodate. That happened in our last game of Scum and so I’m thinking about what I might change going forward. Possibly nothing! But I’m thinking about it.
One thing I really want to call out is that there are little stagecraft flourishes that I’ve developed that are most certainly part of the transaction. Like I’ll underplay the Devil’s Bargain because I want to entice them into taking the die. I’ll overplay their stress track while they’re grubbing for dice and then underplay their stress track when they’re resisting. I’ll enthusiastically describe the Greater outcome level when asking if they want to push or shift for effect.
Burning Wheel
I’ve played tons and tons of Burning Wheel but it’s also been a few years. But it’s got a really specific transaction that’s worth talking about:
1. If it sounds like the player is formulating a plan, I’ll ask them for their intent. “Okay at the player level, what is it you’re trying to achieve?” Experienced players will usually state this before I have to ask. I might just Say Yes at this point and move on, transaction over.
2. Then I’ll ask them how they’re going about it. That sets the skill being used.
a. If the skill is a stretch, I need them to sell me on it.
3. I’ll ask if this touches a Belief or Instinct. This usually means I move to one of the scripted minigames (Fight!, Duel of Wits, or Range and Cover), which is a whole different transaction.
4. If it seems super easy or boring, I’ll just Say Yes at this point and we move on. This is not great play because BW’s advancement system frequently requires boring-but-easy rolls. I’ve developed this habit mostly from convention play.
5. If I’ve got an inkling of a failure consequence in mind, I’ll have them continue. If not, I’ll revisit 4.
6. I’ll think about the target number, but usually not too hard. I’m lazy so mostly I’ll just say “okay, you’re looking for 3 successes.” If they’ve chosen a skill with an established target number system (it’s a BW Gold thing) we use that. Sometimes I’ll throw in some “yikes” to make them feel better if it ends up really high.
7. The player puts together a die pool.
a. They start with the skill they’re rolling.
b. They justify each field of related knowledge (FoRK) die. I ask “and what does that look like?” each time, which usually culls big reaches. If they’re eager for a reachy die, I’ll make a note to include that in the consequence step.
c. I’ll ask if anyone’s helping.
d. I’ll swing back and ask about linked tests and situational advantages.
e. I’ll do my level best to give them a die at my own discretion, and repeat that they can both lobby for a die and I can give them a die. This is theatrical. It’s a reassurance that I’m on their side.
8. I’ll restate their intent
9. I’ll state the consequence of failure and listen for pushback. Some experienced players, and certain kinds of “I’d rather talk the GM into what I want” players will push back.
a. I’ll weigh the pushback for validity. If it feels weaselly, I’ll ask for a different skill so we can discuss different consequences.
10. I ask for artha being spent. I use tokens to track all this in BW, again for theatrical reasons. If it’s a versus test with an NPC in play, I’ll make a big show of pushing NPC artha tokens into the middle of the table first.
11. They roll and look for successes.
a. If they succeed, huzzah, I usually congratulate them.
b. If they fail, I restate the consequence and make it so.
12. I’ll mention marking their skill for stat for advancement and help them figure out what level of test it was after the fact. The chart’s in my head.
See, Burning Wheel’s transaction is quite a bit shorter than Blades/Scum. But this is just the Versus test. Versus tests are just easier than any given Scum roll, but it also requires less conversation from both the player and GM. That’s a big part, for me, of deciding if I “like” a game: does its transaction prompt good conversation?
Apocalypse World
Not all PbtA games have the same transaction but a lot of them are frequently similar.
1. We start looking at moves for one of two reasons: something they’ve done in the fiction triggers one, or the player wants to make a move and needs to shape the fiction into a trigger. This means I’m kind of acting out a perpetual validation gate, which means knowing the common moves at the very least. If there’s a move on a playbook that might get triggered inadvertently, I’ve made a note of that somewhere.
a. If they’ve stumbled into a move, I check in to make sure they’re okay making that move. Sometimes they retcon the fiction to back out of that.
b. If they’re pushing the fiction toward the trigger, I’ll make sure what they’re doing actually fits the trigger.
2. They grab a pair of dice and one of us will state what stat is getting added.
3. I’ll ask the table if anyone’s helping, usually with a reminder that they may share the consequences.
4. They roll and read the move’s rules for the result.
5. If I’m called on to cook up a 7-9 (ie Act Under Fire), I’ll look at the situation and why it’s unstable. Usually the 7-9s are self evident. Sometimes I’ll take this opportunity to recontextualize the situation, to put the players off-balance. Chaos and instability are a huge part of the AW aesthetic and this is the perfect prompt to invoke that aesthetic into the conversation.
6. If it was a 6-, I state “Okay you missed and I make a move.” I say it this way as a reminder to myself that they didn’t fail, because I fuck that up pretty easily. This is my reminder to think about it in terms of me making A Move, not necessarily A Move That Will Punish Them For Touching The Dice.
7. I’ll usually ask about highlighted stats and whether they’ve earned an XP. My players mostly forget to do this.
AW’s transaction looks like the shortest one here! But that step 1 bit is a channel I leave constantly open. That’s where the cognitive load of the game is for me, so thankfully the transaction is pretty snappy in most cases.
Final Thoughts
I feel like I’ve mastered any given game’s transaction when the mechanical steps feel fast and natural to the point that I can introduce some stagecraft to the whole process. If I’m just grunting out “roll for initiative, who hits first?” over and over, either the game’s offering a boring transaction (i.e. it asks too little of the conversation) or I haven’t actually mastered it yet.
Rawplaying Baybee
In other news: all this talk about how I work out a game’s transaction has me thinking more about that thing for which we do not yet have a word: Playing an RPG by the rules because we earnestly feel the rules produce the best experience for us.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this one ever since it came up here a few weeks ago. Most of my ideas are unwieldy, or pejorative toward other modes of play, or I’ve formulated it as an –ism which is a notoriously quick way to start a vast flame war. Gamers!
My current best idea is rawplaying. Derived from RAW, or “rules as written.” Very common term of art describing, sometimes pejoratively, what play looks like when you follow the rules as written. I felt like the bad times RAW gets spooled out are pretty easy to spot early, as they frequently come attached to “roleplaying not rollplaying” and “we never even touched the dice!”
So. Rawplaying. Try it on for size. It’s not my final answer but it’s my best idea so far.
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Technique #2: Reading Tea Leaves
I have this unformed notion in my head of eventually documenting all my various methods of learning RPGs. One of those steps, I think, will have to be how I deal with the fundamental incompleteness of RPG rules. My previous post in this series is here.
In my last Derpening of Mirkwood thread, there was a minor kerfuffle (which I really don’t feel like re-litigating so please don’t) regarding whether you can treat RPG rules like boardgame rules. So let me say a couple things about that:
1) Of course not, duh, they’re different things.
2) I don’t do that, and if you think I do, you’re misreading my approach.
It’s a truism that the basic transaction of roleplaying — folks talking about and agreeing to what is established truth within a collaborative fiction — makes it hard, maybe impossible, to write rules that cover every contingency.
One way this has been addressed — the most terrible way — is when you see traddy physics-type games that create tiny little special case rules for every tiny special-case thing: rules for being poisoned while on fire in zero gravity, rules for feeding your livestock during downtime broken down by seasons, whatever.
Another way it’s been addressed is through consistent approaches that treat all uncertainty as basically the same: Fate’s roll + aspects vs target, Burning Wheel’s versus tests.
And yet another way is by constraining the kinds of uncertainty that can exist in the game: PbtA moves.
I mean, I think it’s great when a game solves the problem in a more consistently applied way! The downside is that it means the players need to use a lot of discretion in deciding just what is being rolled for and why. It also means, for some players, they have to stop being immersed in their characters and think more like an author, or an impartial observer.
I’m not actually advocating for any particular approach, just pointing out that it’s a standing challenge with many solutions. There are entirely legitimate and functional reasons why a game works how it does. There are also lots of unexamined assumptions, even by major writers, designers and developers.
Necessarily Imperfect
So moving on to part two: Once you understand that rules are necessarily imperfect, how do you fill in the gaps?
1) Play lots of different games. Pay attention to the gaps that tend to repeat themselves: that’s where you know the designers are working with an unexploded view of game design. Common gaps: When to roll dice, how to interpret failure, explicit orders of operations. If you see those in your game, you’re dealing with designers with deep assumptions about how RPGs work. So the best you can do is roll with those assumptions.
2) Look for cues in the design as to what the intention of the design is. This one is tough! I’m the first to acknowledge that. And it requires you do lots of #1 up there above. And since everyone’s experiences will be different, that means everyone’s going to bring different interpretations. But for heaven’s sake, arm yourself with knowledge so you can make informed guesses.
I look for:
The kinds of uncertainty the game wants to address (Will you succeed or fail? What does failure cost? How will the fiction change if you express this or that? Can you ensure success? Can you mitigate risk? Can you fail forward or be stopped?)
Economies that encourage particular behavior cycles (do this > earn that > spend on blah)
Assertions the designer has made about a game’s themes or source material. This one is huge! It also means you understand what a “theme” is, and how to critically evaluate source material. Is The Hobbit about sneaking past dragons, or is it about working through hardship with friends? Is Dogs in the Vineyard about smoking demons, or is it about dealing with the fallout from violence? And so on. You don’t even have to agree as to what any given “theme” is! But by golly you’d better acknowledge it exists at all. This gets you in the designer’s groove, hopefully.
2a) Ask the designers. Yay internet. But hey, be ready to deal with the fact that their intentions might not have been well expressed through their own rules. It happens.
3) Use whatever method has worked for you in the past. This is not my personal preferred method, because I think it’s really, really easy to trammel all over the designer’s intent, which very well may require you deal with uncomfortable stuff.
4) Be okay with the deliberate gaps (if your best informed guess is that a gap is deliberate). For example: All the rules dealing with social interactions in The One Ring are written with NPCs in mind — it’s not unusual. Mutant: Year Zero is another notable example. In fact it’s one of the great assumed gaps in trad design!
In the case of The One Ring, I settled on that being a deliberate gap. What I look at is the company rules (the company must agree to a goal every session) and the experience point rules (you only earn if the company is pursuing the agreed-upon goal). The game feels like it’s about cooperation, not personal striving. Compare to say Burning Wheel, which is very much about personal striving (as expressed through its advancement and Artha rules).
But in MYZ I decided it wasn’t at all deliberate (cues: relationship map questions during character creation aim adversity both outward and inward), and had to come up with ways for the system to work fairly with everyone.
The tl;dr of this whole ridiculous post comes down to this:
Be sensitive to what the game is trying to accomplish
Be educated as to the scope of things that RPGs generally have tried to accomplish
Be open to what’s actually on the page and pay attention to what’s not on the page
Always question what you’re bringing to your interpretation.
Just my take. YMMV, the artist is dead, etc etc.
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Love it all! I absolutely think the same way at the table about mastering the fundamental unit of play, the transaction, which then bleeds into the “cycle of play,” the way that the conversation spoils out across transactions.
I’m loving this. I would love to have an hour to categorize each of these steps, as I have a hunch they’re amenable to it. Things like:
– determining the applicability of a mechanic
– quantifying a fictional situation (e.g. as a modifier)
– lobbying for a particular mechanical interpretation (e.g. FoRK relevance)
– calculating (e.g. summing modifiers, building a dice pool)
– rolling dice (or other oracles, etc.)
– updating quantities (or otherwise purely mechanical steps, like recording damage)
– describing a quantified outcome (e.g. interpreting a 7-9)
– asking consent to proceed (opportunities for retcon, advertising consequences ahead of time)
– reminders of optional mechanical options (e.g. devil’s bargain)
Michael Prescott oh yeah for sure, and that’s a pretty good list.
There might be really novel points in specific games that don’t fit neatly into one of those buckets but I’d have to think hard about it. And then I’d have to think about making the bucket a smidge bigger anyway.
I’d add: send and receive a signal that a transaction is needed.
A few I’m hard pressed to generalize, like ‘stating consequences ahead of time’.
This list is culled from the list of behaviours I made up for my “one day I will analyze transcripts of AP to make an actually data-driven classification of play styles” project. It includes other things like, “Describing how one’s character/character action appears to others.”
That sounds kind of like “settle on the agreed to fictional context, possibly over several iterations.” So like, assembling the pool in BW (forks, lobby dice, linked tests) and asking for help nearly everywhere.
.
Maybe I’m missing something but isn’t this an in-depth elaboration of the Care-Boss Principle?
Rules nitpick for Blades/Scum 15c : Players can Resist every consequence of an Action Roll to either reduce/avoid it. It would be one Resistance Roll for the clock and one for the Harm.
Obviously, you run the game the way that works for you, but you’ve drifted the rules when you offer them a hard choice rather than reduced/avoided consequences.
Super great post breaking it down tho. Very helpful!
Copied that detailed S&V transaction with an eye toward turning it into a checklist. I’m contemplating bringing it to the table soon, and having that detailed procedure will surely help avoid some skinned knees. Thanks!
Regarding the comment on the transaction promoting good conversation, the part of the BW process that is gold for me is Step 7, a through e. Building the die pool, and digging into the justification for each die added can be just a torrent of beautiful fiction, expanding and coloring the action being taken. To me it’s why the end result of each transaction in BW carries with it such a strong sense of authenticity… we saw in great detail in the fiction how we got to where we are.
Ariel Cayce in what way is my choice not reducing the consequence? I’m not understanding.
EDIT I’m dumb. More below.
Gregor Vuga I don’t know that principle. I’m sure smarter people than me have already been here, though.
“validation gate”
/mind_blown
I’m gonna have to go think about this for a while.
Ariel Cayce OH OH OH. I see what you’re saying now. Roll for each consequence.
Scum doesn’t break it out that way. It’s just “the consequence,” which I understand to be the all-in package deal: take a level 2 wound and heat goes up by one or whatever.
I need to go look back at Blades and see if he’s more explicit there.
Hmm but just prior to the Resistance chapter it says “a given circumstance may result in one or more consequences” and that sure sounds like they’re all separate deals.
I’m in! Thanks for the explanation. Can’t believe I’m 8 sessions in and still discovering little wrinkles like this.
Yeah, it’s on p.32 in Blades: “The GM may also threaten several consequences at once, then the player may choose which ones to resist (and make rolls for each).”
EDIT: The text in Scum is identical, but it’s on page 36.
Original post edited for dumbness reduction. No guarantees there aren’t still dumb things in there.
Paul Beakley It’s the old “System (including, but not limited to, the rules) is how players agree what happens in the fiction” mantra.
Ie., 1) the rules/game text/RAW is not the system and 2) the system is whatever means (or steps taken/required) by which the group assents that yes, Bingbong the Elf does indeed get axed in the head by the orc, including unwritten rules, steps and procedures, drift etc.
I guess the key difference is that the CBP assumes that rolling a fortune die and saying your ship is surrounded by bounty hunter drones is part of the system because the group tacitly agrees that the GM rolling a die and saying something good or bad happens in the fiction is part of how things happen in the game, while you don’t consider it part of the transaction.
(This is not me nitpicking or something in case if it comes across that way, I think it’s a useful new concept, I just noticed a great deal of similarity between the two.)
Gregor Vuga yeah I’m seeing that as well. I do think we’re talking about similar things but maybe for different reasons. Totally compatible conclusions though.
I need to read this at some length and absorb. I like the distinction between the conversation and the transaction, and the idea the transactions (not all purely mechanical) are what make up a game’s system. There’s illumination for me here, so thanks for posting. It’s interesting, and genuinely helpful to think about for both GMing and designing.
More when I absorb…and maybe start doing more consciously some of what I do instinctively.
Scumday Wedneday
The weirdest thing happened last night. I think I talked myself out of Scum and Villainy.
I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with the game itself. I’m feeling the teeniest bit aggravated that I keep discovering little rules wrinkles (last week: every separate consequence gets its own chance to resist; this week: each of the three little arrows next to Veteran is its own advance). But that’s not it.
Last week we had a really tense, fun session with guest star MadJay Brown. It was fun! It was the first time the crew had gone up against a higher-tier opponent. They pulled out all the stops, really worked the system hard, somehow pulled it off. Having a fourth crew member was a huge help.
So I had a little debrief before last night’s session. You know, is everyone still into this? and what’s the fun parts we want to see more of? Because I wanted to get at that feeling after last week’s session without just saying so why did last week feel so off?
I got back lots of aggressive “oh it’s fine!” and “it’s okay.” Thumbs up but not enthusiastically up. So of course I started offering my own debrief back:
On my end of things, the sessions are super fun to run on their own. The transaction is fun and fruitful!
I’m not really feeling much big-picture storyline forming up. It all feels like gigs. And if I don’t take the time to prep a bit (I did not last night) then I don’t really see anyone actively pursuing story stuff.
I don’t really feel strong characterization coming off anyone, probably because the system is crunchy and demanding enough that it’s taking up most of that creative bandwidth.
And by the time I’d said all that, inside, I was doing the Emma Stone meh face. I think I’ve talked myself out of this game.
So…I’m not sure where we go from here. It could be that it was just an off night, and we need to allow for off nights once in a while. Orrrr it could be that we’ve kind of seen what the game has to offer, and they’ve advanced enough that everyone’s is quite good, mechanically speaking, at getting what they want. (It’s true, everyone’s got 7 or 8 advances and it’s getting hard to really challenge them.) Or of course there’s the siren call of other games, games yet to be played on my list: Legacy, SCUP, Forbidden Lands soon, Mechatron, whatever. The list never gets shorter.
Or is it that thing at the back of my mind now, knowing that Plus is going away and the Indie Game Reading Club is either moving shop or closing shop. Writing here has been enormously fulfilling, occasionally more than playing itself. I know it’s gotta be a part of it.
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[…] There’s a very similar tempo to clocks being introduced and engaged with within a mission. The FitD transaction is identical across all […]
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Howdy everyone! How’s your isolation going? Today was the first day of having my daughter home, figuring out some homeschooling/unschooling strategies for the upcoming weeks. We’re taking a break, so let’s talk about 2016 in indie RPGs.
This was the first year I couldn’t track everything coming out. Kickstarter became the primary funding/marketing venue for gaming, at least in my world. I stopped neurotically tracking every update to every backed project, which means I stopped paying as much attention to chitchat out of designers. All but one, that is.
If you’re following this series or want to go backward from here, the 2015 edition is here.
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
Blades in the Dark
The flagship of the Forged in the Dark design platform.
PDF and book available via DriveThruRPG.
2016: Blades in the Dark/Forged in the Dark
Honestly, I had a hard time deciding what year to plop John Harper’s Blades in the Dark. I backed it on Kickstarter in 2014 and didn’t receive the final book until 2017, but it was 2016 when I started playing from drafts released to backers. I never play games from playtest drafts, but even early looks at Blades showed me there was something interesting there.
The short pitch, in case you’ve somehow you’ve never heard of it: players play gang members in a spooky steampunk city. The focus is on the shared enterprise of growing the gang, with trope-enforcing playbooks and cinematic caper rules supporting that. The system itself feels like a mashup of Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel, a trindie game more on the indie side of things.
I’ve written a lot about various Forged in the Dark games over the years. I’ve played Blades, the sci-fi version Scum and Villainy that started as a stretch goal and become a freestanding book from Evil Hat, and most recently Band of Blades.
Is Forged in the Dark the next big design platform? There are certainly a lot of adaptations out there now! A few that jump out at me: Hack the Planet, Beam Saber (on Kickstarter right now!), Copperhead County, A Nocturne, and Brinkwood. This isn’t even close to comprehensive, just a quick list of what’s sitting on my hard drive. If you like playbooks, explicit negotiation with the GM about your effort’s fictional positioning and desired effect, a party-focused orientation, and fun mini-games that handle downtime and your party’s shared enterprise (your gang, your ship, your family, etc.), it’s time to get into a Forged in the Dark game. The original is a safe place to start.
2016 Runners-up
Invisible Sun
This infamously ultra-luxe production from Monte Cook Games
was first funded on Kickstarter this year. It’s raised a lot of questions! Does
a premium product deliver a premium experience? Is it wildly overpriced or is
the rest of the market wildly underpriced? Is a game this big really “indie?”
This is my first runner-up because a very generous patron backed the reprint of this game for me the following year, after the initial release produced a lot of hype and noise and conversation. In a very real way, the Indie Game Reading Club blog would not exist without it. I started the deep dive into the Black Cube mid-2019, and we played the game itself both at the table and online, with mixed results. My Invisible Sun wrapup is here, with links to the rest of the series.
The Black Cube is cheaper on Amazon, but if you want the PDFs you need to buy it direct from Monte Cook Games.
Masks
I had my first dose of actual play the year before Brendan Conway’s Masks came out, but I’ll list it here. Masks is a PbtA teen superheroes game, and it does superhero gaming exactly the way I want: focused on interpersonal melodrama, not the physics of interacting superpowers. I’ve put my time in on the Champions and GURPS style supers, I’ve played Brave New World, I mean…I’ve played a lot of superhero games. Which is funny because I’m not really a fan of the genre. But Masks gets me. Highest recommendation, even if you feel iffy about playing teenagers. The teen part of the game is more about their relationship with adults, rather than exploring their emerging personalities like in Monsterhearts.
You can buy Masks on DriveThruRPG.
Space Wurm vs Moonicorn
This dose of sci-fantasy psychedelia flew under my radar because of the name, but playing it blew my mind. It’s a layer that sits atop Dungeon World, and maintains that D&D-ish “fantasy party” vibe to a point, but mostly it’s about the extensive prep that goes into creating the world. SWvM is ostensibly built as a pseudo-competitive RPG – Space Wurm is trying to take over the galaxy, and Moonicorn is trying to get out from under the galaxy’s oppression – but really the good stuff is in the absolutely gonzo interplay of setting weirdness, playbook weirdness, and big scene-chewing melodrama. The game also comes with a self-contained one-shot version, with every move in the game explicitly on the playbooks. No common moves! It’s tricky for the GM to run because of that, but it’s a neat format.
I wrote a lot about SWvM back when Google Plus was my platform. I haven’t gotten everything tagged but here’s a good intro from my first session.
Get it on DriveThruRPG!
Coriolis
This Year Zero Engine sci-fi ship-crew game has an amazing setting, truly: generation ships head off to settle a far-off world, but while in transit instantaneous gateway travel is discovered, wars are fought over the gates, societies are trapped behind the destroyed gates and fall and rise over the next several thousand years, and then those generation ships arrive. It’s a very hot mix of Arabian Nights and Firefly and cyberpunk. And the production values are jaw-dropping. And I love the Year Zero Engine! But Coriolis was the first time I felt disappointed in the Year Zero Engine.
In doing something “different” for Coriolis, Free League messed with its dice mechanisms, introduced a “darkness point” economy that didn’t work, and broke action scenes into discrete “action points” that I found exhausting to engage with. I think we ran three or four sessions of this and ultimately felt disappointed in the result. Coriolis makes this list because it was the first time I realized I need to not fall in love with Year Zero Engine games sight-unseen.
Get Coriolis on DriveThruRPG.
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I’m going to experiment with something new here: short reviews of things I’ve been reading, once a month. I’m not done with my deep dives! But this will get more information out there about the staggering array of indie titles. It’s also a chance for you to vote on the title you’d most like me to critically dive into in a future month. Just leave me a comment here, on Twitter, or on the Indie Game Reading Club Slack.
This month features all physical games I’ve gotten from Kickstarters recently. Of course “recent” doesn’t mean what it did pre-pandemic, does it? These are the top of my TBR stack.
Shinobigami
PDF is available at DriveThruRPG
Hardback is available at IPR
Shinobigami
This is a surprisingly small, dense book. Shinobigami opens with a replay, a very Japanese scripted playthrough of the game with manga-style illustrations. It’s like half the book. I confess I only skimmed it.
The game’s angle is that the PCs belong to different ninja clans in the modern world. You play through a one-session scenario in pursuit of some agenda for your clan (literally called The Prize). Might be a scroll with ancient wisdom, or a sacred relic, an NPC, or any other MacGuffin you can dream up. “Modern world” is also loosely held here: it could be new cybernetic technology or an AI or something as well. There’s an overarching setting conceit, and it’s basically the World of Darkness (“World of Shadows” here), only with ninjas instead of vampires: vast conspiracies, an ongoing war right under everyone’s noses, monsters everywhere threatening mundane humanity.
The scenario can be cooperative, or a two-sided battle, or an anything-goes battle royale. It’s a prepped GM thing, and the scenario is resolved at the end of the session. I feel like having an explicit goal makes this very easy to just run with. No idea what characterization looks like within play, though.
Character creation is very crunchy and mechanical, with various abilities (called ninpo) that interlock and synergize. I think the first time you play you won’t see much of that, but the second go-round will get some very clever builds. But…yeah, it’s a “builds” kind of game. There are attack, support, and equip(ment) ninpo, and then each clan gets its own list as well. Finally everyone gets an ohgi, a secret technique known only to your character and kept secret from the other players. There’s also an advancement system called Merit that lets you cash in earned Merit for handy virtues, and take on additional flaws in play that further bolster your Merit. While the game is played one session per mission, you play your characters through multiple missions.
Shinobigami is a straightforward, even old-fashioned, skill-based game: you roll dice against a GM-set target number, and either succeed or fail. It doesn’t have anything to say about what fails look like, which is disappointing. I assume various indie techniques, like “you face a complication” or “don’t roll again until the situation changes” are applicable to make it a bit more interesting. The very novel killer app of the game is the grid on which the skills appear, with blank spots between skills. When the GM calls for a skill to be rolled, you count the skills and little blanks between a skill you do have and the skill being called for, which becomes a penalty to your roll. Taking skills also fills in the blanks to either side, making the number of spaces you count go down Clever!
An image from the replay. The little kawaii characters appear in a PDF that comes with the game as well, tokens to use during the combat game.
Combat is a more elaborate minigame than straight skill use, of course, because you’re ninjas. The big twist is the Velocity System: there are six columns, numbered 1-6, indicating your “plot.” No idea why it’s called that. Anyway! Everyone in the combat secretly picks a number on a d6 and hides it under their hand. You reveal, and put a token on the Velocity chart matching your number. Attacks happen from high to low, easy enough, but your number is also the fumble number: the earlier you go, the more likely you are to fumble. Pretty cool. The difference between numbers also establishes an abstract sort of “range” for ranged combat.
Because it’s a translation from Kotodama Heavy Industries (who also brought us Tenra Bansho Zero and Ryuutama), they offer advice to localize what can feel like a weird tabletop experience. TBZ and Ryuutama both feel, to me, like they’re 30 degrees “off” what we think of in terms of conventional play culture and assumptions, and a few small tweaks can help modernize (Westernize, let’s be honest) and streamline play. Or you can ignore the advice and work out the experience for yourself.
Hit the Streets: Defend the Block
PDF available at DriveThruRPG
Hit the Streets: Defend the Block
Gauntlet online ultra-GM Rich Rogers’ first game design, Hit the Streets: Defend the Block is a neighborhood-level supers game. Think Daredevil, Jessica Jones, the whole Defenders lineup. Hit the Streets won BAMFsies (popular vote and judge’s spotlight) and a 2020 ENnie (Judges’ Spotlight and popular vote winner).
The book itself is nice and compact, an attractive full-color 105 pages. The art is all very 4-color comics-style. For such a slender volume, it does a great job of presenting information spread-by-spread (for which Electric Bastionland, which I will talk about later, has been lauded recently – note that Hit the Streets…hit the street months earlier). There are only a couple places where text blocks flow to another page. I really wish more games would do this! I love the graphical presentation.
I mean who doesn’t want to play a pink jackal?
For perfectly good genre reasons, the game is team-based: players conceive of their supers in terms of the team, starting with agreeing to a purpose for the group (retired heroes, ex-villains, heroes for hire, etc.), continuing into each character’s team purpose (leader, den mother, strategist, jerk), and ending with relationships among members. Then you do the same, kind of, to establish a Rival Team that makes your life hard: super villains, or a different hero group. Finally, you establish details about your neighborhood.
Character creation is refreshingly straightforward for a supers game: you decide if you’re better at being normal or being super, divvy up values across six stats, and pick a couple powers (most of which are enhanced versions of your stats, with some color/explanation/fictional positioning). You also start with a random amount of “Spark,” an economy that reflects confidence and gets worn down through play. It’s dialed way back from Champions-level detail while also being more specific and constrained than Masks: A New Generation.
Sessions play out in a conventional way, with the heroes overcoming neighborhood problems. Players roll against target numbers set by the GM (the number of 4-6es you need to roll in a pool of d6es, Burning Wheel style) while sometimes risking your Spark (the number of 1s you roll, up to the difficulty you were facing). The dice pool is easy to build: mode (normal or hero, 1 or 3d), stat (1 to 3d), team role (1d if you’re fulfilling it), one of your powers (2d if you’re using it), and finally Spark can be converted to dice, as many as you want. State a clear intent, make a single roll, and you’re done with the conflict.
Spark is the central bit of the game. You gamble it away on conflicts, you lose it if there’s Tension (that is, the roll is meaningfully dangerous in some way), and you earn it back via charity, neighborhood patrols and team bonding. It’s a nice, simple way to keep focus on the stuff that actually matters in the game. If you ever hit 0 Spark, you’re out of the session.
There’s a simple advancement scheme based on earning XP from dealing with your normal obligations (family or job or whatever), and supporting your teammates. Your normal/super mode and stats can all be improved, and you can eventually buy more powers. That’s it, that’s the whole game mechanically speaking.
While the mechanisms and economies of the game are stripped back to functional first principles, I think the good stuff is in the GMing section. Here, Rogers has solid-gold advice. Most of it is applicable outside Hit the Streets, too: ask tons of questions about the character choices players made during creation, think about the characters in context with their setting, and so on. He’s got some good ideas to make the game more mechanically nuanced as well, by establishing good-enough and holy-shit-great difficulty levels for single rolls, or setting up conflicts that need more than one roll to resolve, and so on.
The best bit, in my opinion, is that the game has strong opinions about the themes of street-level supers stories: specifically, corruption and financial disparity. He provides lots of prep ideas for creating problems for the team and individual characters that orbit these two themes.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to giving this one a spin even as a one-shot. It’s theme-driven rather than physics-driven, which I love, and it’s great that it hits different notes than Masks.
After The War
PDF available at DriveThruRPG
Hardback available at IPR
After the War
After the War, by Hugo nominee Alasdair Stuart and Genesis of Legend founder Jason Pitre, came out many months ago and I’ve been struggling with how to talk about it. My takeaway after my first read-through was that it’s a sprawling work of fiction and world building with the slenderest thread of mechanics running through it. A closer read has changed my mind a little on that.
A roomy layout makes a book such a pleasure to browse.
It’s a beefy book, at 355 pages. The art is black and white, all very nicely done. The layout is clean, easy to navigate, probably best in class at this point for a book this big. Of those 355 pages, easily 200 pages of it is fiction, mostly presented as in-game documents, interviews, all kinds of found-footage type stuff. Another 100 is play advice, necessary for a game with so much required collaboration. Maybe 50 more pages are (many) lists of character and setting choices. I could probably type all the rules-rules on one page.
All that fiction is in service to presenting the premise of After the War, and it’s a doozy. There’s been a catastrophic war throughout the galaxy against a memetic virus called The Song. The hand-waving behind The Song is super interesting! Something about a vibration emitting from the very fabric of spacetime that overwrites sentient species’ free will, converting them into a vast hive mind called The Great Choir. Cool cool cool. It’s finally beaten by a counter-song engineered by humanity called Tormenta, which basically did the same thing as The Song but instead of enforcing unity, it created hyperviolent monsters out of people and then killed (most of) them. The game is set, well, after the war. The setting is a graveyard planet where the war’s survivors are trying to hack out new communities while hints of both The Song and Tormenta threaten to re-emerge and characters grapple with their wartime experiences.
I need to talk about how the book works at this point. So those first 25 pages spell out the timeline of the war, right? The next 35 pages are spreads of interviews with survivors. It’s all well written, and maybe there are even some NPC ideas in there. But it’s really just an extension of those first 25 pages.
Character creation is pretty easy, mostly just coming up with an origin (which conveys two traits), your war story (and two more traits), and your profession (for your last two). Lots of choices, and it feels kind of lifepath-y. Then you create a pair of Beliefs (Burning Wheel style) and that’s it. There’s also a group setting-creation step, comprised of a settlement type (each with four questions), industries (each with an NPC), relationships between each PC and one of the NPCs, a little map-making game (I love these!), and a quick explanation of how each PC found themselves in the community. It’s a GMed game, but this process does a good job highlighting the themes everyone’s interested in exploring. Later, the GM does a bit more prep on their own, specifically filling out five other settlements around the planet. None of the other settlements want what the PCs want, of course.
While there is a GM, it’s on the players to collaborate on what scenes they want to play out. The GM is tasked only with setting up “the platform,” that is, an initial situation and setting. A different player defines “the tilt,” an incident that drives the action. Then a third player sets “the question,” a compelling element you want to explore in the story. Once you’ve got a platform, a tilt and a question, all the players decide to opt in or stay out. Then you play out the scene until you’ve answered the question. I have no idea what that feels like in play! Feels like you get interesting vignettes perhaps more than plot through-lines. There’s some useful stuff for the GM to help work out interesting situations by evaluating history and current relationships, but when the GM only sets the platform, I’m not sure how they bring those situations into play.
Games that democratize conventional GM duties put a lot of creative onus on the players. There’s a lot of good advice in After the War for the players on how to handle all these duties. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether players will actually read them. Getting players to read rulebooks is like pulling teeth, but maybe the audience for After the War is self-selecting for indie nerds who love this stuff. I can tell that the particular division of labor this game requires is pretty novel, though, so expect a learning curve.
After some instructions to the GM, there’s another 100 pages of background material. Some of it’s obviously useful, some of it less obviously so, but all of it is interesting. It’s a lot to read. That’s followed by a pretty detailed example of play (much like the Replay in Shinobigami, above).
My takeaway, again clarifying I have not yet played After the War: there is a lot to read, a pretty small footprint of a system with some novel twists to the conventional RPG transaction, and lots of what appears to be freeform storytelling punctuated by infrequent but one assumes impactful rolls. My first read left me feeling like the book mostly existed to showcase the setting, but going through it again for this article I feel like there’s more system than I saw the first time. If you’re in for a heavy read (all those survivor stories in the beginning of a book are downers!) and theme-intensive collaborative gameplay, give it a look.
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I’ve been running a Burning Wheel game for the first time in years, and was reminded that swaths of the indie world might not know about this seminal work. I’ve written about it a ton, but here’s a one-stop overview.
(The) Burning Wheel
Okay yes, formally it has a “The” in the beginning. Absurdly underpriced rulebook and Codex available from BWHQ. If you find a PDF, it’s pirated and you should feel bad about having it.
Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel, nearly two decades old now (and its final
revisionedition appeared a decade ago! EDIT: Burning Wheel Gold Revised came out 2019, and made a few small but important changes to Gold, which came out in 2010), is still one of the most important indie games ever created. But as time goes by, its importance has changed. There’s a generation of indie gamers who started in PbtA and Fate and lyric games, and they have no use for its lessons. But for folks coming from an older, perhaps more conventional roleplaying background, Burning Wheel is still an indispensable bridge to the modern world of game design.Here’s why Burning Wheel still matters. And … why it doesn’t.
Wheel 101
The current generation of indie gaming fans might not even know what the deal is with Burning Wheel. Here’s a quick recap of the game’s killer apps, and why it works.
Layered Complexity
You can play the core system of the game — simple die pool tests against either a value set by the GM or against other players’ rolls — and get most of the BW experience. And then you can add other systems as they come up: authoring NPCs into the fiction, tracking one’s finances without counting money, and so on. Get good at those elements and you can move on to several minigames that address melee, ranged combat, and verbal conflicts. It’s set up like layers of an onion — well, the hub, spokes and rim of the Wheel, formally speaking — and doesn’t leave anyone behind who doesn’t want the extra complexity.
A Tight, Consent-Oriented Transaction
There are three pillars to how BW’s transaction works:
((Radically) Transparent) Intent, Task, and Consequence: To do literally anything in the game, you need to make your intent — that is, the actual desired result of your efforts — abundantly clear to the table. You can’t play close to the vest, you can’t try to “beat” another player or the GM through fictional positioning trickery. Then, the GM tells you what task (skill) you need to roll to achieve that intent. Finally, the GM is obligated to tell you before you roll what the consequence of failure is. But get this: the player isn’t obligated to make that roll. They have to consent to it. The GM can always offer a different task, but can also change the difficulty and/or the consequence. It’s very clear, above-board negotiation. Lots of players get tripped up on this transparency mandate, and it’s Burning Wheel’s first and most powerful lesson.
Say Yes or Roll the Dice*: This is a philosophical and procedural stance that not every event in the game needs to be rolled off. The GM can just say yes to anything a character tries: not just the boring stuff, but great and exciting plays as well. This intersects with the game’s advancement system, which relies on actually using your abilities and skills, so sometimes you don’t want the GM to say yes. But it’s always there, demanding the GM aim the camera of uncertainty only at what is important. When you’re rolling, it means something important is happening. That’s a useful indicator to the players.
*EDIT: Okay, this has come up a couple times online! “Roll the Dice or Say Yes” is what appears in the book. It’s always appeared in the game this way. It’s formally called “Vincent’s Admonition,” named after a rule/philosophical stance in Vincent Baker‘s game Dogs in the Vineyard. The reverse order is a old cultural artifact, repeated often enough that I still forget sometimes. But giving credit where credit is due is rare enough in gaming, so let me set the record straight here as well. As a practical matter, the point here is that saying yes is a powerful focus tool (“roll the dice” is the default trad thing and, in my opinion, doesn’t really need to be repeated other than to clarify that saying yes or rolling dice is the decision point.)
Let it Ride: Another lesson that trips new folks up, players are prohibited from rerolling for different outcomes, until the situation that led to the roll materially changes. If you rolled to pick a lock and you missed, you can’t roll again: you just can’t unlock this one. This applies to GMs as well! They can’t demand new tests for things characters already accomplished. If your intent is to sneak into the castle, you’re not going to roll once for the tower guard, once for the dogs on patrol, and again for more guards in the courtyard. The scalability of intent is a tool BW GMs use to direct and focus play, along with Say Yes (above).
These three pillars work together in a tight, consistent and fair way. Everyone has to be clear about what they’re trying to accomplish, the GM has to decide whether the players need to roll at all, tell them what they’re risking before the roll, and then the outcome is final and unchangeable once it’s over. Depending on your background, that may sound like pretty typical play or it may sound radical and unfun. (The latter crowd is wrong.)
Player-Authored Incentives
The killer app of Burning Wheel is artha: three flavors of bonus points you earn and spend various ways. The entire cycle of the game comes down to using Beliefs, Instincts, Traits and their interplay to generate artha. It’s all carrots, no sticks, so every time the player engages, they’re complicit in their own story.
Beliefs are a terrific, very difficult tech: you state things your character deeply believes in and cares about, and ideally attach a goal or action to that. So things like “I deserve to be king, so I will murder my brother the heir.” Or you can go with a Belief without an action: “God guides my hand in all things.” It’s difficult, though, because you’re asking players to commit to what they care about. Surprisingly tricky! More advanced play means writing and updating Beliefs constantly to maximize the artha you earn from pursuing, completing or conflicting with other Beliefs.
Instincts are programmatic reactions your characters can always do. These macros started, I think, as a way to protect players from bad GMing: “Always have my sword ready,” for example, means the GM never gets to say “a-ha, you’re caught off-guard!” Instincts get more interesting when they’re potentially problematic and get your character in trouble. “Always have my sword ready” is not an awesome instinct when trying to bribe a city guard or seduce royalty, right? You’re never obligated to get yourself in trouble, but if you do, you gain artha.
Finally, traits are little descriptors you mostly don’t have much control over. You’re obligated to start with some traits via the character creation system (below), and you can buy some useful ones as well. Later, though, traits get voted onto your character based on how other players perceive your play. Neat, and occasionally aggravating if you’ve been signaling something you didn’t intend. It’s hard to be given “cowardly” by the other players when you think your character was just being very careful!
This authorship sinks its claws into the players when they commit to exactly what they’re doing to earn artha. Some of that will come from pursuing Beliefs, or letting your Instincts get you in trouble, or for allowing your Traits to send play off in new and surprising directions. The result is quite different from external XP or advancement schemes that involve hitting someone else’s marks to get your cookies.
Emergent Character Complexity
This is, I think, where Burning Wheel stands in stark contrast to PbtA style and many other indie games: every character is a complex, bespoke creation. There are no templates, no classes, no playbooks. Instead you’ve got lifepaths within settings, with constraints on how one progresses from path to path. The GM can fine-tune the focus of their game by restricting settings and setting the lifepath count (3 is good zero-to-hero, 7 is towering badass), but otherwise players have a lot of options. The downside is that there are no Burning Wheel pickup games.
The game also features a use-it-to-improve-it advancement system. In practice it’s fussy to track every roll, but it’s also a powerful incentive in its own right: If you know you’re just one high-level test away, you might just go for it and accept that you’ll (probably) fail the roll and invoke the consequence. Between advancement and artha earning, the players are constantly pulled toward making life hard on themselves now, so life will be easier in the future
Finally, the other players occasionally vote to give each other new traits. If you’ve been an ardent worshiper, you might pick up Faithful (the power to pray for miracles!) or if you’ve been mean to NPCs, you might end up with Jerk. Later, if you’re jerky to an NPC and that sends the fiction off in a surprising direction, you’ll get paid artha.
The interplay of lifepaths, BITs, advancement and trait voting means every character is mechanically and fictionally complex and unique. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything close in any other game.
Rewards Mastery
Because the game is meant to be gamed and optimized and worked, players can get good at it. This shows up most pointedly in its various minigames: Fight, Duel of Wits, and Range and Cover. Each of these involve scripting moves in advance, comparing, and watching chaos ensue. It generates delicious, genuinely dangerous uncertainty. It’s also the kind of thing you, the player, can get good at. You might have a middling-fair sword fighter but they’ll be spectacular in the hands of a skilled player.
Internal Tension Is Good, Actually
Last bit: Burning Wheel’s systems come together such that intraparty conflict becomes an important source of energy for the game. Rather than a well-lubricated “party” that exists only to defeat obstacles, a typical group of Burning Wheel characters will have drives and needs that conflict with one another. This makes for great adventure fiction. A typical best practice is for players to have some BITs aimed at one another, and others aimed outward at whatever the campaign premise currently is. The very clear, aboveboard transaction I described above ensures everyone’s on a level playing field when it comes to using the system to fight (each other, sometimes) for what they want.
You Should Still Play BW If…
Should you really still care about a decades-old game? Maybe! If:
You came from D&D
Or any conventional big-book RPG background, really: Cypher, Gumshoe, Savage Worlds, Storyteller, BRP, and so on. Burning Wheel argues most traditions of “trad” play are anywhere from unproductive to actually toxic, which is a point of contention (or aggravation) for folks who don’t like the game. They’re not wrong! The game has a strong underlying philosophy, and it continues to be best-in-class for teaching trad folks what is de rigueur in much indie-style play: radical transparency, strong authorial collaboration among everyone at the table and not just the GM, that uncertainty can be good, that consent is powerful.
But it is also not shy about telling you what’s wrong with trad play too: unlimited GM authority is toxic, planned adventures are boring, and intraparty conflict should be not only acceptable but encouraged. This aggressive tone, I think, also reveals rifts and dysfunctions that long-standing play groups may have not realized they harbor. I’ve heard so many stories of groups breaking up over BW — it’s a thing.
You want to understand current (non-OSR) fantasy
Burning Wheel tech shows up in all kinds of places. Mutant: Year Zero and The One Ring in the trindie world, The Veil and Ironsworn for a couple PbtA examples, Blades in the Dark and the entire FItD family as well. BW popularized Beliefs, Say Yes, Let It Ride, use-to-advance, and lots of other ideas. Don’t know about you but I find it easier to understand and interpret game designs when I can see the underlying values.
You want to understand adventure fiction
The absolute best part of Burning Wheel, for me, is that it beautifully models a popular and game-able kind of fiction: the character-driven adventure yarn. The BIT system is for characters who know what they want and will stop at nothing to get it. It does reactive play less well, and programmed “adventures” not at all. “Going on an adventure” without anything driving that for the character will mean no artha earned, which ultimately means slow or no advancement.
But Don’t Bother If…
Ten years is many lifetimes in game design. I wouldn’t recommend the game any more if:
You’re a committed storygame nerd
If you come from a tradition of GMless/GMful play, lyric games, solo games, PbtA/BOB, or larp, and have no intention of engaging with trindie games, Burning Wheel might not have much to offer. It’s orders of magnitude more complex than any of these kinds of games, the learning curve is intense, and even a quick game demands more investment than picking up a playbook and answering some questions. The game has a huge social and psychic footprint and that doesn’t work for everyone.
Complex economies are work
If the idea of tracking multiple economies that can be spent in multiple ways doesn’t thrill you, you might not dig the game part of this game. Same with tracking each roll you make for advancement, and evaluating when you’re close enough to advancing something to warrant an unwinnable roll. The game rewards mastery but it also demands it.
You love to hack
The lifepath system is murderously difficult to hack. Individual entries need to be balanced along like six criteria, settings need to be balanced against one another, and combinations need to be exciting, interesting and sensible. It’s so hard that the next generation of Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, uses a simple questionnaire instead.
You think player mastery feels weird
Player mastery can feel weird! In some places, BW protects you: your character can be a much more skilled and persuasive speaker than you, for example, because of how the Duel of Wits minigame plays out. This is a notorious blind spot in most trad games that rely on the actual players to talk things out, which can lead to more skilled and persuasive players getting what they want in a way that doesn’t represent their dumb, unpersuasive characters. But it can also get weird on the combat side, where players can be so good at scripting their fights that they win more often than their unskilled, clumsy characters normally would.
The Rest Of the Family
Final bit to catch everyone up! The Burning Wheel family of games includes:
Burning Empires: a very specific sci-fi adaptation, featuring comic-book-like play that closely models the Iron Empires comics by Christopher Moeller. It’s more compact in some ways, more complex in others. Most notably, BE features a tight economy of scenes for each character and the players are in semi-competition with a semi-impartial GM. The competitiveness is touchy and hard to pull off well, but produces some powerful play juice.
Inheritance: this is a mostly-freeform larp-ish game about Viking families gathered to argue over the inheritance of a recently deceased patriarch. It’s a preprogrammed scenario, and procedural uncertainty is reduced to cards that explain who wins in the event of violence. But it’s highly replayable because Beliefs drive play as hard as in the original. Good luck finding a copy, though: Keep an eye on eBay.
Mouse Guard: this variant, another comic adaptation, features simplified character creation (questions instead of lifepaths), simplified scripting (multiple versions of the same basic minigame, each with their own special takes “weapons” and such), simpler but still use-based advancement, and more focused artha generation (one Belief, one Instinct, one Goal). It’s quite a lot easier to hack, which is a big deal. But it’s also not (quite) Burning Wheel. I’m not sure you’d get the same trad-fixing lessons playing Mouse Guard: it’s not constantly telling you you’re doing it wrong.
Torchbearer: huge breakout success, based on Mouse Guard but evolved well beyond it. This is BWHQ’s love letter to B/X D&D, viewed through the Burning Wheel lens. There are some neat tricks that expand on its Mouse Guard roots: the GM is encouraged to just “say yes” to folks who come up with a “good idea,” rather than forcing them to grind through their supplies. “The Grind” is probably Torchbearer’s most notable feature: every roll burns down light, food and so on. A new edition is about to become available.
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Now that Blades in the Dark is several years old, we’re starting to see new games push the Forged in the Dark (FitD) envelope, not only in terms of the “scrappy heroes with a shared enterprise” premise but the underlying transaction of play. Off Guard Games’ Band of Blades was the first major departure from the model. Genesis of Legend/Jason Pitre‘s Sig: City of Blades (SCoB) is probably the farthest-out hack/adaptation yet. Certainly the farthest-out I’ve personally played.
I just wrapped up a six session run at SCoB with some lovely folks online. Here’s what we found.
Sig: City of Blades
Available in PDF via Drivethrurpg.com
TL;DR if your time is short
If you love D&D’s Planescape, or the idea of madcap fantasy-gaming trope mashups, this is an earnest love letter that delivers that experienceThe rules have a lot of problems, a combination of matching the model to the premise, and pushing the design in so many new directionsIf you already know FitD games and are not doctrinaire about your rules, you can get a lot of fun out of this. But if you want rules that work out of the box, you’re in for a rough time
I used Miro to run Sig online. New-to-me technique was to import PDFs into the workspace and run it all in one place: no Character Keepers, no online dice rollers. I liked everything about it except for clocks getting relegated to a corner. At a live table, making/marking clocks is central to the stagecraft.
So… “Planar Fantasy?”
Confession: I knew nothing about Planescape when I started digging into Sig: City of Blades. D&D is a blind spot for me after the early ‘90s, but I’ve seen lots of art and read stuff from folks who still love the Planescape setting and aesthetics. And I was charmed by Jason Pitre’s previous game in this setting, Sig: Manual of the Primes, built on his Sparks engine.
First session or so, someone tossed out the phrase “planar fantasy” and all my players nodded like they knew what that meant. I can’t find a firm definition online. But my take, after debriefing with a Planescape superfan who signed up, is that it’s a combination of high-fantasy mashup and mundane city/real life. So: the cops are armed lizard men who love donuts. There’s a gigantic, terrifying dragon who’s an accountant in the city’s biggest firm. The gods (“Powers” in Sig) rely on the power of worship and will serve you cease and desist orders if you interfere with that.
So that’s Sig. It’s inspired by Planescape’s Sigil, a city floating in “planar space” with literal physical tethers to three planes of existence. There are elemental planes, ideological planes, and conceptual planes. There are also portals in Sig that take you to any fantasy world you could dream up, so it’s a fun premise for dipping into different settings at a whim.
In SCoB, Sig is a generation into semi-functional anarchy, ruled by a network of Factions in the absence of the Silent Regent. I’m told by Planescape fans that she maps to a character called the “Lady of Pain.” I’d imagine the absence of the Lady of Pain’s benevolent dictatorship is Sig’s greatest departure.
The premise of SCoB is that the characters are a Crew of freebooters, who serve as the outreach/ activist/ adventuring arm of a Faction. But also the Faction’s leadership, allegedly, but that’s less obvious in the text. They’re scrappy up and comers but the Crews and Factions are described in, shall we say, aspirational language.
This doesn’t have to be a contradiction. Probably because of playing lots of Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy, it was a fight to reconcile ourselves to this idea. We started by clarifying that Factions aren’t the same as city functions. So, like, there will always be a vast bureaucracy running Sig but the Paper Guard, a Faction, are currently in control of it. Should the Paper Guard be taken out in the course of the faction war at the heart of the game, the city bureaucracy will endure.
Our players took the Order of Ashen Keys, described as “mercenary warcasters” in service to the Sage Collegium. Basically they’re a magical militia working for very aggressive librarians. They’re also in charge of the Faction that runs the city’s libraries. In our game, they went to war straight away with the Dustkeepers, who run the city’s museums. Basically a magical nerd fight.
Epic battle between librarians and docents
It’s fine, it works, but it took work to get out of the Blades mode of “scrappy up and comers” in a living city where factions are functions: the Bluecoats are the cops of Duskvol and will always be the cops, for example.
A breakdown of Sig’s essential city functions would have helped. There’s an elaborate map of Sig composed of 48 Claims. The whole game is about seizing those Claims, but there are never more or less of them. A Faction’s Tier is limited to the Claims they hold, so if you’re Tier 2 and both your Claims are taken, you’re no longer a Faction. In any case, the map strongly implies the city’s functions, but it took some homework on my part to figure out what all’s actually happening.
I still have no idea how the setting “works” as a realistic setting. The game doesn’t care, either, and that’s fine. It’s an “urban fantasy mashup” aesthetic, and its themes drive more toward conflicts between communities and power-hungry factions than pursuing one’s ambitions within a hostile sandbox setting (like Blades and Scum).
The Rules: Ambitious, Broken, Redeemable
We played six sessions, and every session featured a goodly stretch of talk about how to make the rules work.
Some of this is due to the ambition of changing both the default holding environment, and a lot of changes to the FitD model of play. Some of those changes are super interesting, while others left us wondering what motivated the changes beyond novelty.
The best and most interesting change to baseline FitD is in character creation. Rather than set playbooks, there are ten each cultures, lineages, and devotions. Every character has one of each, which grants stat ranks as well as possible abilities. This is all done for tabletop play via this extremely clever character PDF with invisible layers for each choice. Set your chosen culture, lineage and devotion layers to “visible” and bang, a bespoke character sheet. Very cool.
To be sure, SCoB innovates typical FitD in lots of other ways. Player-facing stuff that jumped out at me, for those of you who already know Blades in the Dark or something similar:
Loadout impacts the engagement roll: if you go light, you grant another die to that roll. I like the push-your-luck tradeoff. The downside is that your Crew’s equipment list features a tag system that isn’t explained in the text, and at least in our game the choices were frequently interchangeable. Loadout didn’t feel like an especially hard choice.There is no longer a “position/effect” element to actions. Effect level aggregates from a list of stuff like Tier difference, “controlled position” (a GM call), suitable/quality equipment, and how many 6es you rolled.Consequence level — minor, moderate, major — is a function of your current Stress, which accumulates in the usual ways (giving yourself dice, helping someone, resistance rolls). The rule, formally, is that the next level of consequence becomes available to the GM to inflict. That worked okay, but it just meant an ever-growing list to check against, and the GM having to take responsibility for the amount of pain inflicted. I kind of hate having to shoulder that responsibility. I tended to look at the lower end of the scale when things weren’t crucial, and the upper end of the scale when things were at their most tense.Devil’s Bargains are Planar Bargains in Sig, and allow you to reroll all your dice in return for taking a consequence. That didn’t work great for us, given how effect level is calculated. We drifted this a bit with “reroll any dice you want.” Also, rather than pulling from a set of smaller consequences like conventional Devil’s Bargains, consequences on offer for a Planar Bargain scale with the character’s Stress (like all consequences). Obviously you don’t want to make a consequence too steep if you want players to take it, but these Bargains did feel more punitive.There’s a Harm track that mirrors the Stress track, with effect level reduction being the penalty for running the track to “wounded” and then also 2 Stress to do anything when you’re “incapacitated.” When it’s filled, the character is eliminated.Factions accumulate Infamy rather than Heat, which is earned in similar ways to OG Heat (quiet to messy to catastrophic), but also when you seize a Claim. This landed weird for us, given you can definitely seize Claims very quietly. More to the point, the Faction needs Infamy to level up, either gaining a new ability or leveling up their Tier. I feel like the actual noise generated needed to be one source of Infamy, and Claim seizing needed to be separate from that. But that’s intuitive, based on watching the characters do two Missions with an eye toward deliberately generating tons of Infamy so they could quickly claw their way to Tier 2.Character advancement comes from missed (3-) rolls, Dungeon World style, on both action and resistance rolls. Each of a character’s three starting choices — lineage, culture, devotion — also come with a built-in Drive. In theory you can earn XP off your Drive when it “causes trouble,” but given the tight economies of the Mission phase, that just meant nobody bothered with their Drive XP except during downtime and non-mission roleplay. I drifted this to include “when your Drive sends the action in an interesting new direction,” and that brought Drives back into play during Missions. You can also mark XP for developing or ruining a relationship. There’s no guidance as to what that looks like. I’d guess developing a relationship could be a personal project clock during downtime, and ruining would be obvious in the fiction. Every character starts with two Relationships with NPCs keyed to their gang, resulting in good triangles right out of the gate.
On the GM side, the changes were more profound:
Every mission is strictly about seizing a Claim in Sig. The city map has precisely 48 Claims, so it’s a zero-sum game. And a faction’s Tier is limited to the number of Claims they hold, so to claw your way up you need to drag someone down. It’s an ugly crab bucket, uglier than even Blades.Missions have three clocks: Politics, Profit, and Peril. The Politics clock is chosen by the players during their mission planning, 4, 6 or 8 segments. If they complete the clock, they get 1, 2 or 3 dice to roll after the mission to seize the Claim. It struck me as kind of a marshmallow test for the players: they could totally do 4-segment missions, face far less wear and tear (mostly only addressable during the downtime phase), if they’re willing to accept 50/50 odds each time. The faster downtime cycle seems like it’d be a better bet, but my players were impatient and went for 6 and then 8 Politics segments. The players also choose the size of the Profit clock, which will earn them 4, 6 or 8 Coin if they complete the clock by the end of the mission. And if they don’t complete the clock, they still get 1, 2 or 3 Coin. Yes, that means calling for an 8-clock and then giving up on it still gets you nearly as much Coin as busting your ass to fill that 4-Clock. And when you’re ticking a Profit clock you’re probably not ticking the Politics clock: Profit is stuff you’re doing that’s going to earn you Coin: robbery, extorting or blackmailing folks, all that.The Peril clock replaces the conventional engagement roll. The GM rolls fortune dice, one plus one more for each freebooter with a “light” loadout (smart!). You get a 4, 6 or 8 segment clock representing a major tilt in the action. You still set up other clocks the normal way in the game both for things you’re trying to accomplish as well as looming dangers, but the Peril clock is supposed to represent a big shift in the mission’s focus. It didn’t really work out, but it’s the compromise for giving up “position” in the transaction. The regions of the city containing the Claims don’t have any of the material you might expect from first-gen FitD games: no fortune die ranking of safety/wealth/crime/occult, no sample “notables.” Very broadly the city is broken into four social classes — rich and powerful, merchant class, working class (the tethers to the planes kind of standing in for harbors), and the poor underclass. Other than that, all you’ve got to go by is the Tier rating of the Faction that holds the Claim you’re going after. I didn’t have a lot to go on other than a bit of color text from the book, but that also meant there was room to improvise without messing with canonical setting stuff.The Planar Bargain thing is supposed to be tied to the three tethers (themes) hooked into Sig, but lordy was that hard. I’d let the players cook up some kind of thematic color explaining how their reroll was justified via Stone (strength and size), Shadow (imagination and craft) or Order (patterns and bureaucracy). This might be a practice thing. I wanted this to generate a few more interesting hooks for play but we couldn’t get there.There’s an explicit “Drama Phase,” that is, unstructured non-mission roleplaying time. It’s a small thing but it addresses a common FitD critique that there’s not enough room for roleplaying to breathe. The text also says you don’t have to be super strict about progressing between phases. We put that to use on several occasions, moving between downtime options (healing, personal project clocks, indulging in vices to reduce stress) and drama play. Honestly, I could even see bouncing between Drama and Mission, if everyone’s clear when they’re actively pursuing Mission clocks. It’s good, it’s an easy small change, and I could see using it in other FitD games. Mechanically, the only difference between Drama and Mission phases is that you can’t make resistance rolls during Drama play.
Rules Problems: The Premise
In actual play, we ran into trouble for one of two reasons: reconciling the rules to the premise, or interpreting text that pointed to earlier versions of rules.
On the first one, reconciling the rules to the premise, we had a hard time with the aspirational language of the Crew chosen by the players versus the Tier system representing scrappy up-and-comers. When I asked Pitre about this, he explained that the Crew are also considered the leadership of the Faction. Honestly that doesn’t make sense either, and undercuts the freebooter vibe laid out in the text itself. There’s just a lot of ambiguity in the text, as written, about the difference between a faction and a crew of freebooters working for that faction, and whether they’re actually in charge.
Sounds like they’re a scrappy crew working for a Faction, yeah?
The Infamy rules were also tough for us to wrap our heads around. As I mentioned above, seizing a Claim gets you Infamy under the “epic and terrifying” category. But what if you were “smooth and quiet” while you seized the Claim? This is why I thought we should earn Infamy for both how they handled the mission, and what they accomplished. “Epic and terrifying” also includes eliminating an important individual. I do like that Infamy provokes a marshmallow test for the Freebooters, because they also risk less fallout from taking a lot of Infamy at once: you gain 6 fallout results minus the highest die, and you roll as many dice as empty Infamy slots. So you really do want to hit hard and early, rather than letting the clock fill up slowly and exposing yourself to many more rolls.
Just like every other FitD game I’ve played, these various tools exist to let the GM calibrate tempo and tension. Clock creation, in particular, is still good tech. But it’s also all smoke and mirrors, and it only matters as long as the players agree it matters. There’s a real table benefit to smoke and mirrors, though: I wanted to speed up advancement for both the characters and the gang, so I threw down far fewer and smaller clocks than I would have in other FitD games. You could say SCoB just makes it more obvious that there’s not really much objective mechanical tension behind its systems.
Rules Problems: The Text
The other issue, when the text points to what I can only guess is earlier rules ideas, is harder to work with without being very charitable in your reading and interpretation.
The Claim roll, for example, is written like you’re nibbling away at a Claim. So you’d take a smaller Politics clock if you wanted only a small nibble, and a larger for a big chomp. But in actual play, the Claim roll at the end of the mission is all-or-nothing. The rule works fine but the text describes something quite different.
The three mission clocks, Politics, Profit and Peril, also feel like they started with one rules draft and ended up in another. In all cases, clocks advance based on effect but also on fiction. The GM watching the fiction to advance clocks is far more important in SCoB than it reads to me in Blades in the Dark. The importance of fictional clock advancement became apparent when I ran across the rules about how one progresses the mission clocks. Specifically, a simple (non-Clock) roll only ever adds one tick to a mission clock, regardless of effect level. To get more effect at once, you need to start a sub-clock for some bit of the Politics or Profit mission. In actual play it felt like inventing work for the purpose of the work, not in service to the fiction.
There’s other stuff like that throughout the text. Pitre, to his credit, has released errata addressing what we ran into. Hopefully the print edition will incorporate as much of this as possible too.
The Play: Freewheeling, Improvisational, Strange
The best part of Sig, for me, is that it’s filled with provocative gaps. Very few “facts” but lots of hooks to grab onto. Character abilities, for example, are frequently open to interesting interpretations, which might make you crazy if you want tight rules text. Take this ability, from the devotion to Magdak, the will of the city of Sig itself:
So…is that descriptive or prescriptive? Does “establish” mean “GM tells me” or does that mean “I tell the GM?” We went with the latter, and it was marvelous and weird. Super wide-open Sherlock-y connection-making with an occult touch, inviting the player to surprise me with how things are connected. Marvelous.
Everyone took the fantasy + mundane mashup thing and ran with it, which was great fun. The flashback mechanism, which remains untouched from Blades, is especially well matched for this kind of play too: “I broke in before the mission and placed stun sigils everywhere” fits just as well as “I gossiped with the dragon accountant’s secretary at the bar.”
My method for maximizing my fantasy palette was to open up fantasynamegenerators.com to its “fantasy races” tab, and then generate a few names to grab as necessary. Given there aren’t meaningfully deep cultures at play in Sig, I could open my brain up to free association and let the listed races prompt the fiction.
This whole style — and I assume “planar fantasy” in general — needs early and eager player buy-in. I don’t think it’d sit well with the folks who want deep, consistent cultural development underpinning the city’s workings, or a more serious style. It’s mood-board play, which normally I’m not into, but Sig: City of Blades helped me accomplish a fun time with that style.
We played the game for several sessions, so the game can work. But we needed to be flexible and charitable about reading the text, and frequently apply previous FitD experience. If you know how a typical Blades in the Dark job’s tempo should feel, it’s pretty easy to map back over to Sig’s clocks and Stress countdown. SCoB’s novel takes on old systems resulted in a less-different play experience than I expected. Mostly things just felt a bit looser and easier for the characters, and then suddenly much worse as Stress imposed spiraling consequences that demanded resistance, and therefore more Stress.
Last Thoughts
You know what Sig/Sigil reminded me most of, once I started really digging in? Invisible Sun of all things. I mean it makes perfect sense if you know Monte Cook was responsible for both Invisible Sun and a huge swath of Planescape, especially Faction War, the final book of the Planescape setting. Both settings feature a sprawling surreal city filled with incomprehensible strangeness, ruled by Factions with inscrutable plans and methods. It’s a free association exercise underpinned by an aesthetic that welcomes mash-ups and contradictions. Themes of living in a strange city in a blend of strange cultures, everyone having arrived in the city from elsewhere (I’m not sure anyone is “from” Sig so much as having arrived from another plane or prime world), and an occult thread running through everything and subject to occasional upheavals (the Path of Suns in Invisible Sun, the tethered planes in Sig).
Sig: City of Blades is in an interesting design space between PbtA style games that provide no/little setting other than what the players come up with in Session 0, and FitD style games with extensively developed setting materials ready to push back against the players. It feels lore-intensive — planes and primes and tethers and powers and factions — but when you get there, there’s no there there. The game offers tons of affordances to grab onto and improvise around, but the players need to know the affordances exist. It feels like a sandbox environment with the promise of interesting exploration, but the players find they’re responsible for their own discoveries.
As a love letter to Planescape, I think the game succeeds. As an evolution of the FitD framework, I think it’s ambitious but decidedly mixed. Hopefully future FitD-inspired designs will keep pushing the envelope.
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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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Something that occurred to me just this year: having an encyclopedic knowledge of RPGs hasn’t actually made me happier. In fact it’s probably made me less happy participating in my hobby, because I don’t share the same assumptions as the players with whom I spend most of my time. It’s given me all the tools I need to understand my own unhappiness, though.
Maybe it would be different if I were playing largely online. A diffuse body of players themselves will more often cross-pollinate ideas, particularly if they’re all drawn together by the idea of cross-pollination. But that’s just not the case with the folks who show up at your home on the regular.
The same thing happens a lot when I’m running some weird indie shit at a Games on Demand-style space at a larger mainstream convention. The indie weirdos are probably down for whatever you throw on the table. But you’ve also got the not-indie folks, the trad crowd whose tickets are actually making our indie corner possible. In that case, I know the common assumptions – the traditions that comprise “trad” play – I’ll face, and build those into my pitch and explanation.
Rediscovering your own beginner’s mind is the postgraduate work of roleplaying.
Beginners are so much easier to work with. And it’s so hard to be a beginner, again and again.
Category and Rhetoric
The problem I think comes down to players either making category errors or rhetorical stands.
Rhetoric shouldn’t come as a surprise in a hobby rife with tribalism: all RPGs are D&D hacks is the umbrella claim. Stop me if you’ve already heard these bangers:
You can’t trust the GMThe GM is GodThe point of play is to make your character strongerAll games ape other mediaThrow away any rule you want
Ehh…it’s all basically folk dances, right?
More often, though, a player’s operating assumptions aren’t rhetorical. They come from a profoundly different understanding of what the activity “is.” For me, a former composition major, roleplaying is music: there’s a huge range of styles, orchestrations, methods, and structures filtered through history and venues. For others, all roleplaying is waltz music: jam that melody into a ¾ time signature whether it fits or not, play it at a dance pace no matter what, one chord per bar no matter what, and treat every single piece of music as ultimately derivative of folk dances.
The (Eight) Usual Suspects
These are the eight topics I find demand specificity at tables with experienced players, because they (experienced players) come loaded with assumptions from other games. Any one of these could be a complete essay! And maybe they will be. Just let me know if any of them sound interesting enough for another few thousand words.
Intent, conflicts, tasks and moves
Maybe the most common point of confusion I run into is what happens after players touch dice (or some other procedure-with-uncertainty). It’s especially confusing if the player is unclear why they touched the dice in the first place. What’s the cause and what’s the effect? What are the rules even for?
Some games use randomizers to determine success or failure of a specific, tangible task: that’s your straight up task resolution method. Others require players to state their intention before the roll: this is either transparency (if you’re clarifying why you’re doing a task, as you do in Burning Wheel) and/or conflict resolution (if you’re resolving an entire scene and you’ve described what you want out of it, like Dust Devils). Others use randomization to introduce surprise into the fiction, the aspirational — if not frequently unrealized — goal of PbtA style moves.
Why are we rolling again? When are we rolling? What do I stand to gain? What am I risking? Maximize my agency but don’t overwhelm me with options.
The purpose of a roll has the most room for misunderstandings and disagreements, even within genres or traditions of play. Especially within genres or traditions of play. What happens when you state your intent but a move doesn’t hit it? What if you just perform a task but don’t discuss your intent (maybe to leave yourself some wiggle room ex post facto)? What if you expect more granularity and the whole scene ends up resolving with a single roll? And so on.
There’s also the question of when you engage with a game’s procedures. PbtA moves (usually) trigger when something happens in the fiction. FitD actions (usually) trigger because the players want to achieve something. Trad games (usually) instruct the GM to tell the player which skill to roll and (usually) only when what they’re doing has a chance of failing. Lots of (usually) in there, right?
Inputs and outputs are such a fundamental bit of The Transaction and yet there are so many ways of doing both. The curse of being an experienced player is that you’ve probably developed preferences along the way.
Collaborative vs adversarial facilitation
Many games of the current era aspirationally describe themselves as “collaborative,” frequently to imply that those other games are not. But the rules may or may not support actual collaboration. Games with goals, for example, are hard to run collaboratively if the play product is supposed to feel like accomplishment. Does it still feel like winning if everyone agrees that you won? I’ll get into that one more in a future column I’m working on.
Calm down, control freaks.
There was an old Forge bugaboo about authority, broadly referred to as Mother May I. You can probably imagine what this looks like from the player perspective, constantly having to seek approval for your play choices. Lots of indie games were specifically designed to get away from traditional power structures, but it doesn’t mean the players have. Your GM might still act like a Mother, and the players might also treat the GM like a Mother! Things can get real weird when those power structures get reimposed by players because of their assumptions.
Downtime as abstract bookkeeping vs open play
Play phases are a more recent design phenomenon. You see it a lot post-Torchbearer and its Adventure/Camp/Town breakdown, and popularized by Blades in the Dark’s Downtime procedure after every Job. Rather than a constant play-the-day flow of action, the game has formal breaks where stuff happens that’s not about the adventure, or the job, or whatever.
Spend one more Coin on recovering from harm. As a treat.
Sometimes the phases are meant to be pure abstraction, or the players treat it as such: the Fellowship phase of The One Ring, for example, doesn’t really need to be played out. You take a break, jump ahead a few months, and the characters spend that downtime healing, training, and so on. And sometimes the not-adventuring phase is meant to be played out, just without the mechanical weight of the action sequences: the Investigation phase of Voidheart Symphony is my most recent exposure to this.
More often than not, the text doesn’t actually say much about how much “free roleplay” is meant to happen during these phases. Different players and facilitators will treat this in very different ways. No surprise, then, that players may be caught off-guard when they’re asked to dig into their downtime stuff. Or GMs may be caught off-guard when the players bing-bang-boom work through their checklist, eager to jump into the next procedurally dense bit of play.
Structural goals vs embodiment play
This isn’t a great description but let me unpack what I’m getting at.
Band of Blades, Fellowship, and Voidheart Symphony all have explicit goals in mind. Band of Blades’ goal is for the characters to reach Skydagger Keep while racking up the highest possible score. There’s a score! Fellowship characters will ultimately face the Overlord and defeat them. Voidheart Symphony is about facing and defeating a series of big bads who serve the Void, the universe’s visceral urge for toxic individualism. But goal-oriented games use their goals for different reasons: Beating the Game might be one, but pacing might be another.
Compare these to Urban Shadows, Mutant, or Blades in the Dark. “Get rich or die trying” in Blades is a driving motive for your crew, but it’s not really an endgame goal. Finding Eden in Mutant is a goal, but you don’t defeat Eden, you go there and see what happens. Urban Shadows has “storms,” thematically connected PbtA style fronts, that just structure what’s going on in the game’s big picture.
Cool, cool, glad you liked your 7-9.
Players looking to shoehorn goals into embodiment games are gonna have a rough time, just like embodiment players are gonna make the goal players crazy in goal-oriented games.
Vocabulary
This basically comes down to two problems: mechanical tricks that look similar but aren’t the same, and common words that mean different things (or different words for functionally identical ideas).
Why is it always clocks, anyway? Who wouldn’t want a slice of this?
Clocks, for example, got popularized in Forged in the Dark games, but the graphical presentation has shown up in other games to confusing effect. The clock in Voidheart Symphony’s Investigation phase is just counting the days since the characters became aware of the next Vassal; they can’t run the clock and achieve a goal by filling it. Those are two different applications of the same graphic design idea.
Assets are all over: sad things on index cards! But they work differently in Fate, Cortex and Dune. Easy to assume Assets all do the same thing but they definitely do not. Assets are an easy place for players to get confused and frustrated. You can invoke an Asset in Fate, for example, but you can’t assume that’s a thing outside of Fate. There are (different) economic constraints to Assets in Fate and Cortex, but not in Dune.
I ran into a problem with the word/concept of Advantage in Fellowship, where it represents an opening you can exploit against an opponent and not a third die, take the highest. Frustrating! Or Value Statements from Tales of Xadia, which look a little like Beliefs from Burning Wheel but are actually more like Fates in Tenra Bansho Zero.
(This is what I was saying at the top of the essay: encyclopedic knowledge won’t make you happy, but can explain why you’re unhappy!)
Or take skills from most any game as compared to actions in FitD games. Functionally similar, but there’s some subtle differences there worth exploiting. Actions are bigger and more thematic than skills, except in games where skills are meant to be big.
Economic incentives vs pacing
In a game with an economy of some kind – Fate Points, Plot Points, Artha, Doom Pool, Darkness Points – it can get very confusing as to what the economy is for. Sometimes economies are there to incentivize play choices, like taking a d4 instead of a better die in Cortex and getting a Plot Point in return. But sometimes economies are pacing and GM-constraint tools and don’t have any sort of incentive purpose to them, like Darkness Points in Coriolis or your scene budget in Burning Empires. I frequently need to explain what an economy is “for,” but players will explore them on their own no matter what you say.
But I don’t want all this Artha. I just want to have more than you.
Let’s also not forget that many incentive schemes do not incentivize players who don’t care about them.
Explicit responsibility and implied authority
What exactly each player is responsible for at the table used to be a pretty clear-cut thing, but lots of indie game design challenges traditional authority breakdowns in novel ways. I run into this one a lot! Players who think that, since they had a mandate to narrate their own successes in one game, that’s just how all games are going forward. Not so! Or GMs who are expected to make rulings in one game are explicitly forbidden from doing so in another.
I picked gm-less for a reason.
In some games, there’s no actual GM at all of course. But there’s almost always some version of facilitator at the table. That’s not great when other players start treating the facilitator like a GM and abdicate their responsibilities.
The mechanical weight of fiction, the fictional weight of mechanisms
Does it “matter” how you’re armed or armored, what equipment you have, what the landscape looks like? Is fiction just color or is it constraining? Does the fiction provide interesting new affordances or can you only do what the character sheet says you can do? Does the fictional positioning meaningfully change after the rules touch it, and if so, does that change what you can do within the procedure?
You think that’s air you’re breathing?
I wish more games were better at calling this out specifically. But it’s an ongoing struggle, at least in the beginning, to suss out the relationship between the fiction and the procedures in any game.
But The Rules Say…
Besides the fact the players bring their assumptions to these things, let’s not forget that plenty of game texts themselves do a poor job of clarifying their own assumptions. Designers are gamers as well, and they have their own blind spots. In other cases, they’re writing toward a specific audience with their assumptions in mind. See most everything that calls itself OSR, for example.
Treating this stuff as having any sort of meaningful shared assumptions is impractical, even with explicit textual explanation. To strain some metaphors, it’s like a baseman tackling another player as they run between bases because, hey, there’s tackling in football so why not baseball? They’re both ball games.
Closing Thoughts
It’s not a complete list of every possible unaddressed assumption, but it’s as complete as I can make it. Writing the list left me wondering, is there a lowest common denominator to this category of activity? What defines “roleplaying” and makes it stand apart from other, related activities?
Honestly, I’m not sure there’s much there, beyond “embodying and authoring a role within the constraints of an agreed-upon set of fictional criteria.” That might be it, the very minimum definition. Which, of course, means we should be thinking long and hard about fanfic and other forms that fulfill all those criteria but don’t look a thing like any RPG you might see on a shelf.
Meanwhile, I can’t help but think that it’s just so impractical to expect every player to completely discard every assumption every time and start from scratch. Going once more back to the sports metaphors, there are only so many sports you might participate in. You’d be forgiven for conflating pickleball with table tennis and regular tennis (which I did recently). But there are just so darned many RPGs, and we prize novelty in the indie space. It can be exhausting to come at every text with beginner’s eyes.
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