The Rant to End All Rants

Me vs The World
I feel like I'm the crazed madman in a movie, yelling and screaming about a truth obvious to him, that nobody else sees. I have no way of telling if my thoughts and opinions on TTRPG's are logical and valid, because nobody seems to agree with them. My low self esteem tells me that I should accept I'm wrong and stupid and smell and nobody likes me. 

BUT, it's not just me that nobody agrees with. Nobody seems to agree with each other. And even when they do, they argue about what they agree on. So maybe it's not just me that is stinky.

God, I hope it's not just me that's stinky.

The following is going to be a long and rambling breakdown of how I see stuff.

Ludo-Narrative Dissonance

The way I see it, is everyone is (unknowingly) a hypocrite, or trying to square peg a round hole. From every school of thought, I see people saying they want X thing from TTRPG's, but play using Y rules that do the opposite, or at least make it harder than it needs to be.

D&D 4th Edition and the WotC editions in general are a great example of this. They took criticisms of 3.5E's bloat and tried to streamline it. Except in the end, it somehow turned out even more byzantine than all previous editions.

There is Another Way

That kind of spawned the Oldschool Renaissance (OSR). A lot of dissatisfied people started looking back at previous editions to see what might be useful, and they (re)discovered a lot of the simple elegance of that stuff from the 70's and early 80's. For sure, it has it's archaic quirks, but those could be ironed out after several decades of select game design improvements were applied. Like restoring antique furniture.

Others settled on Pathfinder, but I don't know anything about that culture so I've nothing to say about it.

The Dam Breaks

4E tripped something in my brain. I was miserable running it and miserable playing it, but for the longest time I didn't realise it. I would spend days and days designing campaigns and encounters and set pieces according to the perfectly cromulent guidelines from the DM's guide and numerous blogs on the subject. And I kinda enjoyed that. It was a very nice mental exercise. 

But then you get to the table with it, and nothing works as well as you thought it would. Nothing lands with the players. Nothing engages them. But I've always been the go-to DM of the group. People like my campaigns and are excited to play in them. Or so they tell me. So what went wrong? Did I lose my touch? 

Sorta. I stopped doing what I normally did. What was comfortable for me and running my game. Instead I was running 4th Edition. As prescribed in the official material, and advised by several well written blogs. It was very compelling in theory, but didn't work out in practice.

A bit about my gaming history.

I was introduced to D&D in the early 90's at about 8 or 9 years old by a friend's older brother. He sat us down and ran an introductory adventure from the Basic edition of D&D (he had a mix of early 80's Moldvay and Mentzer books). He ran one session, then handed over his box of D&D books to us and set us on our way.

We didn't really understand the rules that much, but we muddled through it, making things up where we needed to, and had a blast playing. The rules didn't get in the way, and we probably weren't even following them properly. We just did what worked for us.

When I started highschool, 2E was the game de rigueur. So we ran that in much the same way, but with more comprehension of the rules. 3rd edition was released during my senior years and everyone jumped over to that. It was just fine in the early days before all the splat books came out. 

In between all those major editions of D&D, I also experimented with all sorts of other games. Cyberpunk 2020 (ha!). GURPS. Vampire. I got deep in to mechanics. I loved reading those rulebooks and absorbing the mechanics. But when it came time to actually play with them, everyone kind of switched off. Looking back, I can see it was because the mechanics got in the way of the adventure. D&D managed to toe the line pretty well between mechanics and role-play all the way through until the latter days of 3.5E, which is why it was always the constant with me and my groups. We'd go off and explore other games for a bit, but always come back to D&D.

But what captured my 8 year old mind just as much as D&D was the Fighting Fantasy choose-your-own-adventure novels. Which at some point released their own game system called Advanced Fighting Fantasy. I played that in tandem with D&D through primary school and came back to it after graduating highschool.

What was great about AFF was that it was a very light system. It had 3 stats, used two 6-sided dice for everything, and the books were paperback novel format so they could be easily toted around. We could play it on the go. Exploring the woods, we'd have nothing but pocket notepads, pencils and a couple of dice. The rules were simple enough that we had them memorised and could do everything off-the-cuff. You could play this game anywhere at any time so long as you could find a reasonably flat surface to roll a die on.

What fascinates me about it, is the idea that you could have simple mechanics as robust as D&D, but a fraction of the mental overhead. You can hold it in your brain and never really need to reference a book. The flow of play never gets held up trying to find or resolve one rule or another.

Like Sands Through the Hourglass

All these TTRPG's talk a big game about how they allow you to use your imagination, and how the role-play is the thing. And how they're easy to use and resolve. But how often have you - even in the highly lauded 5th Edition D&D - had to stop to look something up? Or wait 15 minutes for your turn in combat? Or flip through multiple stapled pages of character sheet to find something? Or make a series of rolls, one after another to resolve a single task? Could you estimate how much time is spent on doing that? Or what percentage of your sessions are devoted to that kind of thing, vs engaging activities that move the game forward? I think if it's taking more than a few seconds to roll and adjudicate something, you might be having your time needlessly wasted.

No Efficient Gaming Under Late Stage Capitalism

Keep in mind that writers tend to get paid by the word. And businesses need to be putting out regular new products in order to stay in business. It behoves them to design a system that can be constantly expanded upon with new material. Which inevitably leads to greater complexity. Which slows the game itself down.

Like how your phone or PC gets slower over time as all the software and patches and advancements tax hardware that was built to become obsolete within 5 years, forcing you to upgrade regularly, sustaining the business indefinitely. 

The average lifespan of an edition of D&D is about 7-8 years. 5E is doing quite well in that regard. I wonder how long until it buckles under the weight of all those expansions and a new edition becomes necessary. It'd actually be cool to see it stick around for 15 or even 20 years though. Will the business model hold out? Will people's imaginations hold out? They've done it with Magic the Gathering.

Tap That Market

Ah. Magic the Gathering. Simple to learn. Hard to master.

Simple to learn. You can memorise the basic rules of play. And all the special mechanics are explained on the cards themselves. Funny how something so simple, but robust enough to be expanded on infinitely can stand the test of time. Nearly 30 years MtG has lasted. It's seen the rise and fall of several editions of D&D, and remained relatively unchanged itself in all that time. No major rules overhauls. Cards from 1993 are broadly compatible with cards from 2020. It might not be balanced particularly well, but the mechanics will interact with each other pretty smoothly. Try pitting an AD&D party against a 4th edition Beholder. You wouldn't be able to run the encounter, the mechanics are so different.

Mental Breakdown

So, coming back to the pivotal moment where I realised I was playing the wrong game. 4th Edition. It killed off my longest running gaming group. We'd been playing together for the better part of a decade. But something was off with 4E. I was the mainstay DM of the group, while the others would run something between campaigns or if I had burned out and wanted a break. But within the first year or two of 4E's run, nearly every one of us had tried to run a campaign with it, and each one had fizzled out. We didn't see it at the time, but looking back, I can see that the rules and the gameplay were exhausting to deal with.

But at the same time, we enjoyed it. It doesn't matter what rules you use, as long as you're having fun. But it was kind of like one of Sauron's rings of power slowly turning us all in to gollums. 

Anyway. After one particularly sucky and short-lived campaign we all sort of burned out on D&D and just stopped. But for me, I started thinking about what went wrong and I realised that for a very long time, I've not actually enjoyed D&D. At least not as much as I could have. And I started thinking about why that was. What parts of it specificially were giving me headaches. I sort of came to the following conclusions:

• Too many rules slow down the game, which more often than not makes everyone bored. Rules should be simple and flexible and quick to resolve.
• Making characters was more fun than playing them.
• My groups most memorable characters were made in simpler systems with fast and basic generation, started as mostly blank slates and grew their personalities through play.
• Designing campaigns was more fun than playing them.
• My best campaigns were largely improvised in play.
• Structured design takes inordinately long to prepare and is only rewarding to me while I'm designing it. It never once paid off at the table.

Memories

I started going back through my memory to the good times, to try and identify the best games, what rules were used and the various other circumstances that contributed to it. I most fondly remembered B/X D&D, AFF and a homebrew that were based on AFF. At the same time, I came across the OSR and rediscovered oldschool D&D and the philosophy of that playstyle that had been lost over time. That was kind of a second epiphany.

Oldschool rules tended to facilitate the gameplay they intended. If you play them the way the rules imply you should, then everything runs smoothly.

Modern ones are struggling with that. They say it's all about storytelling and role-play, but the rules are intended for tactical strategy and action combat. If you try to role-play, you find yourself having to jump mechanical hurdles to do it.

So for a while, I was deep in to the OSR scene. I loved the DIY attitude, I loved the type of game those rules supported. But the people did sort of have an air that I can't describe and won't even attempt to because it'll mischaracterise them. In any case, I never fully felt comfortable in that scene, so when google+ shut down and several scandals turned the OSR in to a complete mess I quietly exited.

Once again, I started thinking too much about this stuff. The oldschool philosophy is pretty good, but as I was reading through the dozenth twist on B/X or some clone of it, I picked up on the fact that people are still having to tinker with the rules to get them to work for them. And I too have always done the same. There's still a few things getting in the way.

Space Kings

Then I came across Space Kings.

Made by a guy whose group played D&D at a bar. The drunker they got, the harder it was to play. Too much math and tracking and dice flying everywhere.

So he made a game that used a deck of cards to resolve everything. Very little character tracking.

Super fast and elegant to resolve. Easy to learn and memorise. It was like AFF all over again.

It really distilled TTRPG's back to the core mode of playing: The player says what they want to do. The DM tells you the result, and if you need to flip (roll) anything. The DM improvised and narrated results based on how good your draw was. Not much more to it than that. But it was robust enough to sustain lengthy campaigns while drunk.

Brilliant. It might even be perfect.

Veteran Players

I've noticed that the more familiar players get with the rules, the more they tend to think in rules. New players don't know the mechanics yet, but they're told it's a game of imagination and to just describe what they would want to do as if they were there. Then the GM tells you the result and if any dice need to be rolled. Every RPG rulebook ever tells you that's how the game works.

It's a good way to learn the rules. But over time, as those rules are learned naturally through play, the player builds up a sort of mental index of approved game interaction options. The brain naturally likes to make things easy, so instead of describing in real-world terms what they wish to do, they'll pull up a game rule and say "I want to do that".

Newbie: "I swing my sword at the orc, trying to chop off his arm"

vs

Veteran: "I use Dismemberment, which gives me a +5 to targeted attacks"

Some games encourage this more than others. For instance, modern D&D has pages and pages of feats, skills and combat mechanics that cover almost every situation. So naturally, the players will learn this language and push the button or pull the lever that does the thing.

Some players are more or less susceptible to this as well. Typically, those who don't like reading or learning rules will stay in that improv mode longer, because they don't bother mentally cataloguing mechanical interactions.

Some players are so deeply invested in mechanics, that they think that IS the game, and if you're not interacting using that language, then you're not playing it properly. Or if the rules don't do it that way, then the game itself is not doing it right. Role-play is not what a role-playing game is to them. Character building and combat strategy is what role-playing is.

To a lot of people, that's what they signed up for, or are comfortable with. But it is at odds with the creative role-play side of TTRPG's. As much as I appear to complain about 4E, I recognise it's perfectly good as a straight up tabletop wargame. It might be remembered more fondly if WotC marketed it as such, shed the pretence of role-play and made it a D&D branded competitor to Warhammer.

Forever Young

So what do you do about this seemingly inevitable path away from roleplay the more you master the rules?

Build the rules in such a way that creative thinking and role-play are a necessary component. I'd say what you leave out of the rules is just as important as what you put in. If the rules don't let you fall back on codified interactions, then you're forced to stay in that new-player-imaginative frame of mind in order to play at all.

This is what a lot of rules-lite and minimalist systems try to do. They give you one or two universal mechanics that can be applied to any situation with a little imagination. So, the less robust they appear on paper, the more robust they are in practice.

A side effect of leaving things up to the imagination is that it actually exercises the imagination, which makes the imagination easier to use, which creates a cycle that ever improves your game. From speed of play, to engagement, to excitement.

And once again, if you don't like leaving things up to people's subjective opinion; I think you might be playing the wrong kind of game. Or playing with the wrong group. If you can't trust everyone to be reasonable and mature and cooperative; the game rules aren't the problem here.

Make Believe

I'm not advocating for purely narrative systems with no rules. And people who imply my train of thought will inevitably lead to that are either falling prey to the slippery slope fallacy, or arguing in bad faith.

It's still a Role-Playing Game. Game is still a word there. People showing up to an RPG still want to roll some dice, just as much as they want to wax Shakespearean with an NPC for half an hour. 

I'm saying the ideal should be a balanced ratio of Role-playing to Game. And a seamless transition between the two modes. Or no transition at all. Rather than Role-play mode and Game mode, a single mode that is both at once. Neither end of the scale should get in the way of the other, but rather support, facilitate and enhance the other.

I am aware that there are a number of systems that attempt exactly that. I've read a lot of them and for one reason or another they tend to rub me the wrong way. If I could point at a good version of it, I'd say Space Kings. If I could point at an example I dislike, it'd probably be something like FATE, Powered by the Apocalypse, or similar "storygames" along those lines. But nailing down the why of that is something I'm having trouble with.

That's it.

I've run out of things to say in this post. I don't expect anyone to read it or agree with me on anything. I just had to get the poison out.

It probably won't be the last rant, but I do want to start posting more actual gameable content at some point. Maybe. If my attention span holds out.

[D&D] Death & Attachment

 D&D is a villain holding a gun to a puppy's head.

You are being set up to get upset.

D&D is kind of in a tug of war with itself. On the one hand, it tries to be a story emulator. On the other, it tries to be a game. The more you want it to be a story, the more the game part interferes. The more you want it to be a game, the less control you have over the story.

I ran a questionnaire. It was a small and therefore biased amount of responses. But, from those responses I gleaned that story & role-playing were by far the most important aspects of the game. But when it came to chances of character death, people still wanted it to be a real threat. The game part (stakes) still matters.

In fiction, characters are never at any real threat of dying. Characters die if it's dramatically appropriate. The stakes aren't real though. The writer is in complete control of that. As an audience, we buy in to the illusion of threat in order to enjoy the story.

In a game, you can lose, whether by difference in skill or by chance. The stakes are real. We play the game because we want to test our skill or luck, and for that game to be satisfying there has to be a real risk of losing.

To reiterate simply: A traditional story must be rigged to be satisfying. A game cannot. That's the tug of war.

What's the gun to the puppy's head?

D&D these days gets touted as a story emulator, by the product itself, the marketing and the popularity of live gameplay productions (made by professional entertainers and storytellers). They really push the idea that you're going to lovingly craft a character for yourself and you'll get to go on heroic adventures, making a story together with your friends. You're going to get immersed in the fiction. You're going to get attached to that puppy.

But then there are game rules and dice. The gun. That puppy gon' die.

(unless you're clever and lucky and win the game)

Now, this has rarely been a problem for me. I've been lucky enough to play with groups where PC death was no big deal. Expectations were managed.

But going off this survey, conversations and countless online threads, it seems a lot of people are getting sold on the wrong fantasy. I don't mean elves. I mean the fantasy that you can recreate and star in your own novel or movie.

Not to say that you can't. But if you want that, you'll need to tweak how the game works. Take threat of death off the table. Make it a dramatic choice. If someone goes to 0hp they're knocked out but not going to die. It's up to the player and DM to decide if death is appropriate and fun in that situation. I've seen games successfully run like this, and it can be pretty fun.

But if you want to run D&D as written, it's important that expectations of PC survival and story are managed upfront. You gotta let people know that it isn't a traditional story with a 3 act structure and character arcs. It isn't Lord of the Rings. It isn't even Critical Role. It's a fantasy world simulation. The stories don't have structure. The stories emerge naturally from the butterfly effect of action and reaction. Your PC might die for any number of reasons. You can't rely on plot immunity. Free will and the dice make that impossible.

I think the marketing department are aiming for wide market appeal. That's why they push it as a story emulator. They seem to think people can more easily understand and engage with the concept of telling a capital S Story, over running an imaginary simulation.

Top 10 Best selling videogames of the 2010's according to Wikipedia; Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto V, Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, Mario Kart 8, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Diablo 3, Terraria, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Red Dead Redemption 2, Call of Duty Black Ops.

Grand Theft Auto 5, Red Dead 2 and Skyrim are the only games on there I'd consider are notable for their story. But the gameplay itself is largely open world simulation. People are not spending hundreds of hours playing through the story sections. They're fiddling about in the world making their own stories.

Minecraft up the top. No story to speak of. Wildly popular and influential.

Zero linear story games in the top 10 (nobody is buying CoD for the story). The first one that pops up is The Last of Us at 18th.

The producers of D&D don't give people enough credit. We'll like and play D&D as an open world sandbox. And we'll get less upset about our characters dying if you advertise it as such.

I'd say if people still don't like losing their progress from PC death, then maybe some kind of legacy system could be useful. Like, you can cultivate your next character in some way while playing your current one so that you have something to look forward to in the event your current one dies. That's a post idea right there.

And to beat my broken drum again, I'll say; pare down the mechanics. No wonder people get so attached. Sunken cost fallacy. You have to put so much time in to making and maintaining a character. It's an ordeal. You'd be less bothered about PC death if it only took 10 minutes to make one. 

[D&D] Skills

I always go back and forth on skill lists. They are an undeniably useful game tool. But I also find they can be a crutch for many players.

In all things in life, we want to travel the path of least resistance. So a list of common game interactions with an associated rating is nice. I can, at a glance, see my character is very good at picking locks. There are a lot of locks to pick in RPGs.

But then the law of the hammer sets in. The cognitive bias where if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. If all you have is this list of a dozen skills, then you try and solve every obstacle in the game with a skill and a dice roll.

If you didn't have the list at all, you'd just use your imagination. You'd talk in natural, descriptive language about what your character wants to do. But to those brought up on skill lists, the idea of throwing out the skill list is insanity.

You must have a way to measure the skill of your character. My character is good at picking locks, not because they are a Rogue, but because being a Rogue gives you +5 to lockpicking.

You must have choice and agency as a player and as a character. My character is good at picking locks because I decided to take the lockpicking proficiency. If I don't get that choice, I will not be playing the character I wish to play. I had no hand in crafting them.

These arguments are fallacies, imo. The presumption is that the game was built around the use of these skills. It would be like telling someone to play Super Mario Bros. with a Rock Band guitar. An unnecessary and awkward interface for the game.

I strongly disagree. The core mechanic (roll 1d20 vs a DC. Roll high to succeed) is the only tool necessary to resolve these situations. The skill system is an extra layer of granularity to tip the scales more in your favour, but they aren't necessary to play or even enjoy the game.

I won't deny there is pleasure to be had in character building and modifier hunting. It's a satisfying mental exercise to play with the lego blocks of character customisation to build your avatar brick-by-brick. It's also satisfying to get big bonus number make dice go brrrrrrrr. But I see those as a kind of mental junk food. Yes, it gives you pleasure, but the quality of that pleasure is thin and fleeting.

I was in my late teens and early 20's when 3rd and 4th editions were big, and I got really invested in them. I was on the Character Optimisation forums and poring over hundreds of pages of splat books to hand craft all sorts of mechanically interesting builds. I loved it. Then I'd get to the table with these characters and immediately get bored with them, whether the build was successful or not. I realised years later that I got more out of the mental exercise of building a character than I did playing it. And years after that, I learned about how dopamine responses and anticipation are linked to form habits. Healthy and unhealthy ones. 

Game designers use this in a benevolent way. It's a simple method to enhance fun. You get all these big numbers that go up on your character sheet. Modifiers, experience, levels, big pools of hit points and spells that do 4d6+18 damage. Loads and loads of special abilities that tell you all the cool stuff your character can do. The excitement builds, you throw the dice, count all the big numbers and explode in orgasmic delight. That's the sugar rush part of the game. The noise and flashing lights of the poker machine.

The rest of the game is where I believe the better quality - nourishing - fun is to be had. The role-playing. The problem solving. Immersing yourself in a story and an imagined universe. Shooting the shit with your friends, having a laugh. Those are the endorphin and serotonin companions to dice rolling dopamine. That's the exhilaration of a good workout, or the thrill of pulling off a bluff in poker.

I'm not saying the mechanical stuff is bad for you. I'm saying we're addicted to it. We place a higher importance on it, because our brains are wired to do that. It's an easy feelgood response. A better effort-to-payoff ratio than the other stuff, so it gets higher priority. But it's a small and temporary payoff compared to the other stuff. 

I made a little questionnaire not long ago and solicited responses from my circles. Questions about what aspects of tabletop RPGs you enjoy the most. An overwhelming number of the responses (24 respondents total. A small and admittedly biased data set) said that story and role-playing were the absolute most important aspects of the game, far above anything else. Game mechanics, strategy and other mechanics-heavy aspects were only moderately important in comparison.

This is interesting to me, because it's the opposite of what I hear when I talk to people. Whenever I advocate for reducing mechanical complexity in favour of greater creative freedom, I meet heavy resistance. It seems to be that in the moment - a conversation - people react strongly when the easy dopamine reward option is threatened. But when asked to sit down and think about it - a questionnaire - people recognise that the real value of the game lies in the social and imaginative aspects.

We know we're addicted to snack food (mechanics), but the addiction makes us resist giving it up.

Any game designer will tell you that the more complex you make the mechanics, the slower the game gets. Can you remember any epic 3 hour long combat encounters that were exciting and tense the entire time, with a rewarding payoff at the end? I'd wager not. It's more likely that those combats were a slog. A death march and the only relief anyone felt at the end was because it was over. Was the time and mental energy you expended to build your character an advantageous trade-off in that situation? A couple of good dice rolls, maybe. But the net takeaway is that you were bored most of the time and exhausted by the end. That's what you'll remember for years to come. The time and energy that was robbed from you.

Snack foods (mechanics) are fine, in moderation.

One way to break unhealthy habits is to substitute healthy habits in their place. We cut down on sugar and eat more nuts instead. We shed unnecessary mechanical complexity, and replace it with more role-play and mental exercise.

Ditch the skill list. Instead of picking the happy meal menu item, we engage our imagination and describe what we're doing. And instead of referencing a rulebook to tell us what the outcome of a situation is, the DM makes it up on the spot (using common sense, of course). You know. Role-playing.

You don't need a character sheet to tell you that your level 5 Rogue is extremely skilled at picking locks. That's just common sense. Everyone at the table can agree your level 5 Rogue should be good at that. Instead of adding a bunch of bonuses together (and making everyone else wait), the DM can just lower the DC to whatever everyone agrees sounds reasonable. Your level is a pretty good number to use. Lower the DC by that amount. Or if you're playing 5th Edition the Proficiency Bonus is the only modifier you need. And you don't need to choose and track what you're proficient at. It's inferred by your class, background and the fiction itself.

Did you really lose any agency when building that character? You got to decide they were good at picking locks just the same as if the rulebook said you could. That's more agency, not less. You still get the satisfaction of rolling high on a d20. You've lost nothing, saved time (and energy), exercised your brain, and been more engaged in the (highly important) fiction than you otherwise would have been. That's a pretty good deal.

But but but if it isn't in the rules I have to ask for permission from the DM! They shouldn't have such arbitrary power over my fun!

If your DM is as unreasonable and unfair as you seem to think they are, then I don't know what to tell you. Your DM sucks. They need to adjust their attitude, or step aside and let a more mature person run the game.