This post is actually two posts—maybe three—but I’ve chosen not break it up because they’re all entangled in my head so I’m sharing this more or less as it occurred to me, which is honest, at least.
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.