A little bit of talk around here about an old blog post of mine, "Rules vs Vigorous Creative Agreement," and it reminds me of one of my favorite things I've ever said about rpg design. It's from a different thread, a few years later:
"When we want to let our characters off the hook, we need rules to threaten them; when we want to kill our characters, we need rules to protect them."
The idea that we choose game rules in order to be frustrated by them is funny to me, and not untrue!
@lumpley Do you think a rule is better if it's used or not? Is a rule still a rule if no one uses it? Isn't it a bit like standing on the head of a rake?
I'm going to go with: some rules are good only when they're used, some are good when they're used but better when they aren't, some aren't meant to be used and are terrible if they are. Some of my favorite rules are fine if you never use them, but when you want them, no other rule will do. So, it depends!
I think rules are still rules if no one uses them, sure. For instance: roll, and on a 6, set fire to your dining room table. This is a rule but I can't imagine anybody doing it.
@herrold Oh but regardless, I definitely think it's better for people if they don't use rules they don't like.
@lumpley :"The idea that we choose game rules in order to be frustrated by them is funny to me, and not untrue!" I get that life is complicated and contains multitudes, but you could see how both of these things that you've written could be sometimes hard to tell apart? Frustration and not liking. Like in music or any art really, having an internal rule often helps, if only to move things forward, and to have something to contradict later on.
@herrold Oh sure! It's part of what I find funny about it. "Frustrate me in just the way I want you to. Not like that! Not like that!"
And it's not the only reason we choose rules, just one of them, of course.
@lumpley Oh, and when you make a new game, do you think of it like a quasi-living thing, with its own needs and wants(truths)?
For a fact I do.
@lumpley How did you think of Apocalypse World say in comparison to ... Murderous Ghosts? How do(did) they feel different?
@herrold That's too much to take on! I guess Murderous Ghosts, being so much smaller in every direction, had a lot less flexibility in its nature. It would work the way it knew it must, or it wouldn't work; I couldn't fudge it along or leave it to work itself out.
I dunno!
@lumpley Do you think you were more careful/worried/fearful with Murderous Ghosts?
@herrold The opposite. I knew that Murderous Ghosts would either work great, or I'd abandon it, and that there wasn't anything I could do but find out which.
Apocalypse World took a lot more care: more moving pieces to balance and double-check, more opportunities to mess it up and cause problems for its future.
@lumpley Were there games that seemed to work themselves out?
@herrold Yeah! Some games just fall out of my head whole onto paper. The Wizard's Grimoire was like that.
Murderous Ghosts took a couple of tries to find its feet.
A lot of games have a key to unlock, a trick to their design, and if I can find it, the game becomes easy. It and I are working together.
It's never easy to communicate what they key was. For Apocalypse World, it was to always write what I'd want to read. For Under Hollow Hills, it was the idea of "how are you going to play this?"
Oh wait — but that's only in relation to me, it's creator. I don't think it has needs and wants in relation to anybody who'd play it.
In relation to play, I think that games have editorial positions, which were built in by their creators, not wants and needs at all.
No player's accountable to a game's editorial position.
@lumpley Yes, we're on the same wavelength. I mean as a "parent" of an idea. I assume you weren't alone in feeling a need to nurture a particular idea. I mean, I kind off assumed you had a great play group that helped make Apocalypse World pretty great. I'm sure many of them might have different feelings as well. Maybe I'm wrong?
@lumpley Would you say that the procedures of a game like Fiasco, which are mostly there to give some initial input and then structure the process of reaching agreement, are not really rules? Or merely that they are a different kind of rule, which is possibly less interesting to you? This may sound like a semantic quibble, but I guess I'm wondering whether it's useful to distinguish rules (which decide something about the fiction) from procedures (which help *you* decide about the fiction).
Oh, I'd definitely say they're rules.
I think we choose rules for a lot of reasons, just one of them being to frustrate us. (Challenge us, I suppose I should say.)
We choose rules for inspiration and structure too, for example. For all kinds of reasons.
Like, we don't choose to follow traffic rules because they make driving more frustrating!
@lumpley Yeah. Rules (and the GM role) exist to an extent to provide resistance. It's simply more satisfyng to do a thing in the face of resistance than to do it easily and trivially, so when we want to do something, we add factors that add resistance, add a chance of failure so it feels like accomplishment.
@lumpley Well yeah -- no one needs a rule to force them to do things they want to do. No one needs to make cat-petting mandatory.
Scroll down to lesson 13:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/twenty-years-twenty-lessons-part-2-2016-06-06
Our rules and our affordances and our objectives lead us to do things whether or not those things are what we want to do or not. So having rules to do fun things or reward can be a good thing in a game.
The classic Taschenlampenfallenlasser story example from tabletop RPGs:
People were playing a horror game (CoC I think), chars are in some monster infested tunnels, one of 'em suddenly goes "I panic, the flashlight slips out of my hand, and I run", tunnels go dark, monsters go omnomnom, rest in pieces rest of party. Players mad AF out of character because the game had set up conflicting affordances. The flashlight dropper had violates their expectation of "trying to win" in the situation. If there had been rules in place that rewarded that sort of behavior (like compels in Fate) or even mandated it (fear checks in Alien, meters in Unknown Armies), that'd sidestep the argument and lead to clarity.
The "actor"/"instigator" type players who like to experience things on an emotional level and act it out fully would be allowed to do so, and the tactical minded players would need to take the psychological state of their characters into account (à la Darkest Dungeon), making it more acceptable as just another vector for trouble, parameter to plan around—or, if the design was focused on another kind of fun, rules could reward or mandate calming your tits for three seconds and just hold the light steady while we figure this situation out. Either way the design would have a clear promised premise and lean into that promise rather than fight it all the way like that PoS game CoC does.
Just the other day actually (and I didn't connect this to the Taschenlampenfallenlasser story at all at the time but the parallels are super obvious now) we had a situation where a deep in the dungeon party are heading to rescue some prisoners and they come across a torture chamber with row after row of tools and everyone except one of their henches, Amin, make their fear saves. Amin, on the other hand, freak out, high-tail it out of there, I roll a random location for her (+ also put her on the random encounter table, so there are two ways they can find her), rest of part heads back, finally finds her, I get to ham it out sobbingly, chars get to talk frankly about how twisted the situation actually is, she refuses to return (as per the rules of that room, fear effect stays for 4d4 exploration turns), party heads back to fight their foes one hand short while she guards the camp (I roll separate encounters for her, rolling openly as is my wont, but she's in the clear).
Following my three guidelines for a fear or charm effect in D&D:
1. There needs to be a supernatural cause (in this case the module described it as supernaturally caught anguish in the room itself).
2. No weaksauce effects. Don't have everyone roll just for "you feel a li'l queasy" or "you have disadvantage on checks for one hour". (The Alien RPG suffers from this.)
3. Address the people who made their saves and tell them what the person who failed the save does, instead of telling the person who failed the save "you do this and this" (in this case it was an NPC so it worked out). Or, pass a note or send a DM to the person who failed and let them do it, also works great.
Fun fun fun
Great session.
Just the other day I linked to this video on cursed problems in game designs and a lot of those cursed problems are about just this Lesson 13 kind of stuff. When the fun thing to do (which, in a horror game is to freak out and in a cat petting game is to pet cats) clashes with what you need to do to win:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uE6-vIi1rQ
@lumpley
Obviously the sex moves in (unburned) AW come to mind as a perfect example of this sort of affordance. Something a group might not be sure about if it weren't for the move. Cat petting moves, I call this category of moves
(I mean, I've been calling them flashlight dropper affordances but that's just me)
I remember playing 5e with @tiger and she asks me "this is an adventure game. Is this the sort of 'you have to focus on the mission' type games, or…?"
And I look her straight in the eyes saying
"If you fuck up the mission…"
"Yes…?"
"…you get rewarded."
"You get rewarded?!"
And I explain the inspiration rules.
And she proceeds to kick absolute ass doing all kinds of shenanigans in character.
Insp, just like Fate points in Fate, is such a weaksauce reward (you often give up way more than you get) but I've found that, at least for non-competitive games, the reward does not have to be commensurate. It's just an "hey, it's explicitly OK to do this". (I mean, obviously the reward size is a good development knob if you find that your gameplay isn't working so if you need to crank it up, just go ahead. Like Hillfolk, a game about arguing with each other and winning arguments… solves a lot of problems by giving a massive reward to whomever gives in. Or, Svart av kval vit av lust does something similar but but reversed (winning arguments gives "you" a token but it's a bad token that everyone else can use against you). Big rewards.
@roger
