...or something like that. hi! I'm very tired and frustrated by trying to explain a thing to someone who just isn't getting it and so I'm going to try to express it here, directly, and see if it gets across. Okay? Okay. Okay!
so I made what I now recognize as a mistake expressing a certain opinion in one of the gaming talk-groups I'm in (no details will be shared: if you were there you know this discussion already, if you weren't I'm not snitching, overall the place is Perfectly Fine, don't worry) and stating that I have a not-just-nostalgic fondness for the style of RPG which has fairly exhaustive gear lists. You know, Cyberpunk2020/Shadowrun style, where you may get the generic "Pistol, Heavy" entry but even that will have range brackets and magazine size and fire-select modes and you can select the order of bullets you load into the magazine, and then if you're lucky you'll have 20 more "Pistol, Heavy" variations with manufacturer names and their own quirks and frequently it's just NERPS but sometimes it's minute mechanical variations and if you're REALLY lucky you'll get pictures of 25% of the guns or more
oh, what's NERPS, if you don't know, NERPS is Non-Essential Role-Playing Stuff (affectionate). Like how it's probably never going to MATTER-matter that Papa Murphy's Authentic Old-World Irish Burrito And Sushi Hut ("Smells like Food!") has a promotion going on where if you buy $55 worth of Neon List items you get a day-glo branded bracelet that's good for Bonus Points off your orders for the next month, but it makes the world and game feel that much more connected? World-building (affectionate) instead of world-building (derogatory), because it's something your players COULD use if they wanted, you just don't know how, instead of something no one really cares about because it doesn't actually touch anyone. NERPS is great. I love NERPS. Anyhow.
The point is, I love Gratuitous Gear Lists (usually, when they're decently done) and Indulgent Equipment And Style Books. Especially for indie RPGs; when a single-author, close-knit-co-op, small-studio or small-press line puts out an Indulgent Style Book, that usually means that the game is doing well enough to afford the indulgence, which is, dare I say it, fucking awesome. And folks in the chat were generally on board with this, albeit grudgingly. It's when I tried to explain that no, I liked them as themselves as well, not just as signifiers, I actually like the product and the artistry that I started getting confused pushback and 3 people actually straight telling me
No you don't
Which like. Excuse you. You are not on the council that decides what I think.
But I still wanted to explain why I liked them because in theory this is a chatgroup explicitly for game design, and I was asked there because the chat owner specifically wanted my perspective on things, so what the hey, let's try, right? And we started with the usual suspects, things like "having a list helps me know what's out there"
(the response was "yeah but no one needs a list to do that, just make it up")
"OK but having a list lets me know what the shape of "make it up" looks like"
("uh, but a good game shouldn't need that, you can just start from the base and go until it fits")
"Yes but the list lets me know the kind of shape of experience that the writers were aiming at in a very tangible way"
("but if they're doing their job you shouldn't need that, it should be in the text?")
"The list is part of the text"
("No it isn't, it's retro-gaming cruft, it's wasted words, what the fuck")
And that didn't really go anywhere so I tried something different. This is the part which is actually really relevant-relevant, this is the part where I'm like... if this doesn't make sense, I don't know how I can talk to you.
Two Directions Of Drama
Since I brought in the lens of "guns and gear lists", the situation I used was a violent one: how many bullets are left in the gun? One of the big examples is Clint Eastwood's famous delivery in Dirty Harry (though there are others, from all over, from just about every genre of violence (and frankly, the John Wick movies are largely built around this conceit, every gunplay scene can be framed as "holy shit Keanu is just so good at reloading"))
"I know what you're thinking, did he fire six shots or only five? To tell you the truth, in the excitement, I kinda lost track myself. But being as this... ...would blow your head clean off, you've gotta ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?"
The tension here is palpable, and it hinges on one very simple fact, one which the audience might know in theory, assuming we have perfect omniscient knowledge of the scene and can track every gunshot: is there a bullet in the gun, or is there not, and do you want to risk it?
This moment can exist in tabletop games, which is pretty cool. Frequently it actually comes down to "do I hit with the attack" because a lot of games and even more playgroups don't bother with tracking ammunition (which is fine, I'm not here to rag on that), but you can actually arrive at the "do I feel lucky? Well do ya" moment itself, or any of its variants, from two directions. Does the drama inform the gun, or does the gun inform the drama?
When the drama informs the gun, this happens because someone at the table has decided that this is a dramatic moment to leave up to (some degree of) chance. Common examples are the gun-holder's player asking for a dramatic moment, or the GM-role player offering a dramatic bargain ("if there IS a bullet left in the gun, and you pull the trigger, then... but if there isn't... but the gamble is in two stages...") and playing out the scene based on the invoked unknown - it doesn't matter whether or not there were bullets in the gun prior to the drama being invoked, but now it's a big unknown, it's the second stage of the gamble (the first stage being "will the gunner pull the trigger"). And there are many different systematic ways to represent and influence this, from a simple coin-flip/die roll, to systems which frame it as a specific Move, sometimes tied to a certain Playbook or archetype, to systems which allow modifiers like "my guy has Always Prepared which adds +1 to the roll" or "I took the One Bullet Left schtick which explicitly states I always have One Bullet Left once per dramatic scene when otherwise I would be empty"
And these are all fine and good. And arguably, this is the easier way to handle it. And a case could be made that from a dramatic standpoint, this is actually better, it leaves the tension unresolved because the state is unknown and because the scene is invoked by the players, instead of arising out of nowhere.
But the alternative is the gun informs the drama. In this model, Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum holds 6 rounds. The player knew how many rounds were in the gun at the start of the sequence, and marked off a round each time they fired. The question is already answered, the drama is now shifted to the first part of the gamble: is the punk in question going to back down, or does the trigger get pulled, does the bluff get called? Because the game already knows what happens.
There are modifiers, of course! It's too much work for a game to literally track every variable at all times, so it's entirely possible that the player picked up a gun that hadn't been interacted with in the scene and so the GM has to quickly collapse the waveform, even if the player doesn't know how many bullets are in the gun. I'm not stating that "the GM knows how many bullets are in every gun at all times". But in the idealized example, we and the game know how many shots are left. And that's a very different kind of dramatic tension than invoking it the other way around.
And you just don't get that with a loose, floaty, "IDK it's a handgun, it does 1d6 damage, tracking ammo is boring so we just assume you have it unless it's dramatic".
For complete transparency, I really like both directions here, I think they're both really neat. This is not a statement of superiority. And it's also rare to find a game that operates at either extreme (though it's more likely to find games hanging out at the drama-informs-gun side for a bunch of reasons). Most games blend elements together. I've even listed some of those blends above.
But you can't get the hard-stop, resource-driven drama without at least some kind of equipment list, and the more lovingly detailed the NERPS, the higher the chances it'll click like that.
I dunno. Maybe I'm just way off base and gratuitous gear lists are a relic of a crummy, crusty generation and it's all Character Aspect Tags and Dramatic Timing that's important now.
