I hope it continues to be true that I learn the most from my failures, because I royally fucked up my last game. Right now I feel mostly defeated.
So there’s this thing in Legacy called Wonders. They’re big goals your family can aim for. You gather these abstract resources, invest them into the Wonder and explain how that looks in the game fiction, and when you’ve done all five, bang, here’s a big new change to the setting. It’s a neat idea.
Where I fumbled so, so badly is that there’s a zero-sum game lurking inside Legacy. And I was reminded that I cannot be trusted with zero-sum games.
One of the core mechanisms of the game is the Treaty economy. Every family and faction can hold Treaty that’s coded to another family or faction. You spend Treaty (“Call In A Debt”) to acquire one of their resources, or to compel their help, or to gain a bonus when you make a move against them. The only ways to stop that is to spend one of your Treaty back against them (it needs to be reciprocal) or make the Hold Together move. It’s totally unclear from the rules if you need to actually get a hit on Hold Together; I assume you do.
The zero-sum game is taking resources from each other. I now have it, and you don’t.
I can’t be trusted with zero-sum games because it introduces winners and losers. If I have it and you don’t, I’m winning and you’re losing. This is a totally toxic head space to find myself in. I can’t trust my own motivations, and the best-written principles in the world won’t stop me.
In our Legacy game, I had an NPC faction that, since the prior turning of the age, had evolved into a religious crusade. Via several trial and fortune outcomes on the Turning roll, this faction ended up holding a bunch of asymmetrical Treaty on the players’ families. So I opened the new Age with what felt like some strong, sweet moves out of these guys. I’m going to set them up to be the bad guys! I’m gonna upturn our “the vampires are the villains” assumptions of the previous age! Better still, my first target had a resource tied to another resource, with the codicil that if they lost one they’d lose the other.
Or is this ex post facto rationalization? I’m super good at rationalizing. Is my sweet move fictionally sweet or competitively sweet? I don’t know! Because I can’t trust my own motivations.
I’ve been developing a theory of play for, well, a very long time now. It’s not original, I’m not offering it as my invention or anything. But some time ago I read about the idea of a “magic circle” we create when we play. It’s got the trappings of religion, with ritual and community and intimacy inside of it. It’s why I despise playing in ballroom settings at cons: I can’t draw my magic circle.
Play that forgets the principles of fiction first, being a fan of the characters, of making our choices look like things in the fiction, that stuff is extra-toxic within the magic circle. We’ve agreed to the rituals and community and intimacy, and here I am abusing all those things. Because there can be winners and losers, now it’s a competition.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been through this. Burning Empires also has winning and losing as a vital part of the play dynamic. I can kind of keep that at arms’ length, because you can do precious little to actually influence the roll one makes every session to meter out victories of the humans and Vaylen. But in Legacy, those safeguards aren’t there. It’s on everyone to hold the game at arms’ length on their own, to not take anything personally, to play in a principled way.
I’m just not strong or skilled enough. It’s a personality flaw. I know me! I’ve been sitting right there when my motives start getting really fucking blurry around my decisions.
I fucked up. And I knew better.
Our Legacy game is over. In retrospect I should have seen the looming threat of zero-sum play baked right into the game. If you’ve got a table full of players who are 100% cool with watching awful things happen to their stuff, the game might work very well for them. There are lots of ways to inflict awful things on each other in Legacy.
I think, too, that my theory of cognitive load was completely correct: with so much to stay on top of, nobody had any bandwidth left for patience and charity. Me included! The game was too much to track, plus potentially competitive. I think everyone’s patience was worn thin by constantly trying to shoehorn our desires into the moves, constantly evaluating whether we’re zoomed in or out, constantly tracking all the little benefits and bonuses that show up scattered across three pages of character stuff (there are some real information design issues I have with the playbooks) and three pages of moves. Everyone ended up nose-down in their paperwork, thinking very little about the fiction.
Anyway, we’re taking a good long break from any kind of roleplaying going forward, I think. I hope it’s not forever. But whatever we return to, it won’t be a heavy cognitive load nor have zero-sum features. Those things, I think, are poison for me.
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It should be a label on the cover, right there next to the bar code: zero sum game inside!
Someday when everyone agrees with my universal labeling standards this won’t come up.
It’s definitely applicable to boardgames as well. 1-2-many right there!
Sorry to hear it all went down so poorly.
I admire the way you can unpack this stuff. When games don’t work for me I just throw the book across the metaphorical room and organize a beloved PbtA game.
It was a terrific reminder for me to take a long hard look at my various current projects. I’ve got one that will, in the words of one reader, “create a tornado of PvP.” If there’s bad-competitive stuff baked in I need to pull that shit right out. JFC.
It was also a good reminder to back down the cognitive load of my designs. They tend to be overinvolved, which maybe is great if you’ve taken the effort to really master them (see: Burning Wheel) but oh lord not if you can’t or won’t.
Also: super clear affordances of what’s procedurally possible and what’s expected to be handled non-procedurally. The constant butting up against the moveset to accomplish stuff wore everyone out fast.
Joe Beason haha I’m the poor deluded soul who believes I can actually improve myself out of my flaws.
I’m much too fatalistic for that. My approach is to learn how to maneuver around them.
I’m pretty sure I’d be happier if I could do that.
Aw, dang. This is exactly why I couldn’t run Torchbearer! The mechanics of the Grind, and the fact that as GM I get to introduce checks (and thus invoke the Grind) at whim, AND I get to decide what counts as a “good idea” to avoid a check… it made the whole thing really hard for me, and bounced off all of my decades of developed best-practices.
Sorry it ended poorly, but it’s interesting to hear your thoughts! I still haven’t checked out Legacy, although it’s on my list.
Competition and PvP sorts of elements have a long (and fraught) history with tabletop RPGs. I got deep into dissecting that history when I was working on WotA.
Based on that deep dive, I’d say adding PvP or competitive design elements in RPGs is usually ill conceived, although I find it interesting that in the earliest days of D&D, you have Arneson making PvP a very central part of the game.
I also hope it’s clear that I’m talking only about myself in this post. Lots of I language! But it’s easy to read stuff as prescriptive and I’m totally not doing that.
I feel ya on butting up against the moves. We’ve only played 2 sessions of Legacy that MadJay Brown has run and I keep thinking of thing I want to do but I’m not sure how to do them with the moves. We sorta made a couple things work by squinting real hard and bending moves a little out of shape, but that’s not incredibly satisfying.
Failure is how we learn!
I’m still trying to puzzle out what you did that was your fuckup. Was it that the players didn’t like getting punched in the gut now that some bad people wanted to try it?
Jason Corley it was (probably) making moves motivated by my desire to deliver a brutal hit, rather than my desire for the faction to act in a principled way.
Like, did or would “they” “want” the resource I went after? Or did I go after the resource because it was a really strong competitive move?
I rationalized it in the moment but even now I don’t know if it’s real.
The fuckup isn’t necessarily that the player didn’t like getting gut-punched, although it was one of many punches and I know it was a lot to absorb. It’s not knowing the motivations for my own play. And it was not taking the temperature of the table, not noticing that everyone was struggling with the moves, not seeing all their noses down in their paperwork.
Adam D I’m running TB for the first time this Saturday. These are all my worries.
Adam Day fwiw the amount of facilitator discretion Torchbearer requires totally didn’t trigger the same worries for me that zero-sum stuff does. Dunno why! It wasn’t even a thing, and lord knows I spend an inordinate amount of time looking for things.
Interesting. I wonder if Legacy is saying something about the nature of institutions with those moves. In other words, a flash of greed like you experienced, where power corrupts your decisionmaking, might be the point of the zero-sum nature of the rules. Perhaps the game is saying “You did all this prep, but did you really plumb the depths of what happens when there’s a dramatic power differential in an institutional relationship? Make this move and find out!”
Dunno. I didn’t like it. My players didn’t like it.
I really think it’s not the zero-sum move on its own. It’s that plus the heavy, awkward load of the rest of the game.
We had a really similar reaction to Undying as well, but in that game’s case there’s just a very short list of moves. Less load so the players were less strung out when it came time to face something stressful, like getting jacked by another vampire.
Paul, you touched on this above but I’m totally curious about the difference between the feeling this gave you and burning wheel. BW seems quite a bit more antagonistic/competitive than most other games I’ve played/run. But there are very definite constraints in what can and cannot be done by the GM. I always feel like it has mechanics in place to allow the GM to fight as hard as they can once a situation had been established. Is there anything here that prompts additional thought? I’m running (possibly) some bw in the new year and want to understand it as much at possible.
Nicholas Hopkins okay yeah.
First off: I’d say Burning Wheel continues to be best-in-class in its various PvP procedures and solutions. This is because, as I understand it, Luke et al are hyperantagonistic players and a lot of the game grew from managing that dynamic.
In Burning Wheel, formally you always negotiate everything. They can’t necessarily negotiate completely out of a tough roll, but there’s a whole thing in place where you’re required to talk through what’s happening: here’s the intent, here’s the action I’m taking to achieve that intent, here’s the consequence for failure, here’s the die pool and how I built it, here’s what that die pool looks like in the fiction. And after: this roll will stand until something dramatic changes. That’s important too.
In Legacy and PbtA in general, move procedures are either triggered because the fictional trigger was hit (and everyone agrees that that fiction is what actually happened) or the player makes the fictional trigger and the move happens. The GM is constrained in their moves to the moves list, which in every case I can think of is so broad as to be more of an inspiration list than an actual list of constraints. But more to the point, there’s no negotiating: it’s all baked into the move.
In BW if I was about to take away a faction’s control over a hydroelectric dam, it’d all happen at the character level in the first place: this religious group meets with your elders and makes a moral plea that their great work cannot continue without the dam. (First check: is this even a reasonable request by the crusaders? Almost certainly not but … let’s say it’s been fictionally positioned that it could be.) It’d probably be a Duel of Wits. The player would have their own stakes, like get the fuck out of our territory and never come back. And there’d be all the rolls, that add up to a compromise.
It’s possible that it’d be a catastrophic fuckup, the religious group would get everything and offer no compromise. But way back at the beginning there’d be that first “okay sure, I agree to those stakes” between the GM and the player.
Legacy has these family moves that are, first of all, super abstract. Nobody’s really “making” the moves; they’re meant to represent large-scale movement that sets up zoom-in scenes. But the big difference is that there’s no negotiating: I’m spending my Treaty and I want your resource (the dam), now either you spend a Treaty to shut me up or you make the Hold Together move. Oh you rolled snake eyes? Fuck you, the dam is mine.
The whole transaction from start to finish is completely different. BW’s transaction has lots of safety built in so the players can play as hard as they want/can but they’re constantly checking in with each other and agreeing to stakes. PbtA’s transaction cares only about fictional triggers, and there’s no stopping the outcome once the move is made. That can be really powerful in terms of generating unexpected/unwanted outcomes but it’s not “safe” in the same way.
You totally rock, Paul.
Does that help?
This is me reminding myself to come back to this later. It is hitting a ping on my radar about fights I used to have on the Forge and early Story Games, and things I thought were behind a lot of folks reactions to push-pull discussions, and how the differences around the assumptions about the fundamental core activity of play. Like, it isn’t all about zero-sum, but your framing of it here makes me think that is a good place to approach it from.
.
> That can be really powerful in terms of generating unexpected/unwanted outcomes but it’s not “safe” in the same way.
I have experienced this even in Urban Shadows. It is really all over the PbtA space.
I meant to do this before 12/31 but, well. Y’all have read plenty about my malware woes. It’s under control for now, but I’m looking at maybe, possibly reinstalling at wordpress.com and letting them deal with the server headaches.
Here’s what I played and my year-later takeaway, nice and short for potty reading:
Epyllion
Played, didn’t run. I really enjoyed it! But a couple things still jump out at me a year later:
As lovely as the friendship crystal mechanic works (short version: you give away your supply of tokens to other PCs when they act on the flags you’ve put on them during character creation, then either count them up when helping or spend them on the “moon magic” move), I still remember it being especially punishing for groups that aren’t great at paying attention to each other. Basically, you end up spending a lot of energy playing toward other folks’ flags but if they’re not paying attention, it’s easy to feel resentful about spending that energy. Given how my year played out, I very much think this is a phenomenon of my home group. I hope to address this more specifically in 2019.
I have no idea how the long game plays out. I chased advancement really hard and got to the next age. It’s fine. I did notice that advancement choices are pretty narrow. I feel like everyone’s playbook will end up looking like everyone else’s playbook across play groups and experiences.
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No Thank You, Evil!
I played a good amount of this with my daughter early in the year but we haven’t played in months, now. Honestly, I’m kind of itchy to get her to try something with a little more mechanical complexity. That’s totally on me and if I’m being honest with myself, it’s probably not what she would enjoy. But I think about running NTYE and it bores me. The narrow, short formula absolutely works! But it’s a narrow, short formula for play.
Probably the next thing we’ll do with it is move her to the highest character sheet level. She graduated from triangle to square in January, and that might have been the last time we played.
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Burning Wheel
2018 has obviously been a long fucking year because I completely forgot we played Burning Wheel! I played, didn’t run. It was nice. I’m also clearly not the target demographic for this game any more. It’s just such a heavy load, both on the GM side and the player side. Lots to manage. We didn’t do a great job of really workshopping Beliefs, and our campaign reached a point where we’d just kind of…done what we came to do. Was that my short attention span? Maybe!
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Bluebeard’s Bride
Played this at NewMexicon 2018 and it blew my mind. It’s super weird, very arty-farty, not at all a conventional RPG in terms of agency and bildungsroman and long meaningful campaign play. It’s a one-shot featuring a series of horrific vignettes, everyone plays an aspect of a single character and takes turns in the driver’s seat, and it’s so squicky and weird that it’s just impossible (or perhaps just in poor taste) to try and describe actual play. Very high on my list of best games of the year.
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Sagas of the Icelanders
Another NewMexicon 2018 game. I ran this, because I always run it. SotI is on my very short list of games I’m so good at, I can make the game do anything I want. It is a lovely experience every time.
This particular game was a “spotlight GM” event that I ran. I remember it being funnier and more Fiasco-y than it usually is. Worked great and I’m adding that mode to my quiver for future runs.
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Masks
My first run at Masks and it was super fun. My buddy Kit ran it at New Mexicon, and he is to Masks what I am to Sagas. The game does some really interesting stuff about supers relationships and completely dispenses with Champions style physics modeling. It’s terrific, loved it, want to run it here in 2019.
I had another opportunity to play Masks later in the year, at Rincon 2018 with Jason Corley running it. I played a more conventional character and it was a more conventional experience, which is great because you don’t have to push the envelope every time.
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Golden Sky Stories
Actually a fantasy adventure hack called Fantasy Friends. GSS is cute but not my jam: it’s heartwarming and affirming, you basically bid points to get things done and then do heartwarming and affirming things to get those points back. I mean it’s nice! And Nick Hopkins did a really good job running it. I was just ehh on the whole model of play afterward.
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Coriolis
Coriolis was my only real heartbreak of 2018. I adore, absolutely love Mutant: Year Zero from Fria Ligan, and Coriolis is built on the same engine. The game is packed with interesting history and social context, the setting is super interesting, characters look neat. I mean just on reading the text, I was all in. But the game has a huge glaring problem at the center of it: a GM-facing economy called Darkness Points.
What I discovered was that I grind against the DP economy in every imaginable way. First off, there’s a huge list of bad shit the GM is “allowed” (?) to launch at the players by spending DP. I read that to strongly imply, or mandate really, that nothing on that list is in my toolbox without spending those points. Then what really killed me was that I can effectively earn and keep unlimited DPs, and the players can’t do shit about it. Even playing hard toward the intent of the system, this is I think intentional! So there’s no meaningful decision making, no tension, nothing. It’s a list of things I feel like I can’t do but actually can do because I’m spending an effectively unlimited number of points.
I will say, though, that Coriolis has an extremely nifty spaceship combat system. Each player takes on a specific on-board role and everyone’s contribution matters. It’s great.
Otherwise, the game left me restless and irritated. What a shame, because it’s so very beautiful. And it appears I only ran three sessions of it? Ye gawds.
Ref:
The Veil
I tried to run The Veil but it catastrophically failed for us within an hour of the first session. When I had read the rules, the playbooks stood out as weird and very specific and I thought “oh wow, everyone is so strange!” And they are. But once you figure out where each playbook comes from, escaping the tropes and references becomes nearly impossible.
For us, I think, we worked hard at not doing that. But the moves, oh the moves. Designer Fraser Simons made a fairly lengthy argument explaining his approach, which was to build the moves in a very broad way. I like the idea in principle, but lordy in practice we just couldn’t get a handle on how anything was supposed to work or how any given move’s outcome was supposed to look in the fiction. The whole thing felt very abstract and it wore everyone out in about an hour.
But! But but but: I think The Veil may be best in class for how you create your cyberpunk setting. Each playbook has a very specific set of questions and inputs, so that any given playbook mix produces a wildly different and unique setting. We really liked this. The Veil produced a setting I’d be very happy to play in! Just with a different game.
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Scum & Villainy
My surprise hit of the year was Scum & Villainy, a sci-fi take on Blades in the Dark. I’d had the pleasure of playing once before at a private con earlier in the year, but I was so exhausted that the playbook felt like an incomprehensible wall of jet fighter controls.
I gotta say, now that I fully grasp how the GM-player transaction works in Bitd/S&V, it might be my favorite. Even more favorite than Burning Wheel! I really like how the negotiation bounces back and forth: how well positioned are you? How difficult is the thing? How hard do you want to try? Are you willing to take an additional consequence? Love it to pieces.
Our run at Scum petered out because everyone advanced to a point where there was really no more mechanical tension to the game. This is something I was worried about in Blades as well: the Resistance mechanism (short version: if you suffer consequences you don’t like, you can resist them at a cost to your stress) is such that eventually you can just do anything and everything and practically never suffer for it. I don’t love the realization that so much of the play juice was coming from the mechanisms, but in S&V it did for us.
It did get me thinking about versions of Blades where maybe you don’t get better, but the scope of your action just gets broader. Dunno. It was a good experience, very fun, just ran its course.
Oh and I ran it at RinCon 2018 and completely forgot! Pitched it, explained it, ran it, easy as pie. S&V is definitely on my short list of pickup one-shot games I’m happy to run without any prep.
Ref:
The King is Dead
This is Vincent Baker’s diceless, GMless game of fantasy intrigue built on the PbtA framework. I absolutely love this! And it may be my favorite of his games, even more than Apocalypse World itself.
The core of the game is that everyone gets a copy of the same rules book. You sketch out sexy young princes and princesses in a Game of Thrones-ish setting. And then you start picking little mini-games to play out scenes. You start with a game called “muster and intrigue,” which adds a little fictional context to the setting and gives you a card. The ostensible object of the game is to win the crown by any means necessary. You do that by building a good hand of cards, with more and better face cards worth more than numbered cards.
I’ve played this game twice now. The first time, we just rolled with the minigames and didn’t worry much about the underlying card game. It was really fun that way! But the second time, when I ran it again at Rincon in Tucson, I really charged hard at the card game. It was even more fun that way, because it forced me to play really strategically and think bigger-picture. My game basically shifted from playing Arya to playing Cersei.
Highest recommendation.
Ref: https://indiegamereadingclub.com/indie-game-reading-club/the-king-is-dead/
Palimpsest
Okay, I pretty much never brag on myself but I’m going to now: I am super proud of my Game Chef submission this year, a little time travel game called Palimpsest. The premise is that three different time travelers converge on a small but vital moment in history, and try to make events conform to their wishes before uncertainty collapses and that moment is forever set.
I’ve run it twice, it was fun twice. It could stand a bit of polish and definitely some art direction, but this was the first time I’ve ever submitted a Game Chef and thought to myself “oh heck yeah, this fucker has legs.” I’m gonna publish it in some form down the road. But for now, here it is:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QdRrUkaaxZvUO1ENt2D6OpjoBv1SEhVuG2Q5wcdeono/edit?usp=sharing
Legacy
Oh boy. The last game I ran this year.
It did not end well.
It started with such promise: a game about generations passing through time. A game about building up communities, rather than scrabbling for short-term wins.
It ended for a lot of reasons. Some had to do with the game itself: Mechanically, Legacy was overwhelming to everyone. There are move sets for your character and your family and the common moves and the story moves and and and. There are multiple economies. There is room for really unpleasant coercion via the game’s debts system. But beyond that, Legacy demanded everyone walk away from deeply ingrained habits of character monogamy, agency, and campaign continuity.
It was just too hard. It ended on a really sour note and we haven’t run a game since. That was early December, I think? It’s been a month.
It did, however, give me a lot to talk about.
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The greatest gaming lab ever created is the Las Vegas casino industry. That lab’s most significant finding is that humans crave two things in games: pattern completion and intermittent rewards. I’ve been thinking lately about how my favorite games leverage both of those monkey-level impulses. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how the very best games provide many different ways to achieve both.
Probably my favorite-favorite bit of running a PbtA style game is the little biochemical hit (dopamine? serotonin?) my brain gets at the intersection of pattern completion and intermittent reward. Many, many PbtA games set up a few different kinds of incomplete patterns just on the GMing side: rules that fire when a trope is triggered, genre-appropriate GM moves, fronts you’ve created yourself just waiting to tick down. I think those things all feed into my feeling that PbtA style games are the apex tabletop technology for genre emulation games, which is both a strength and a broadly unacknowledged/unrecognized shortcoming.
The bit where that pattern completion comes full circle for me and delivers the Vegas-style hit is the intermittent reward of a player’s missed roll. Whenever I think to myself, man, this sequence was just magical!, it’s those two things coming together, from different angles, and making the outcome feel both organic and fated.
Story time!
In our ongoing Urban Shadows game, a couple sessions ago ended with a horrific running gun battle in downtown Miami, as a player manipulated a caravan of cartel thugs into a showdown with the city’s SWAT team. The lead-up barely matters: a cool let it out move here, a cashed-in debt there, two snowballs colliding, boom a hail of bullets and blood. Dead cartel goons and a major NPC that had been a thorn in everyone’s side, done and done. Yay!
Of course this being Urban Shadows, this isn’t necessarily the end. My prep between sessions led me to doodle down a new threat: what if that NPC is now a ghost? OOOH. I did up a quick clock to spool out what his vengeance from beyond the grave might look like. Then I filed it away.
The following session played out in the aftermath of this godawful event. Huge media coverage, all the mortals of the city are up in arms at this audacious violence, something must be done, good good, yes. My supernatural scumbags are back to living their shitty lives in the shadows. Worst off is the Vamp, who got caught in that hail of bullets and ended up with a permanent scar (lost a stat rather than straight-up dying). He’s prowling the streets in search of a meal, fucks up a simple feeding, and resorts to seeking out an NPC to square away a more-certain victim. He cashes in a debt with that NPC and persuades him to point out his least-valued goon. The Vamp has irresistible, which turns misses into soft hits with the addition that you “attract the attention of a rival or an enemy.” Because he’s been on the fail-train all night long, he misses and gets that. I file away the “attract the attention…” bit for later in the scene. Because I can feel the first tickles of pattern completion at the back of my brain. Something buried in my prep.
So there’s this great procedural pattern on the Vamp’s playbook that gets invoked every time we see feeding on-screen. It’s actually a two-parter. First, there’s the eternal hunger move, which is terrific: unless you roll a 10+, shit always goes sideways when you feed. Maybe the Vamp won’t care! Like, your victim might die unless you go out of your way to keep them alive. The other half of this is the Vamp’s corruption move, which ticks a Corruption every time you feed on an unwilling victim. Combined with the Vamp’s various incentives to prey on need, the whole playbook is a really unpleasant meditation on consent.
Yeah, well. The Vamp just straight misses eternal hunger. This is one of the few moves with some specificity around missing: “on a miss, something goes terribly wrong.” That’s different than baseline missing! I’ve been hammering home with my players that missing usually just means the GM gets to make a move. So misses that specify badness? That’s special.
I swing back to that “attention of a rival or enemy” bit. I close the loop on my prep and, badabing, his victim has been possessed by that godawful cartel NPC everyone thought was dead. Pattern: completed. And I chose that moment to complete it because I got the intermittent reward of a player’s miss. If someone was running an MRI on me at that moment, I’d be lit up just like I’d pulled three cherries on a slot machine.
Straight PbtA doctrine gives the GM lots of leeway for when and how to make moves. It looks constrained and formalistic but the “golden opportunity” and “when they expect you to say something” codicils makes these game act like any other conventional RPG. But there’s that extra psychic juice built into the intermittency of missed rolls, I think. It’s like permission to make a harder move. It’s a miss that everyone’s already acculturated to receive as a failure even after repeatedly training players otherwise. I know I definitely shrug and blame the dice for bad shit, even thought I could have inflicted that bad shit all along.
The Big Picture
I think where games work or don’t work for me is in how much they push the patterns/rewards buttons. Burning Wheel is all about both of those things: BITs and tests both set up patterns just waiting to be completed; rolling dice is the obvious intermittent reward, but it gains extra oomph both from gambling away your artha and in feeding back into the advancement cycle (itself yet another pattern to complete).
There are lots of procedural patterns to complete in Forbidden Lands but it’s missing a meaningful holding environment, which is any game’s primo A-1 pattern. There weren’t enough other patterns to complete (cool ability combos earned via advancement being the big D&D-style pattern) to hold anyone’s interest. Pushing, one of the Mutant engine’s killer apps, is a terrific intermittent reward though. Maybe it was that the stakes were too low because our particular group likes patterns in the fiction more than patterns on the character sheet.
Or sometimes we just can’t sense any patterns at all. The playbook moves in The Veil are designed to be open to many fictional interpretations, for example. But they are so devoid of guidance that we couldn’t complete any patterns with them. The moves didn’t “feel like” scenes from the movies or books or comics we were carrying around in our heads. But I know these games have their fans, which tells me they’re bringing their own patterns to those moves better than we could. Can’t win ’em all.
None of this is intended as scaffolding for some grand theory on game play or design. I do find it helpful in my own head, though, to spot the patterns my brain craves, to spot the patterns my players are craving (and are oblivious to), and to pay attention to the intermittent rewards being generated by the game and the vibe that comes with them. The intermittent rewards in a freeform game like Montsegur 1244, for example, arise from the inputs thrown your way by the other players, and those carry just as much psychic juice as rolling snake-eyes or a natural 20. And some players absolutely cannot perceive patterns in the fiction. Or in the rules. Or at the table, where we are all repeating patterns for comfort or pleasure: not just who handles what functions, but all the other rituals we enact to draw the magic circle around the table.
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