During play, when Indiana Jones is in combat, he must keep moving. When he is fighting in an environment that he can use to his advantage—around a flying wing, in a speeding truck—this movement may wear out his foes or deal them actual damage. Or perhaps they must move and attack instead of being able to attack twice on their turn, diminishing the threat they pose to Indy. Conveyor belts, roving tanks, speeding cars—all these are preferable to standing around fighting, both for Indy and for us in the audience.

When he is outnumbered in a space without sufficient advantage—like when he’s chased by the Hovitos or the Thuggee—he flees to gain the advantage. He’s gaining resilience or stamina or hit points or whatever by staying in motion. He knows that his foes are most vulnerable while they’re moving so he stages rescues—of the Ark, of his father—when the enemy is on the move. If Indy is in or on a moving vehicle, that counts as him moving. Outnumbered? Turn a fist fight in a castle into a motorcycle chase to get the upper hand. Change the field of battle from static catwalks to out-of-control mine carts. Get out of those tight catacombs and into a speedboat. Hell, Indy can even subdue brutes temporarily by boarding a rocket-powered test vehicle and pitting his stamina against theirs—even while Indy’s hit points are depleted by the ride, he gains hit points back for being in motion.

Indy is most vulnerable when he is trapped in a fight and outnumbered. He can take out one brute or two thugs when trapped alone—say, in the midst of marching, angry ants—but that puts his back against the proverbial wall. (In fact, to get out of such situations, Indy’s player may opt to spend key resources to take out foes—like, say, hulking swordsmen—in one shot rather than risk a time-consuming or dangerous combat.)

It may even be that fights confined to a single area—like, say, a palace guest room—actually constitute traps, not combats. It may even be that the arrival of new enemies—like, say, goons who smash in a door and grab Indy from behind—are invoked by the player for the purpose of turning a duck-and-cover gunfight into a roving brawl. I’m just brainstorming here.

This is an old observation. When I was designing a pulpy d20 adventure setting called Deco Dragons, years ago, the schtick of the rogue class was that they not only moved constantly but that they could increase their defense (and maybe heal) by doing so. (When I played in my Deco Dragons setting with 4th-edition D&D, the joys of that game’s movement mechanics were their own reward.)

If I ever get the Indiana Jones game license, or the go-ahead to work on a game like it, don’t let me forget that Indy must keep moving to stay alive.

Also, remind me to incorporate an attribute called Backbone, like in the old TSR Indiana Jones RPG.

Sorensen was on the hook to run one of his new Parsely games on Sunday afternoon. Parsely games, if you don’t know, evoke classic text adventures through live, face-to-face play. One or more players (sometimes many more than one) issue commands to a person who parses (get it?) the players’ instructions in the fashion of an old text adventure, thereby navigating intriguing, frightening, exciting adventure environments like in days of yore. The players take on the role of explorers and collectors and the parser takes on the role of computer emulator, taking in the player inputs and doling out brief descriptions of the environment and the action.

“You’re in a dank cellar. The water here is ankle-deep. You smell gasoline,” the parser might say, then: “Exits are North, East, West.”

“Go East,” says a player on her turn.

That sort of thing. This might hearken back, for you, or it might be a retro novelty. At first. It doesn’t take long for play to overwhelm novelty, for participants to sink into the actual process of play and forget about the gag in favor of puzzle-solving and immersion in the experience. That each Parsely adventure is condensed onto an evocative brochure-like thing for about $5 adds to the value—it’s a lot of fun for the price.

That last Sunday of PAX East 2012, Jared Sorensen was running his new Parsely adventure, Z-Ward, involving a hospital stocked with zombies. I was helping out at the Games On Demand table, trying to recover my own voice, when word reached us that Sorensen was running Z-Ward without his voice at all. He’d been hooked up with a laptop, a basic word processor, and a projector. The audience issued their commands verbally and Sorensen responded via text, typing out his responses so they appeared on the back wall of the conference room in real time.

I wanted to see this for myself. I headed over to the event space, hoping I could just slip quietly into the back of the room and observe a few turns without being noticed. I found two pairs of double doors, both alike. Beyond them, a conference room with dozens of people seated at round tables with white tablecloths. More people stood or sat along the walls. Everyone looked to the far wall where simple black text appeared against a plain white background. Everyone was quiet.

Sorensen, dressed all in black, sat at his keyboard. He typed. On screen, we—all of us players, alone together—entered a hospital chamber where a zombie was lashed to a chair wired with cables running to a wall switch.

In the real world, the door clicked shut behind me.

Someone took their turn. Quietly, she said something like, “Flip switch.” Quietly, the room gasped and giggled.

In the zombie hospital, the lights flickered and dimmed. In the real world, people giggled as we read it on the screen. In the hospital, the zombie convulsed and bucked against its bonds. In the conference hall, people made sad sounds. One of the zombie’s eyes exploded, splashing some kind of goo onto our collective cheek. The players gasped, grossed out. Then, in the hospital, the power went out. We were plunged into darkness.

Sorensen awaited our input. A facilitator turned to those of us in the doorway and asked, “Do you want to take a turn?”

I waved to indicate “no.” I was just there to watch.

Sorensen pointed at me from across the room. I was a fool to think I could slip in without Jared recognizing me, I guess. I stood still, tried to think. I didn’t know what resources—a lighter?, a flashlight?—we players had.

Words appeared on the screen: Will go.

I stood still.

You will.

Pause.

Staring contest?

I opened my mouth. “Get goo,” I said.

The room giggled.

Words appeared, describing the scraping of goo. For later?

I nodded.

The rest of the room took over. Another player navigated us to a circuit box and restored power. I had to get back to my post at Games On Demand.

Stepping back into the tabletop hall was like walking into angry surf. The room roared. The sound swallowed me up. But inside I couldn’t quite shake the eerie and beautiful silence of those Parsely players—alone together—quietly exploring an imaginary place conjured up in a hidden space within PAX. Tables full of roleplayers were creating imaginary spaces and fictional characters throughout the tabletop hall, but they vied with the ambient droning inside that hangar-like space, leaning in to hear each other. It was that room that had taken my voice and Sorensen’s.

The Z-Ward players had cut a hole in the noise. They had found a place where play trumped the roar. In there, Sorensen didn’t need his voice.

Wil Wheaton! TableTop!

Writer, actor, geek, gamer, and producer Wil Wheaton has a shiny new web series coming to the shiny new YouTube channel, Geek and Sundry. The show’s called TableTop and its something like Celebrity Poker meets Dinner For Five except instead of dinner or poker there are fun and funny people playing fun and funny tabletop games. The first episode debuts on Friday, April 2nd, on the aforementioned Geek and Sundy YouTube channel.

Word from the WonderCon panel at which the network was announced by executive producer and prolific writer/actress, Felicia Day, is that the show will feature a variety of board games, plus RPGs like Dragon Age and Fiasco. Check out the show trailer and the channel’s sizzle reel for a glimpse at some of the guests coming to the show, too. I am maximum eager to see this show light up my computer monitor and, one hopes, to give eventual DVDs as gifts to would-be players seeking primers on a variety of fun tabletop games.

Check out the TableTop debut trailer and subscribe to the YouTube channel to let them know you’ll be watching.

Different kinds of game texts connect with different kinds of audiences. Naturally an audience may tend to prefer and admire the text that connects with them over those that don’t. Can we manage the nuance and understanding that appreciates that games that might miss us, as individuals or an audience, might successfully connect with some other audience?

That is, games that capture an audience other than you or I might not be badly written or unsuccessfully designed or whatever else. Can’t we find ways to parse and understand texts that missed us without disparaging texts and audiences that have found each other?

As I meet more and more gamers, I discover an audience wider than that served by any one text—and audiences that presume the books they connect with are doing it “right” and the others are doing it “badly.” This is precisely as narrow-minded as the perspective of the books that missed their chance to connect with this audience. This is sort of a shame, but it is no big deal. We write from where we stand. We’ll make mistakes. We’ll gather some readers on this try and others with the next. At least we’re here together; does it matter which road we took coming in?

The RPG audience deserves a variety of texts, writing styles, and voices. A necessary consequence of that diversity shall be that not all texts shall connect with all audiences on every try. That is not a value judgment. It just is.

Let us not disparage an RPG just because it was not written in our argot, even if it was written in our language.

Questioning assumptions: In roleplaying games, how come we only play each scene one time?

Here’s what I wrote immediately after reading the question (so this is probably just a reflection of my habits and presumptions to date, alas):

In part, I think it’s because playing any scene multiple times is rare in a given instance of performance. Not many plays or movies or novels play the same scene multiple times for different effects outside of rehearsal. RPGs are typically performance-now constructs, not rehearsal constructs. We know what happens and we are audience, why watch it again when we could see something new?

(I say this as someone who wishes there were more alternate takes on DVDs and as someone who understands why there aren’t.)

Also, getting to explore multiple potential outcomes of or within a scene is tantamount to cheating—like loading a save game to see what the other corridor leads to before settling on your decision. It is meta. It takes advantage of a system and diminishes the impact of actual play. (“What the hell, I’ll say this because I can always play the scene again and leave it unsaid.”)

Of course, this also grants great freedom of expression and a unique look at the possibility space. (“What the hell, I’ll say this because I can always play the scene again and leave it unsaid.”)

This is one reason I advocate for shop talk during play, though. It allows for the skewing or revision of scenes in the moment, as sometimes happens during rehearsal, without having to play a scene again exactly. You get to peek at the possibilities and pick from them rather than just getting what you get from the collision of improvisations.

I have played the same scene from different perspectives, though usually within a strict narrative context and with a lot of hustle to save time. E.g., “Let’s play the scene again from the perspective of the surveillance team we didn’t know was there.”

Also, it’s my sincere hope that people play the same scene at least twice in “All The Damn Time,” though I didn’t know how to suggest that in the playset format and though it’s probably more literal in that set than you’re talking about here.

And, of course, we may play the same scene twice whenever we play the same game adventure more than once. So it’s not unheard of in the medium.

What are your thoughts? (Swing by Jason’s post and share them there, if you prefer.)

I ask as someone who did not use miniatures in any RPG capacity until D&D3.x and has found plenty of fuel and clarity for both narrative and roleplay in games with and without miniatures. Why is a map okay until we set miniatures on it?

The Mass Effect 3 demo convinced me to preorder the game. It was largely the multiplayer component that convinced me not to wait a month or two to buy the thing, when I’d have time to play the thing in a dedicated sprint. The multiplayer demo is a lot of fun with three or four cohorts facing down Cerberus thugs together on alien worlds. The equipment packs, delivering randomized bonuses won with in-game loot, represent a terrific little device, combining the joy of random treasure tables with the alluring mystery and surprise of trading-card booster packs. I like it more than I expected to and don’t want two months to be leveling up my Infiltrators, Soldiers, and Engineers with my friends. Good job, demo.

Meanwhile, the single-player demo did one thing well above all—one thing in particular that convinced me this was the Mass Effect campaign I’ve been looking forward to most of all: it let me diminish the role of the intricate combat dynamics in favor of the unfolding story. With one little menu choice at the beginning of the game, ME3 gave me the option to choose which single-player experience I wanted, selecting between Action, Role-Play, and Story. I chose Story. When the finished game comes to my home, I’ll choose Story again.

It’s not that I don’t like ME3′s shooter action—I’m really excited about the story-light multiplayer element—it’s that I don’t want my ability to take in the tale of this climactic installment to depend on how good my shooter skills are from day to day. Sometimes I play games to study them, sometimes to overcome them, sometimes just to browse them. I’m a game tourist, as we say, in a lot of ways.

If I could skip combat encounters in some games, I would. I’d skip the jet-skis-and-explosive-barrels section of the first Uncharted every time. I’d skip over certain boss battles in various games, just to see what else the developer has in store in the game’s level design. I’ve been slow to play Deus Ex: Human Revolution because I dread the boss battles I’ve heard about and fret that I’ll get hung up on a spec-testing shooter puzzle when what I really want to do is see how my other decisions play out over the course of the game.

So, when it comes to the idea of video games with skippable combat scenes, I am in favor of the option. Not every game should implement that option and I have a pretty broad definition of “skippable,” personally, but I think it’s fine for games to have this tool in their kit. I’d finish a lot more games if I could accept a measure of defeat and progress rather than quietly, hopefully shelving games and then never getting around to finishing them.

In this post at Rock, Paper, Shotgun—“Escape! Escape! Embracing Skippable Combat”—John Walker makes his case for optional combat in video games.

Here’s mine.

Audience Slicing

With the success of achievement-driven gameplay, I don’t get why this should be a big deal. If I don’t play out that combat sequence in your game, deny me the achievements and the cool multiplayer skin as a reward. Do not deny me the ability to stay conversant in your game.

If I can’t get past this or that boss battle in your shooter, and the thing ends up on my shelf with the hope that I’ll get back to it “one day soon,” my interest in your franchise is probably suspended. I am less likely to buy Shooter Agent 3 if I didn’t finish the second one, because I’ll feel like I’m behind or subject to spoilers or whatever. Give me the option to press on in your game, despite the satisfaction of having slain Megaboss #2, and I am still in your customer base, buying your stuffs. This is good for both of us.

I grant you, this doesn’t work for all games. I probably shouldn’t be able to skip ahead some number of character levels in an MMO, for example. That’s an integral element of the game’s form. Gatekeeping in the form of difficulty spikes and combat puzzles, I argue, is only integral if that is all your game is offering. If your game’s story is worth telling, why restrict access to it only to those with the patience and the knack to time rocket blasts or batarang throws or jumps? The alternative is to winnow the audience for the latter-half of your game experience to a smaller and smaller percentage of people with time to devote to frustrating battle sequences.

Players can already dodge through cutscenes and dialogue options with a minimum of investment (and that’s fine), button mashing until they get to the next fight scene. This is a legit way to play some games. Those games say, implicitly, that the story is an optional element and the fighting is the meat. That is great for games in which the fighting is the meat. For games in which exploration and character interaction are either equally meaty or even meatier, does opting out of a fight scene somehow disqualify an experience as a game? Especially in games (especially hypothetical future games) with robust and engaging character interactions, it does not. It only changes the retail shelf where the game presumably gets filed.

Some such levels work almost as well as multiplayer experiences, be they deathmatch environments or co-op challenges. We get to choose what order we play multiplayer maps, and which maps and modes we play, why does a campaign have to be so rigid? If you’re going to button-mash through conversations anyway, why even play the maps in pre-arranged sequence? Because the story of the game still means at least something to you, I imagine.

In Actual Play

Consider some of the ways this can work. Let’s take an imaginary Uncharted sequel as an example. In those games, the characterization, the banter, the cinematic quality of the levels and storyline is a big part of the appeal, in addition to gripping, compelling action-adventure sequences that make you feel like a capable action hero as you progress.

Let’s imagine that Uncharted 4 features an especially daunting combat sequence in which freakishly accurate snipers and ham-fisted galoots fight you atop a burning semi-trailer on a mountain highway. It’s a handsomely rendered, important sequence in which Nathan Drake successfully steals back an artifact he’ll use to solve puzzles in the next level. Okay? You try the sequence a couple of times, getting frustrated at the way snipers execute you during what you think should be a hand-to-hand brawl on the careening truck. You get frustrated. You just want to move on, achievements be damned. But the game developers want you to understand how you get the artifact, so you’ll know where it came from in the next level.

You pull up the menu and opt out of the fight. The game, then, jumps to the next cut scene, written to explain where the artifact came from (ELENA: “Nate! I can’t believe you got Ratigan to give up the artifact!” NATE: “Gah, my back. He didn’t exactly hand it over, you know.”) and to set up the next puzzle sequence (SULLY: “Well, now that we’ve got it, let’s get it to Ireland so we can open that so-called wizard’s tomb.”).

Or, even better, the game AI takes control of Nate and fights through the sequence for you, in a bare-bones example of play, skipping certain great and optional stunts (accessible only by live players) but keeping the game flowing. This creates the effect of watching a terrific action sequence—a fun experience in its own right—without awarding you coveted achievements or the prize of getting Nate to knock a galoot into the bed of a passing dump truck (a cool stunt worth its own achievement). But at least the game keeps going.

The Identity (and Quality) of Games

This renders some games into interactive movies but—and this is key—only for those players who enjoy interactive movies. If you don’t want an interactive-movie experience, play all the fight scenes. The letdown of a computer-controlled fight scene is its own disincentive to the segment of the audience that cares in that way.

For some games, who cares? The Uncharted games are right on the edge of interactive-moviedom already, and thank heavens! They’re great at it. For many other games, though, fight scenes aren’t the interactive decision points they might seem to be. They’re possibility spaces with some lingering consequences (like what kind of ammo your Health you have remaining at the end), but often the outcome of the game doesn’t turn on these things anyway.

If the fight scene has to be won for the game to progress—and it is likely to turn out the same regardless, like when certain characters are scripted to survive or die—it’s not a decision point in the game anyway, it’s a miniature puzzle box or sandbox with gatekeepers at the exit. “Kill the bad guys in this sequence with any combination of guns, grenades, and melee attacks you like,” the game says, “but you can’t see what’s next until you kill every one of them.”

Is that what makes a game a game? Is it the gatekeeping?

If I put a new movie into my Xbox, I can jump to any chapter of it I like, watching just the fights or the FX sequences or whatever, in any order I like. When I get a book, I can read the first and last chapters and then give the thing away, if I want. Only video games say “You cannot see the ending until you play with these toys and also do these chores I have set out for you.”

Is the barrier between player and progress in a story the defining feature of a video game? Really? For one, that would imply that story matters more than some would care to admit—and in an age when single-player campaigns are more and more often regarded as vestigial organs—so I don’t think that’s it.

Is it that possibility spaces, and the defining gameplay inherent in them, are often not about the gameplay experience and the decisions made within them, but that the incentive of unlocking the next level has been mistaken for the very purpose of play? Do we play game levels and face down boss battles not because they are fun but because they are fun-like, fun-adjacent hurtles validating our exposure to the next bit of fun?

Instead of being fun, all the way through, do we feel games need to be punctuated with checkpoints and barriers between fun play spaces so that we can brag and strut about the progress we made?

Challenge and the thrill of overcoming it can be a vital component to the fun and satisfaction of play. Not opting out of combats secures that option for players who want that, on any given day they want that, and the option to skip headache-inducing chores that get in the way of my fun do not threaten the validity of your in-game achievements. What is your achievement really worth if we all had to earn it anyway on our quest to see if Drake and Elena would get back together or if the magic city was real?

In fact, the gatekeeper methodology of video-game design is imposing a linearity on the work that may be stymying development of the medium. Real branching level design hardly exists.

Consider a shooter campaign in which levels were packed with narrative but playable in almost any order, in which every level had a cogent and compelling tale to tell. (Maybe a few levels unlock for beating other levels—the options are all on the table.) The decisions of play wouldn’t just be “Which gun do I use to slay this zombie?” but the very order in which the levels unfold, triggering gameplay questions like, “With the ammo I have left, dare I brave ‘The Haunted Oil Rig’ level?” Achievement-driven players can boast about how they beat a tough level with just the starting gear or stealthed through an environment meant for gunfights.

Developers, think of the metrics you could collect on what people are replaying, what they want to relive and experience again, what options they’re trying out. Think of everything you could glean about why your franchise is popular, what could surprise people in a new installment, what you can safely skip next time, etc. You could offer three new levels with a new ending—a whole new possibility branch!—as DLC.

And, if some players want to just watch the ending cutscene of a given level, so that they can understand the story of your franchise, what’s the big deal?

The quality of the experience should be the lure that entices people to play every part of your game. Getting through a tough game, for the achievement of having done it, is still as much a triumph as getting through that languid novel or drawn-out television series for the sake of completeness. If a game is good, people want to play more of it.

You know that overused moment in film and television where someone levels a gun on someone else and issues an ultimatum? “Do what I say or I pull the trigger,” she says. “Talk or die,” goes the gunman. That sort of thing?

Does that decision arise in your roleplaying-game play? How about the variation where two serious people brandishing guns face off at gunpoint? How does your campaign (not necessarily your game mechanics) handle that?

This is fun stuff. It’s about designing a situation and not an outcome. It’s a pared down, high-stakes decision point. Would your character rather die than do this thing?

One important feature of this situation is clear: this is not a part of combat. This may be a statement, by the players or their characters, that they want to resolve the situation, that they want the stakes to be high (or are at least willing to accept high stakes), and that they want a single dramatic choice to reign, rather than a chaotic battle.

It is a pretty clear decision point, and potentially a classic impasse. One participant says “Do X or die” and the other says “Do Y or die.” It’s a dilemma.

Except, of course, the actual circumstance is often much more complicated, and that complication is essential to making the decision interesting. An actual “Do X or die” situation is simple and tense, but can be terribly un-fun—the target’s decision may hardly be decision at all. Is “take this forced action or stop playing” a good dramatic choice? No. So, “Do X or die” is actually “Do X or accept a risk of death,” which is more interesting, but also muddier, more complicated, and less predictable.

That muddy, complicated, unpredictable option might be more interesting, but those factors may also make it less desirable for the gunman, who must find the option more interesting than (and at least as easy to understand as) regular combat, or else the gunman’s player is unlikely to exercise that option.

Have you ever seen this next thing happen? A player says “I’ll go for his gun!” and then, when confronted with the grappling rules, says “Nevermind, I’ll just cooperate.” I have.

The reasons for beginning a standoff, as a player, must include simplicity, I think. Standoffs are staples of thrillers because they are bold, clear dramatizations. One or more characters demand, and one or more characters make defining choices. Simple, effective. If the setup and outcomes of this act are complex in gameplay terms, they are unlikely to be attempted much, if at all. That’s good if you’re trying to avoid them, but less good if you want your campaign to include these moments. (Whether you just like them or you’re trying to include them are touchstones of the genre or for some other reason is, for now, a separate issue.)

When I’ve done this, it’s with the understanding that a level gunshot to the head is not combat. Such a weapon is unlikely to deal 1d8+Dex damage, or whatever, and is more likely to propel the plot forward at muzzle velocity. Either someone ends up dead, and we deal with the consequences, or someone ends up an unlikely survivor (perhaps in a bloody chop-shop or underground hospital or remote monastic sanctuary) and the story is loaded up with revised or renewed stakes and motives.

A couple of other particular, iconic, and dramatic outcomes spring to mind:

• One participant relents and puts down his gun, as instructed. On film, almost never does the remaining gunman then fire anyway. (If he did, he’s a villain.) This is practically a rule—but should it actually be a rule in play? This is, essentially, a decision to forgo combat, at least for now.
• Both participants choose to abandon the standoff and enter combat as usual. (See Face/Off: ”Plan B. Let’s just kill each other.”) This may be an attempt to settle things through dialogue followed by a revelation that neither side is willing to die, right then, to settle things. So we settle it not just with dice but with a sequence of tactical decisions and randomization, possibly with escape hatches and lots of new inputs to consider.
• Everyone shoots, (almost?) everyone dies. Call this the Reservoir Dogs outcome.

How have you handled it? What game has mechanics for this that you’ve appreciated, hacked, or paid homage to?

An idea you don’t agree with might come to you in a metaphor. That metaphor is like armor on a bugbear. Striking the metaphor does not harm the bugbear.

Analogies, even weak analogies, can be ablative. Attack them and they may break apart, only sometimes revealing the argument underneath. You then have a chance to combat the argument—but this is where a lot of Internet discourse stops. The forumite writes, “Your analogy is imperfect, ergo your point is mistaken,” but that’s not necessarily true.

Fortunately, Sage LaTorra knows this. He has a good metaphor for how modular, home-altered rules can be relayed and function in the wild and he’s using it to make his position about the next edition of D&D (i.e. “D&D Next”) clearer. I think. (I sometimes disagree with Sage even though he’s a proven, cunning, forward-thinking designer. As if Dungeon World wasn’t evidence enough of that, read this post of his about putting D&D in a lunchbox.)

The metaphor: RPG rules are cookbooks.

Sage’s post, “The Rules Are Not A Thermostat,” presents the cookbook as an analogy for how to present and communicate RPG rules. Sage’s analogy isn’t perfect (are analogies ever perfect?) but his underlying point is pretty great. Players should be shown more than a list of components and told that they can combine into an exciting adventure experience. A game text should show you how to mix the ingredients to achieve certain results.

How is it imperfect? RPG play is less like chemistry than cooking is. It’s also even more subjective than cooking is, I’d say.

Recipes For Play

People buy cookbooks to get ideas for things to make, not to have their meals dictated to them, right? A cookbook’s recipes don’t carry the same implications as an RPG’s instructions. I’ve never heard somebody think of a cookbook as demanding we cook a certain way or GTFO, yet I see people on gaming forums get told to play something else (which is tantamount to “Play this way or get out,” to my mind) when they take issue with the way a book teaches. My trouble is in the point where Sage says the cookbook says “this is the dish you’re going to make,” except a cookbook never says that, does it? It says “if you want this, do the following.” I agree that RPG rules should do the same.

Recipes often assume the reader knows a few things about cooking. I’ve seen RPG manuals get in trouble for making similar assumptions. Not every cookbook repeats the instructions on how to caramelize onions. A cookbook that says “heat the shallots for five minutes” doesn’t have to tell you to stop if the shallots, you know, catch on fire.

A recipe might tell you to put in a certain amount of garlic to achieve a certain taste. Doubling the garlic might make the dish awful to some and a delight to others. It’s clear and obvious to say, “if you add more garlic, this dish tastes more garlicky.” It’s harder to put such a clear understanding in GM advice. If I say, “if you add more blood to your descriptions of combat, your game becomes grittier,” does that work? More blood is sometimes grittier and sometimes sillier. (I watch and dig the Spartacus show, so I know what’s up.) One person’s gritty fountain of gore is another person’s satirical spray.

A recipe presumes everyone wants to eat at the end of it but in games some people show up just to throw flour and hear things sizzle. To what extent can a gaming recipe tell you what the proper dose of seriousness is to get your players invested in the fate of fictional characters, especially while the joker at your table is adding doses of puns and farce to the mix? How many rounds does of combat before a player gets bored? Depends on the player, depends on the length of the rounds, depends on the fiction—depends on a lot of things.

The thing is, tastes vary. It’s not just a question of the right amount of spice. It’s a question of what garlic even tastes like.

Game sessions can become too complex for a recipe to be reliable. A recipe speaks to an outcome in a way that gameplay can’t always abide. A recipe can struggle against the notion of playing to find out what happens. I know I want chicken and garlic and tomatoes but I don’t know if I’m making soup or pizza until actual play.

If a recipe goes wrong, I know a lot of variables were in play—the quality or suitability of the ingredients, the quality or suitability of the utensils, the skill of the cook, the clarity or accuracy of the recipe, etc.—but I don’t declare the recipe “broken” or “hack” or “drift” the cookbook, exactly. I might vary the recipe next time or try another, similar recipe, or whatever, but I understand the recipe as a self-contained thing that might not undermine all other recipes in the book if I do it wrong. Recipes don’t interact the same way RPG rules do.

The Role of the Cook

I’ve long said, GMing is a skill, which means you can get better at it. That also means that reading instructions can get you going and save you some time but it cannot substitute for the mistakes you make and lessons you learn during actual play. Following one recipe doesn’t bestow more than a limited amount of experience or instincts.

Underlying all of Sage’s post is the echo of his earlier entry in his “Indies & More” column, which Sage writes in response to Monte Cook’s D&D-specific “Legends & Lore” column. I don’t want to imagine trying to write a design column every week knowing that Sage was going to pick it apart every week, challenging my design goals against the fact that other designers have had different design goals for other games. [Edit: Note deleted.] I don’t feel quite like either Monte’s or Sage’s columns represent my own position, frankly, but it seems to me that Monte is stating only what he thinks his game—D&D—should be like while Sage is telling Monte either what Monte’s own RPG should be like or what all RPGs should be like.

For example, Sage writes:

There’s one bit where I feel like the essay goes a little off the rails: “Empowering DMs from the start facilitates simulation.” First of all, why is the GM “empowered?” There isn’t some finite pool of authority split between the designer, the GM, and the players. The GM and the rulebook (i.e. the designer) work together. The GM isn’t there to fill in the details “the way no rulebook can.” A good rulebook is written to work with the GM, not provide some rules that the GM can then do whatever on top of. A rulebook fills in rules by giving the GM a system, including GM techniques and goals, to work with.

Sage is right in that many RPGs successfully take Sage’s approach to the GM power dynamic and yield great fun. Here, though, Sage is prescribing one GM dynamic for all games and the fact is that an empowered DM is a dynamic that works for lots of play groups and has for a long time. (I don’t agree with Sage’s implicit assumption that DM empowerment comes at the expense of player empowerment, either, but that’s another thing.) The DM as adjudicating renderer and processor may be old tech but it’s not outdated; the people who play that way don’t just not know any better, many actually enjoy it. They may enjoy Sage’s preferred style too and they are not required to choose a side in this scrap.

Sage’s post argues that a game should tell you how to play. I agree, up to a point, but that’s a notion some RPG players rail against. (This is an age-old conflict between the notion of “how to play” as meaning “how to carry out the process of play” versus “we’ll tell you what’s fun,” I think.) Not everyone wants the game to tell them how or what to play; they want it to facilitate the stuff they decide they want to do later.

For example, players may decide they want to be bloody reckless dungeoneers plundering monster lairs for ancient treasure who also go home and use their wealth to play a game of influence with lords and ladies. If the game wasn’t built for that game of influence, do the players just hit an invisible wall or get shuttled off to some other game when they attempt it? If D&D can support—with clarity and precision—both dungeon crawls and courtly intrigue, that’s great, right? Because I might want courtly intrigue to spur the next dungeon crawl in my campaign without having to switch from one game to another midway through my saga.

Some RPGs can say, “Play this game if you want A, B, or X,” and suggest that if you want other things you should hack it or play something else. (I’ll set aside, for the future, the question of why some RPGs get playfully “hacked” and others get bitterly “fixed.”) D&D doesn’t have that luxury. If D&D is perceived as not covering wide and diverse kinds of play, it gets lambasted.

To serve the audience that wants (or wanted) to self-identify as D&D players, the game has to offer access to many more possibilities and options—too many to strictly define “how you to play D&D.” By defining the limits of D&D, you make it easy for people to identify when they have left the territory. Wizards of the Coast’s designers, to capture and maintain a robust and diverse audience of people playing different campaigns and play styles, presumably want people playing on the periphery, on the outermost marches of the land, to still identify as citizens of the republic.

The more precisely D&D says “Do this and you’re playing D&D” the easier it is for people to feel like they’ve detached from the game, even if most of what they’re doing is still descended from D&D. Of course D&D doesn’t want you to engage some other game for the political intrigue with the king’s family and some third game for the chase through the swamp and so on. It wants you to chase down the king’s traitorous brother in the swamp, using the magic items you won in the dungeon, and see that it’s all D&D.

Serving Suggestion

As I was writing this, Robin Laws wrote on his blog about the power of core gameplay and elasticity, and as usual said it better than I have:

But it’s much easier to establish your alternate core activity if the one provided as a baseline is readily apparent and strongly realized. If told that they can do anything in a game, players get stumped. If told they can do X, they may do X, or they may decide to do Y instead. The presentation of a choice, even if that choice is rejected, orients players and allows them to test their desires against the expectations the game presents.

Having a core activity and accurately teaching the dynamic of the game are both important, but elasticity is not a vice. D&D is free to declare the DM empowered and would do well to teach DMs how to DM in a way that is clear, easy to reference, and inspires confidence. If that method bestows extra authority on the DM, that’s a design decision they’re allowed to make. D&D may get both its desired elasticity and vital core gameplay out of creating a DM/player dynamic that is teachable, provocative, and rich even if that dynamic is not the one Sage would pick.

So the cookbook needs to contain a diverse and carefully cultivated array of recipes that match varied and contradictory expectations while also teaching core cooking techniques that other cookbooks might presume readers already know. (Like how to caramelize monster stats or know when a social encounter has reached the right temperature, just to drag this metaphor nearer the cliff.) That’s a tough challenge, but I applaud the D&D designers for taking it on.

We used to say that an RPG system was akin to a language. I think that’s apt, if likewise imperfect, though I like how it interacts with the notion of actual play as a conversation (since it is). The thing is, all the analogies are imperfect. RPGs aren’t exactly anything else but RPGs.

The idea is simple, the execution complex. For each major chapter in your RPG campaign, you use a different game to resolve the action. You hack and modify the games you want to use like crazy, some more than others. What starts as an investigation lead by various governments in a weary, war-torn metropolis leads to the highest tier of society (Cold City). There, in glorious and lavish penthouse ballrooms untouched by the war below, the glitterati dance and drink and dare each other  (via The Dance and the Dawn) to determine who gets whom. That leads to a Fiasco involving miserable spouses, true love, stolen diamonds, and broken hearts that return us to the lowest levels of the city.

Or what about a military campaign that plays out over a century, beginning with complex machinations and paranoia (via Burning Empires) before progressing to the madness of an all-consuming galaxy-wide war (via 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars) and finally culminating in the least likely soldiers fighting in the bombed-out remains of the last human city (via Grey Ranks).

A great many of these games don’t let many characters out intact, so the traditional notion of following a core cast of PCs on a long literal or figurative journey might not work out. Rather, it might be necessary to tie individual games together with a few standout characters—who are playable only in certain chapters, maybe—or narrative connective tissue like monologues, flashbacks, or just a recurring theme or motif that brings together what would otherwise be a loose anthology.

My gut says this idea would require a lot of cooperation, maybe to the point of demanding certain metagaming choices be made during play, but I think the unique satisfaction from pulling it off would be worth it for the group that finds this compelling. Remember, the game that covers the next chapter wouldn’t have to be preordained. It might be that whoever gets the happiest result of the Fiasco story gets to decide what the next chapter is about, for example, so this wouldn’t have to be a strictly planned experience.

What games might you connect into a campaign if you could?