Halceon

Making games, rarely finishing


TalenLee
@TalenLee

as a designer I realised I actively dislike dice because then I have to make a game that works even if someone rolls shit or someone rolls amazing and I dunno that seems a lot of pressure to put on me


leslie-brain-zone
@leslie-brain-zone

Something I think a lot of games fail to grasp is that the dice will not cooperate with you. If someone has a really cool idea that everyone at the table wants to see happen, the dice can (and often will) simply say "no" if you allow them to. If someone is making a desperate last stand against a superior foe, the dice will grind them into the mud rather than deliver a heroic final effort. If you're okay with characters getting unceremoniously dumpstered (which I know some people are) that's fine, but many stories will break under that pressure. If you want to tell stories that reward heroic bravery over statistical advantage, the game rules have to reflect that - or the rules will eventually have to be discarded.


amaranth-witch
@amaranth-witch

This is one of the dissonance points I run into with the game-art conceit of "dice as oracle", as a nice bonus. I did a thinkchost (is that the term? I don't know if that's the term) a while back about a game called SHIVER which actually did something very clever on that front, but ultimately, that's the other thing about the dice: they can only answer a question we ask them directly, and only give answers in a predefined range. To ridiculously oversimplify, "ask the dice" is basically the same thing as "can you roleplay in Baldur's Gate 3". Sure! You can (and they'll answer) but they can only present an answer predicated on pre-defined conditions. Sometimes it feels like that's not the case, but that's because those pre-defined conditions volley the question back to you: in a PBtA game, a move is made, the dice are rolled, it feels like a natural twist is generated by the dice, but that's because the dice turn around and say "Okay, you got a Partial Progress result but another character takes a String on you and the Facilitator introduces a 'pataphysical twist... what does that look like" and the conversation continues.
In other words, it's... not the dice.

I don't have the oomph to get really philosophical here, but there IS a thesis brewing that every TTRPG is actually (at least) 2 games: the tangible game and the metagame. The tangible game is the "game" part in a lot of ways; if a game includes a skirmish-game layer, a literal board-game layer, that's included here, but as a general rule, the tangible game is where the dice live, right? When you take your defined characteristics, however general they may be (earlier tonight I was asking some of my Lancer players "ok, do you think that any of your skill triggers might apply here, do you think that any of your traits or background elements might apply here, ok cool we can put those into the dice roll" because those are deliberately nebulously designed) and apply the game's mechanisms and briefly abdicate control, briefly say "ok, how far CAN I move on this roll" or "ok, DOES this attack hit" or "ok, what general kind of twist is invoked here?" and then interpret the results based on the same mechanism before taking back control.

The metagame, though, that's what people usually think of when they say "roleplay" or even "roleplaying game". That's the cinema of the piece, that's the narrative and the embellishments, and something that frustrates new and experienced players alike is that by default, the metagame and the tangible game proceed at different paces and are often so out of communication with each other that you get D&D groups bragging about "sometimes we go 5 or 6 game sessions without ever touching the dice" like it's a good thing to avoid the entire tangible game as long as possible! In a lot of ways you could consider the meta-game "the improv community theater activities" that people associate RPG's with more and more these days; this is the layer where D&D allows characters to smooch and be queer and soft with each other, for example, but also it barely intersects with the tangible game (or if you want to get really technical, the multiple different sharded tangible games, the largest of which by an order of magnitude is about violence) in any meaningful manner.

Most of my favorite RPGs have a third game attached, one which bridges the two worlds and acts as a medium that encourages the tangible game and the metagame to communicate, and the good ones do it effortlessly, but typically when I talk about this kind of stuff on discord or twitter my mentions immediately start filling up with "you're thinking too hard about it", "you're too pretentious" and "it's not that deep" and it's frustrating just how incurious people are about their hobbies, and how defensive they get when the idea of examining their entertainment comes up, and so it lives mainly in my head.


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in reply to @leslie-brain-zone's post:

Yep! This is exactly why I moved to no-failure for certain mechanics too. If you don’t want the chance of failure, it simply can’t be an option. Dice will sometimes cooperate but the whole point is that you can’t guarantee it.

I found the blog post I mentioned!
https://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/blog/negative-space/
"In OSR play, I think it quite common that players are doing their utmost to avoid engaging with the rules of play! They often exist to model some sort of failure state: saving throws, combat, etc. The odds are in the house’s favour, so play becomes about fictional positioning to avoid leaving things to chance. OSR games are about overcoming challenges, and clever play in this space is all about stacking the odds in your favour. Of course, the best odds are the ones where you aren’t rolling any dice."

in reply to @amaranth-witch's post:

The tangible/meta divide is something I think about a lot, especially with D&D but also with anything that has a developed Combat System™️. It sometimes feels a lot like something like one of those games like Uncharted where you have cutscene mode (in which killing someone is bad) and actual game mode (where wasting 50 goblins/henchmen/etc is just like, what we do every afternoon).

The PbtA idea of The Conversation is probably the most useful "bridge" concept I've seen.

Yeah, there's a lot of semi-trad systems in the vein of Exalted 1e/2e and 7'th Sea 1e which try to force-weld the layers together (in Exalted via "stunts" giving bonuses and replenishing your Magic Martial Arts Juice, in 7'th Sea via the concept of Drama Dice which are earned by Doing Cool Narrative And Cinematic Shit and spent not only to boost rolls and fuel magic, but also to say "actually this branch of rules (usually the Death Rules, but sometimes other Dice Consequences) don't apply for the moment") and while those are cool systems, they fail on a number of places because they only get partway there, they acknowledge "the dice will never cooperate with your narrative vision, even if they sometimes reinforce it that is only by chance and the fortune of how you've staged your modifiers" but they don't talk about any of the why and so on.

On the other hand, Feng Shui manages to be a semi-trad game that just effortlessly nails it by acknowledging and exploring in the core text "hey, sometimes it will feel like the story you are telling in the game you're playing doesn't work with the dice. When that happens - not if, when - decide whether you would rather control the story, or follow fate, and act accordingly. Also, feel free to mismatch bonuses if you feel it'd be better, or give out extra situational ones. It's not "pure vibes all the time", but this is a collaborative experience, not a strictly bounded wargame!"

Uh, that is an interesting division that gives me word to easily express stuff. Like: d&d rules are mostly about the tangible game, and the metagame is all on the GM to figure out, which makes it harder than some other games.

How would you classify games (like some pbta games) where the rules are about the narration rather than the things we are simulating/imagining? Is it the tangible game, or is it that third game?

Binary brought up a related thought in this comment: https://cohost.org/amaranth-witch/post/3423851-this-is-one-of-the-d#comment-7be366c7-2dd4-430d-8c1d-6e1d810145b2

He posits that (a lot of) the PbtA games are the most useful "bridge" idea out there, in the idea of "The Conversation", and I largely agree with that. Basically, I feel like the general PbtA approach is one where the "tangible" game is almost entirely pointed at the meta game / theatrical game / narrative, if that makes sense? Because if you take the theatric out of the tangible, PbtA games are like the roll-and-move boardgame of the tabletop world: on a 10+ you get a Splendid, on a 7+ you get a Complete, on a 6- you get a Whoopsiedoodle, that's it, that's the game, grab your d6's and let's go.

(I am deliberately exaggerating for effect here and wish to state that this isn't my actual opinion of PbtA, just a reductive description of their tangible-game element to demonstrate that there really aren't a lot of moving parts.)

So where PbtA games shine is that their tangible elements are really streamlined towards keeping attention focused on the meta/theatric game, effectively saying "hey, your playbook is for reference and guideline, it is not The Game, the game is the conversation and the story between the people at the table" by having the vast majority of the interesting stuff looping back towards that conversation. When you look at the most compelling moves, they don't just say "on a 10+ you heal 2 damage and on a 6- you don't heal anything", the Field Medic move says

  • On a 7+, you stabilize your target
  • On a 10+, they heal 1 Harm as well
  • On a 6 or lower, there's nothing more you can do for them. Choose 1:
    -- Do your best for them, even though you know it won't make a difference
    -- Break it to them compassionately and stay with them
    -- Walk away

And that's powerful stuff! That informs the narrative game in a strong, evocative and powerful way. But at the same time, it's still separate games: in a very real way, The Conversation (which is the Game) is happening, and then an opportunity comes up to use a Move, and the Conversation is paused while you look over to The Playbook and roll your dice, consult the outcome, apply the results, and then turn back to The Conversation and continue with the changed state of affairs. They coexist, they inform each other, but the only real incentive they have to interact is effectively "Oh, I would like a chance to use this move please" or "oh, I would like to steer The Conversation in this direction and have tools in case we can't naturally agree how it should go"
(again, I'm paraphrasing)
and by itself, the two games are still kind of positively-neutral toward each other; you can play through a session of a PbtA game without ever feeling the requirement to use a Move, and that's not a bad thing, because they explicitly exist to drive and moderate the Conversation and if the Conversation is going splendidly then the game is being played right, or at least there's an argument to be made there.

I have difficulty really explaining the shape of the "third game" because it's not a single thing. It's a combination of a lot of factors, and they're not always present, and maybe there really isn't a "third" game, just a bunch of really well-built bridges that make me feel like such a game-layer exists. Some of those bridges are in PbtA games: Monsterhearts has the concept of Strings, which are a Tangible-Game element that exists to drive the Narrative-Game directly, for instance. The existence of a String you hold on a character encourages you to keep thinking about that character.

  • Sometimes it encourages you to interact with the character: using the String gives you an advantage in that narrative situation! Of course you want to interact while you have an advantage. In that way, it tangibly pushes characters to interact, to look for situations to use that String (or to look for a way to tempt someone to use a String they hold on you early so they can't influence you with it later)
  • Sometimes it encourages you to interact strangely with a character: the tension from "I have a String and I want to use it" is very different from "I have a String and I don't want to use it", not to mention "I have a String and it would be favorable to use it and I should want to use it but I feel weird about using it so I'm not but maybe I should", and so it acts as a sort of narrative gravity well just by being there
  • Sometimes it encourages characters to avoid each other, or avoid certain interactions. "They have a String on me, I can't afford to be around them / can't afford to let them talk to me that way" drives a host of possible interactions and stances and lenses for scenes.

In all cases, it's a bridge, linking the "consult as needed" minimal Tangible game to the "dramatic, narrative Conversation" Meta layer game, because the existence of this situational, specific element tells you directly "this is the kind of game we're playing here" and then proceeds to constantly remind you "oh, by the way, if you interact with X, you can..." just by sitting there as a little mark, or a little token, unobtrusively, tangibly affecting the narrative.

I hope that makes sense? It's a struggle to map out the shape and I think I got it, but it's also kind of hard to say either a firm yes or a firm no, if that makes sense.