Fiasco: We All Had Fun In Spite of the Rules

Last weekend's game of Fiasco, like the other three I've been in, was a crazy blast featuring a preposterous mix of meth dealing, Narcanon, Cthulhu phenomena and Alaska. But I also had the strong, recurring feeling that we were having fun in spite of the rules - that the dice mechanics were inelegant and largely had to be worked around. I have always had the strong urge while playing this game to either Ignore the Dice or Respect the Dice.

Case 1: the rolling for relationships and objects/locations/goals by taking dice from a large pool, which gives a bewildering amount of choice for people who go first and an unsatisfying lack of choice for those who go last.

Ignore the Dice: Just pick.

Respect the Dice: Just roll d6/d6 (and make sure every option on that table is AWESOME, and if you can't think of AWESOME, then have 12 or 20 instead of 36 options)

Case 2: the unclear gamesmanship of taking and granting dice during play. Black or white dice are granted to other players in the first round, then to yourself in the second round, either by yourself (if you let the others set the scene) or the others (if you set the scene yourself). At the end, the only people whose characters have positive outcomes are those who have a large imbalance of black vs. white dice (either way). There's also a tension between players who have been gaming this aspect of the game, and others who have just been playing to make a fun story. You could argue that the negative outcome feeds the grimness of the tale, but in the source material of botched-caper films, there's a space for characters who against all odds come out all right.

Ignore the Dice: Just wager for black and white tokens, with outcome based on the imbalance or some other means.

Respect the Dice: Just roll for outcome, regardless of what happened during play.

The larger point about game design is that Fiasco's flaws are very much traceable to an ideology of player agency. An ideology is distinguishable from a technique when it starts getting in the way of fun. Forget GNS or anything else, here are my three necessary ingredients for fun in a game- PLAYER-centered instead of DESIGNER-centered:

1. agency - ability of players to make meaningful choices
2. surprise - results can come up that shock and galvanize the whole table
3. representation - the opposite of an abstract game, where you can visualize how the game mechanics create a compelling situation or story

My point is, the dice element in Fiasco adds very little to point 2, which dice are there to do. Either go full-on storygame (Ignore Dice) and get surprise from the interaction of players, or respect the dice, and open up to the full ranges of twists and turns that they are there to provide.

Another way to put it perhaps: the choices involved in selecting from dice, granting dice, and reading dice at the end are not representational. "Representational" in this game would be picking some sort of theme or strategy for your character, seeing it through and watching it influence play, and having it inform the outcome at the end.

This Is the Story of a Thing That Is Not a Story

Here's the difference between an immersive game and a story:

The persons in a story don't know they are in a story.  The persons reading it do.

So the person playing an immersive game shouldn't be aware of a story structure to his or her experience, either. The player should be focused on the play within the world, not consciously waiting for the big twist, the climax moment, or any of the other screenwriting-class crutches. ("Hey, GM, is this the part where they invade my safe space?")

Just like the experience of playing a tactical miniatures game, i've found the experience of playing a "story game" with mechanics aimed directly at narrative elements can be enjoyable, but is ultimately somewhat "cool" in all senses of the word. It sticks a critical, self-aware distance between the players and the characters. Perhaps this is what some people want ... but to me it comes off a tad insecure.

Embrace character identification! It's our hobby's dark, dorky secret. Hell, I'll even let you wear elf ears to the table if that helps.

These thoughts have come up as I preside over the wrapping up of our Tomb of the Iron God game. Instead of a big, climactic mastermind fight, there have been a number of tense moments, revealing areas, and epic battles, and the party is currently debating how many loose ends to tie up in the dungeon before moving on. C'mon ... you know you want to fight the Eater of the Dead ...

Slouching Towards the Slugfest

There's a process I've observed over my years playing and designing for the Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) collectible card game, and that recently came to mind as I read what Randall had to say about overpowered spells in D&D.

Some background: The designers of L5R:CCG made a very simulation-based game back in 1995, much more detailed than the original CCG, Magic:The Gathering. The characters you brought out in this Kurosawa-meets-Tolkien world could attach troops and items, go to court, fight in duels, choose the terrain for their battles, cast spells - even commit seppuku if necessary.

One very visible source of strategic thinking for this game was Sun Tzu. Battles were winner-takes-all, with the loser destroyed, so assurance of overwhelming odds was necessary, and attacking always risky. It was possible to take back-and-forth actions to try to whittle down the enemy forces or temporarily disable them, but terrains could shut down battles or annul them entirely. What's more, there was a range of intrigues, assassins, duels, and courtiers that could put enemy leaders and troops out of commission before the battle.

This state of affairs resembles a certain type of old-school roleplaying game where combat is potentially lethal; where cheesy, if naturalistic, tricks abound. Flaming oil, sleep spells and war dogs were the players' weapons against save-or-die poisons, meager hit dice, and death at zero hit points. Under such conditions any advantage was acceptable to seek.

In both games, as time passed, designers responded to player concerns by making the combat more back-and-forth, less all-or-nothing. In L5R, effects that shut down battle or kept military units out of battle were greatly restricted or eliminated, starting in Diamond Edition in 2004, with the ideal being for units to meet in battle and trade actions back and forth. Meanwhile, D&D's 3rd edition redesign in 2001 also filed away the rough corners, with greater PC survivability, less absolute dangers, more whittling down and strategic combats.

This process - inevitable? - represents the fading of the simulation of war into the game of war. Also, the compression of the simulation of life (exploration, politics, intrigue) into the self-same game of war. The truth of Sun Tzu - avoid engagement if victory is not certain, and seek victory by other means than battle - turns into the chivalrous slugfest, approximating equal arms on an equalized battlefield.

Turning a rough-edged simulation into a smooth, equalized game is an achievement much prized, it seems, by game designers anxious to please a certain player demographic: those who at the same time take their games too seriously, while at the same time having little patience for subtle and deadly gameplay. It's as if people would agitate for fool's mate to be removed as a possibility in chess. There's a visible point, though, in many gamers' evolution when they become willing to put down the foam boffers and pick up the katana.

How to Rule the Fantastic?

One legitimate question that arises from yesterday's post - as some of my commenters professed their love for systems and worlds in which fantasy is treated in a predictable, rule-driven way - is ...

Isn't the whole enterprise of fantasy gaming about applying rules to a fantastic universe?

Followed immediately by ...

How can people who love the fantastic rather than prosaic find happiness in a rules system?

I don't have a comprehensive answer right now but here are a few tidbits that tend to push rules to the "fantastic" rather than "prosaic" side.

• In 1st edition AD&D, the artifact descriptions with their powers intentionally left blank and to be filled in.
• Any system that replaces mechanistic magic with animistic magic ... where social interactions with magical entities replace mere point-and-fire. Stormbringer's demons, Legend of the Five Rings' elemental kami, and Goodman's Dungeon Crawl Classics with its sorcerous patrons all come to mind.
• The Birthright idea to have mythological monsters like the Chimera or Medusa be hugely powerful one-offs, as in actual Greek mythology, rather than whole species (let alone with an "ecology.")

Any others out there?

The Light Fantastic ... and Eight Other Fantasy Esthetics

Recently I was debating over whether or not to emphasize mundane abilities for wizards, finally making the call against. Then a number of other things blipped across my mental radar. Doing research on the history of D&D encumbrance rules, I flicked open the 2nd Edition Players' handbook for the first time in ages, marvelling at the mundane exactitude of its encumbrance rules and equipment lists. Zak had a long evisceration of a 4th Ed. module with special attention to the muddy art style. Then back to 2nd edition, trying to figure out what exactly galled me about the majority of the art pieces, and why that gall coalesced around the Elmore frontispiece ...

Yeehaw! All 7 feet of it!

Okay, one thing is that it's prosaic. There's actually some sly humor here if you look at it right. The adventurers are cast as a modern-day group of deer hunters or marlin fishers posing with their big prize. They've strung the dragon up - why, exactly? Who's taking the photo? It's a witty anachronism, but one that drags us away from the fantastic nature of dragons, into the realm of weekend warriors and twelve-point bucks.

The other thing that didn't match my gaming esthetic was the lightness of the piece. Not in terms of humor - humor can be dark, too. Rather, what I mean these are clearly a bunch of characters, blessed with 4d6-drop-lowest stats and maximum hit points at creation, who have just ganked what can only be a hatchling green dragon*. For this mighty feat the DM has seen fit to award a shoebox-sized treasure hoard. This piece conveys the exact opposite of "dangerous." The exact opposite of squaring off against a 30 foot high efreeti. The only sign that the party has faced danger are three little claw marks on the trouser leg of the hulking chainmailed fighter.

Call one axis, then, "light/dark". It's defined by danger - in a game system's mechanics and in the game's art. But what's the other axis? Going back to the first gripe, it's the fantastic versus prosaic. This is a hard distinction to define, especially in a genre where everything technically counts as fantastic. Let me throw out some examples that do it for me. In a prosaic fantasy world:

• The plot is motivated by material concerns, like trade routes or dynastic politics. 
• Full encumbrance rules are in effect.
• Magic may be rare or common, but it is normalized and understood, more like a science than an art.
• Character classes have "mundane" skills to go alongside their outstanding abilities.
• The equipment list is long and comprehensive. It illustrates the importance of using and managing material resources.
• The game system works like a textbook, with rules for every conceivable situation no matter how mundane. Halfway to this is the "almanac" apprach taken by first edition AD&D, where various micro-systems are sprinkled throughout as examples for DMs to improvise other material (and the first 10 years of Dragon magazine are packed with just this kind of improvised material).

The full esthetic alignment grid appears below; with "Tough" being in between light and dark (an environment that is difficult and dangerous, but ultimately surmountable through sheer force of will) and "Worlds Collide" being a commonly seen situation where prosaic characters are thrust into a fantastic universe. On it I've distributed a number of game systems and settings according to my overall sense of where they fall.

A couple of observations from this:

1. It's easy now to see why 2nd edition D&D was the way it was. TSR's mass-marketing of D&D, especially the kiddie market, required a diagonal flight from the Weird; a renunciation of the devils (and demons) and all their works. First to go were the BIG RED DEVILS on the core rulebook covers, then the comfy esthetic of 2nd edition followed suit in a big way. An important thing to realize is they didn't actually succeed in making D&D more attractive to kids, who always have reveled in stories, films, and comics full of blood, gore and evil. But they made it more attractive to parents. This is why I liked 2nd edition AD&D when it came out in my early twenties. I was trying hard to be a Grown-Up; the Light Prosaic, with its sober rules and materialistic detail, fit the bill.

2. I can't for the life of me fit 4th edition in here. There may be some kind of disconnection between its visual esthetics and its actual gameplay, though.

3. My current game is in the "Tough/Worlds Collide" sector, edging to Dark. What's your favored mode?


* Yeah, I know, a hatchling green dragon by the Monstrous Compendium has 7 Hit Dice despite being at most 5' long in the body. But that doesn't look like a 7HD monster.

IF Theory Reader

The Interactive Fiction Theory Reader is available on Lulu. It's a very nice compilation of thoughts about interactive adventure design and atmosphere from the text-adventure game revival of the mid 90's. In it is my old (I guess by now "classic" essay on interactive fiction, Crimes Against Mimesis. It's too bad I didn't have time to update it for the book - for example, by adding in material from this series of posts. But there you go.

Speaking of time being short, my "day job" is throwing multiple deadlines at me right now, so posting is looking to be intermittent through the end of the month.

I tend to make 4 kinds of posts: "program" ones where I work my way through a series of essays or observations; "product" ones where I give you something I've been working on, like the current Gazolba adventure or the house rules; play reports (mainly to keep a record of what goes on in my campaign); and "impromptu" posts where I riff on something that's turned up elsewhere in the web. The impromptu ones are easiest to do, so expect more of those in the next few weeks. And it's interesting that one such post - Why's There a Dungeon Under Your City? - is my all-time most popular in terms of pageviews.

The Heroic Ego

I have been thinking recently about the heroic versus the naturalistic way of thinking, spurred on by a chapter I'm co-authoring for a volume on extremism and uncertainty.

Brief recap of what has gone before: in a heroic fiction the world is there for the sake of the protagonist. It is there to test, challenge, scare, amaze, delight.

In a naturalistic fiction the world exists with its own logic. The protagonist just stumbles upon it.

Four very different instances where this applies:

1. I've abandoned my re-reading of Stephen King's It  The bloat that was annoying in The Shining becomes nearly unbearable here, way too many characters and I don't feel like plodding through to the conclusion, which I recall as a total, disgusting WTF moment.

The real annoying thing, though, is that it's heroic mode. The Bad Thing is there primarily to test, tempt, taunt, and scare the protagonists. You peek in over their shoulder at a never ending parade of horror shows, most of which don't work, and you can almost hear King running around frantically going "I am the master spookster! Boo! Did I scaaare you?" The images may be disturbing, but the underlying message is reassuring. You are important enough for the Ultimate Evil to personally care about you.

Lovecraft doesn't play that. In his stories, you stumble on a universe that doesn't care if you exist or not. That's scary for keeps.

2. In a conversation with a grad student here who is studying conspiracy theories, he mentioned the belief that at the same time the plotters are incredibly powerful and capable, and incredibly stupid. One exhibit of the "incredibly stupid" variety is the mustache-twirling dialogue of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document forged by the Czar's secret service that purports to be the minutes of a global Jewish conspiracy. Again, a product of the heroic mode, as with so many villain tropes. The bad guy is only understandable as a foil for the hero, rather than someone who ruthlessly pursues their own goals. To this end his minions are set up to fail, he provides exposition of his own plots, leaves the hero in a death trap with an adequate Challenge Rating, and so forth.

3. The feminist Bechdel Rule judges films according to whether they contain more than one female character that talk to each other about something other than men. A similar rule could be applied to men who appear in "female" entertainments such as Sex and the City, I guess. Fiction tends to play to its target gender, presenting members of the opposite sex as props in the drama.

4. Hit point systems are heroic. Location injury systems are naturalistic. Guess which one overwhelmingly dominates the world of computer gaming.

The irony is that it is more natural to us as story listeners or game players to prefer heroic to naturalistic tales. Stories and games in heroic mode are comforting; easy to get into; do not tax our thought or motivation; appeal to a wide range of tastes. Stories and games in naturalistic mode are slightly more difficult; they ask us to step outside our heroic ego, face the possibility of death, disidentify with the hero or characters and become more of a puppet master.

I suspect which mode any given person prefers in a game depends on how much they see the game as an escape from the complexities of life, versus an arena in which to confront the complexities of life.

Text to Tabletop 5: Layers of Players

One more resurrection and recap of my old posts, adapted to roleplaying. In 1996 I wrote about the second-person narrative of the adventure game. Derived from the convention of a game master telling you what's going on, second-person leaves the question of who exactly you are open to three interpretations. I've rewritten these for the tabletop context. Just as the interface is different, so the interface between player and story protagonist is very different. In the roleplaying game, the interface character is a game puppet instead of the text adventure's game protagonist. If the game protagonist is built up of in-game motives and actions, the puppet adds a set of in-game characteristics to that mix.

The Player

This is you, the real human being sitting at the table playing the game. Your goal is to have fun. This means different things for different players. Adding on to your puppet, discovering new things, controlling a world full of risky surprises, gaining greater understanding of the meaning in the fictional world, and expressing yourself, are just some of the things you seek out. You are the basis for the other two characters; the game puppet's strategy is only as good as your smarts and knowledge, the story protagonist's actions are determined by your willingness to act in line with that story. And when you see a rust monster, you know that critter is going to damage your weapons, because you read about it in the Monster Manual.

The Game Puppet

This is you, a cipher of a figure with a class, race and level for a name. You are built up of stats, words and possessions on a sheet, embodied perhaps in 28mm of lead or plastic. You are limited, and this limits the player. You want to do something, but the rules or the GM's ruling won't let you. In spite of your limitations, you want to carry out the best strategy at all times, the one that will let you deal out more points, take less points, and collect more pieces and points. You know that critter is going to rust out your weapons ... never mind how, but you know you have to take a round to change weapons to your wooden club and hit it, even though the club only does 1d6 damage.

The Story Protagonist

This is you, Jhin-Dho, a half-elven sorcerer's apprentice who has an elaborate backstory involving the succession to a royal throne and a family intrigue and he also trained as a puma burglar and inherited this glassteel sword... Anyway, your goal is to stop the villains and find the true heir to the Kingdom of Regalia while staying alive. It's a bit odd that you keep listening at doors and tapping in front of you with a pole, but hey, being a seasoned adventurer is part of the story, right? And it's only because you have heard tales around the campfire of the wily rust monster that you put away your sword and reach for your shillelagh when you see the telltale tentacles and propeller tail.

I don't have much to say about these layers right now, but I present them as a vocabulary that might be useful in the future. Quite a lot of differences in the style of games can be traced to which of these layers takes precedence; but all three are always present and communicating with each other in some way.

Say the Dice

The final authority I want to discuss is dice, or random processes in general.

Games succeed when they meet a player's perfect point of challenge - when control and surprise are mixed exactly to his or her liking. Surprise in games can be achieved in three ways:


1.  Complex gameplay - enough to present a problem-solving surprise, even when all moves and pieces are completely visible and non-random. This is the approach of classic strategy games, like Go and chess. They manufacture surprise through the players' own emerging insights into game problems whose solutions weren't entirely obvious from the start.

2. Partial information - some things in the game are known to one player but not the others. Rock-paper-scissors carries this out at a very basic level; against a truly random opponent there is no reason to choose one secret outcome over others, and the game becomes sheer random guesswork. Poker is a better game for meaningful guesswork, as von Neumann realized when formulating game theory. The tension in poker is between making the optimal plays given your cards, and giving away their true value to other players through those plays. The potential for surprise is always there.

3. Random procedures - dice, cards, knuckle bones, yarrow sticks, what have you. The cheap and easy way to achieve surprise from time immemorial.

These three paths to surprise actually correspond to three game refereeing modes, if you make the insight of counting the referee as a player.

Following the path of complex gameplay, the referee lets him- or herself become surprised by the interaction of material made up on the fly with the creativity and initiative of the players. These kinds of interactions are deterministic but don't feel that way, because they come out of an unpredictable dialogue about what is possible. There is nothing truly random; what happens is whatever players make happen, vetoed by what the referee will allow, constrained by the limits of plausibility for everyone. This is the improvisational mode.

Following the path of partial information, the referee writes down contingencies beforehand for the consequences of player decisions, works out solutions to deterministic puzzles, and plans detailed encounters with opponents. This is the prepared mode. Player success here is a matter of figuring out, in a way, whether the referee has put the troll behind door 1 and the treasure behind door 2, or the other way around. Whether this game resembles the faux-random game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, or the more subtle guessing game of poker, depends on how adept the referee is at planting subtle clues, and how adept the other players are at finding them.

Following the path of randomness, the referee uses dice, but for two subtly different purposes. One use of dice I'll call the resolution dice mode. This happens when a referee knows the chances of something happening are between "no way" and "sure shot," but lacks something crucial to be able to judge it in a deterministic way. That missing element can be lack of knowledge. Let's take combat. Unless you are one of these guys, I don't think any sane referee would want to judge the blow-by-blow of combat in improvisational or prepared mode. Even if you came up with an answer based on years of sword combat experience, the players wouldn't buy it, and it wouldn't feel fair when they got hurt. There are just too many unpredictable factors in combat for your decisions to sound like anything more reasonable than kids playing "Bang! You're dead."

The missing element that propels referees into dice resolution can also be lack of patience with preparation, or lack of confidence with improvisation in other areas. Instead of going through the whole song and dance with moose heads, statue arms, and hinged busts of Shakespeare, sometimes you just want to roll a 1 and find a secret door.

Even more interesting from my point of view is the oracular dice mode. The twist here is that the referee is not using dice rolls to see how well the players succeed in their actions, but to determine the very makeup of the world around them as they discover it. Monster hit points ... rolled-up player ability scores ... wandering monsters ... and any other random tables for generating content on the fly ... all of these represent the oracular mode.

The oracular use of dice solves a nagging problem with both the improvisational and prepared approaches to setting up challenges for player characters. Often, a deterministic solution will depend on a match between a resource a character has, and a problem he or she encounters. Even if resolved randomly, game flavor demands that there are bonuses to resolution rolls from favorable match-ups, and penalties from unfavorable ones. At this point, the all-important sense of fairness can start to waver. Either the player complains they never meet a two-headed troll to slay with their sword +1, +5 vs. two-headed trolls; or the referee feels obliged to send a conga line of two-headed trolls to be carved into kebab; or there is some middle ground which feels awfully like a carefully plotted out, artifically fair middle ground, and not at all like real life.

The oracular solution, though, feels like real life: it's completely unknown to everyone just how often the character will run into a two-headed troll. And for that the absolute best thing is a random encounter table with a slot for two-headed trolls. (The other satisfactory solution is for the player to take part in improvising the  adventure and actively seek out favorable matches, asking in every tavern for the nearest two-headed troll lair; but even this should only increase the chances for a troll roll, not guarantee it every time.)

The reason oracular dice are so interesting is the possibility of using them to settle a number of situations usually sorted out with resolution dice rolls. For an example that got me thinking along this track, take a look at the language rules in version 0.5 of James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess ruleset. Every time you encounter a new language, you roll to see if you know it, the chances being determined by your Intelligence.

At first glance, this seems crazy; what do you mean I don't know whether or not I speak Finnish until I run into an actual Finn? But when you consider the alternative, it starts to sound crazy like a fox. The alternative is the two-headed troll problem. As the preparing referee I have to decide what language the all-powerful army speaks; you know, that army that can only be dealt with by parleying. I know what languages all the player characters speak. So do I screw them or give them a break? Why not just roll for it? That way, any outcome seems fair; blame it on the dice, you had your chances.

(As an aside, though, my preferred solution would have the roll be for what language the army speaks, and see if it matches the characters' known languages. Not knowing which languages you speak, for instance, deprives you of the ability to choose to travel to those areas or seek out those people. And then there's the munchkin factor, where players try to speak to as many people and read as many old manuscripts as they can to max out their language skills ...)

Here's another infamous example familiar to most of us. A certain game gives a character with a Super Duper strength a 50% to bend bars and a character with an Average strength only a 2% chance. Furthermore, this game allows only one try per character to bend bars, for fairly obvious reasons. So Super Duper Man blows his roll and Average Guy makes it. That doesn't make sense. Why not have the roll be oracular: determining the strength of the bars? That way both characters can bend weak bars (roll of 02) but only the muscleman can bend strong ones (roll of 47). Strength of bars, hiddenness of secret doors, complexity of trap mechanisms, and other "skill roll" problems could all benefit from taking a closer look at the oracular dice possibility.

Now, although this is a good wrapping up point, I'll just point out that all the above comments about referee decisions also hold true for rules. Because, as I explained last time, game rules are just referee decisions written down and standardized. This is true whether the rule tells you it always happens, it can't happen, or you have to roll for it.

Next up: I think I'll tie in some old essays I wrote to the discussion.

Says The Rules

Rules accumulate in a system where the player-referee conversation cannot by itself supply a sense of fairness. 

And by extension, in systems where the player-player conversation also falls down. The Legend of the Five Rings CCG, like Magic and so many collectible card games of the Class of 1994, started out with rules and card wordings that in many places had to be interpreted by good faith and good will. Issuing rulings was entirely a fan-supported effort, and by fan I mean Jeff Alexander. The atmosphere was more relaxed. Players at competitive levels were open to improvised stunts that a more serious game would have frowned upon. Like the two Dragon Clan players at the Day of Thunder championships who "settled their differences in the mountains" by playing their game on the tournament stand instead of their seats. Or the Scorpion Clan players who bribed the judges in-character with koku (L5R product points).

But the competitive environment evolved, with the game persisting far beyond the three-year ending point originally envisioned for its story arc. The gonzo atmosphere got separated from the game play, and spot rulings eventually weren't enough. Competitive players want to know that their questions will get the same answer no matter where they play.  The interpretations of rules lawyers get taken more seriously, no matter how strong the temptation to take them aside, casino-style, and tell them not to be such a wanker. So what previously was left to player agreement, then tournament judge decisions, moved to an official list of case-by-case rulings that got longer and longer.

When I moved from design team to rules editor for 2007's Samurai Edition, taking over from Jeff's 12 year reign as rules guru, one of my priorities was to clean up the morass of often inconsistent rulings that had accumulated over time, codifying them into a background rules document. From case law to principles, in other words. This move also created a more consistent environment, because it laid down rulings based on general rules rather than specific precedents. Fair? Very. But the door had finally closed on the carefree early days, when players had to figure out for themselves the implications of phrases like "The Samurai must not do whatever it is he was about to do."

So it goes with role-playing games. I use "game" here both in the small-scale sense of a particular referee's campaign, and in the large-scale sense of an evolving game system. RPGs, too, start to grow more rules wherever and whenever the sense of fairness starts to falter.

House rules. Let's assume that a game can start from a Golden Age of improvisation and negotiation over rule gaps in a spirit of mutual trust. As more and more spot rulings are made in this game, a sense of consistency and fairness dictates that repeated rulings be noted down. If the Dungeon Master rules that an unarmored character moves silently on a 1 in 6 chance one day, it's unfair if the next day's ruling is that he moves silently on a 25% chance modified by Dexterity. Fairness thus eventually demands the expansion of house rules - the equivalent of a local scene judge's consistent way of making rulings in a CCG or other complex game. This evolution is an ideal, but the truth is that even before house rules, all but the most freeform of games start out from a core of basic rules. These rules are simply the designer's idea of the basic stuff that should be consistent in the game in order to be fair. Everything added on serves the player's and GM's sense of what should be fair - opening some avenues in a consistent way, closing others that prove abusive.

Standardization. The next step of evolution, then, is when house rules are not enough to serve an expanding scene. This is the step that Gary Gygax explicitly took in the AD&D books, which filled in many of the gaps previously addressed by house rules, in the interest of greater portability of players between different campaigns. For some, fairness suffers if the house rules are arbitrary. (In my experience though, the profusion of rules in AD&D in fact led to a sort of house-ruling by subtraction. First off the plank in our campaigns: things like psionics, weapon vs. AC modifiers, and the grappling system.) In CCGs, this step is represented by the precedent-based rulings document.

As with CCGs, and as also noted by Gygax in AD&D, the growth of serious competitive play at conventions also created a push for standardizing house rules into game rules. Fairness has to depend more on rules if the players don't know each other socially and if groups are competing for some award.

Market-driven reasons also count. One way to sell books is to fill them full of new official rules you just can't do without.  Then there's demographics. It is hard to escape the involvement of new gamers, younger people, or the kind of difficult folks that nerdish hobbies seem to attract. Rules create a superficially easier way to create that sense of fairness without requiring much in the way of trust, life experience, or social skills.

All this has been noted before in various places in blog-land, but no matter how strong the rules, there still has to be some level of agreement on how far the rules can be bent, exploited, and munchkinized. I'll never forget the day one of our long-time players brought a female friend back from MIT to play in our campaign. We pretty much had an agreement to play straightforward heroic-style AD&D, but this young woman threw every cheesy trick imaginable, from the Command spell using "masturbate!" to creating hand grenades by having Magic Mouth + Fire Trap cast on clay balls. She was playing by the rules, and would have torn up a convention game. But she wasn't playing by our unwritten rules. That's also a matter of trust and fairness - even if our way of playing to the spirit of the game was one that competitive gamers would sneer at.

Consolidation. In CCGs and other complex games, the case law of competitive game rulings can accumulate and make it hard to learn and see the underlying principles, requiring a housecleaning and simplification. Likewise, the ever-mounting number of rules and options across the supplements of a long-lived roleplaying system can reach a point where they would most obviously be improved by consolidating the mechanics involved. This was most famously the promise of d20 D&D - to compact the mass of charts, tables, ascending and descending numbers, different dice rolls, and subsystems over 25 years into one core mechanic; to make monsters work like PCs; to get combat down to a science. Ironically, this simplification was quickly overwhelmed by the profusion of character-based features and cruft, and it turned out that giving monsters the same stats as PCs wasn't really a step toward simplification of play. But these faults were bolted onto a rock-solid mechanical chassis, one that Castles and Crusades in particular has taken advantage of while adopting a more stripped-down set of options.

Next in the series: Dice and fairness.

Says Who?

Welcome all. In this blog I'm going to keep a jotting of my thoughts about game design, in whatever game I'm having design thoughts about at the moment.

Right now my thoughts are all about D&D systems in various "old school" incarnations. In fact, my blogroll pretty much consists of writers I've found have interesting thoughts about roleplaying in that system. That may change as I move my thoughts on to other topics like board/card game design, wargames, and CCG.

I'll also use this space to post my own amateur productions for the public domain. Right now I am close to finishing a booklet of low-level monsters for Swords & Wizardry. Another longer-term project is a complete reworking of the D&D character classes and spell lists - an attempt to combine New School variety with Old School elegance. We'll see how that pans out.

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So, old D&D. It's not about nostalgia for me. It's about the new insights into an old game, summed up most eloquently in Matt Finch's Primer. And with that, the possibility of players old and new knowing more, and playing better, than most of us ever did in 1982.

Key to understanding the different forms and flavors of D&D, or really any refereed game, is knowing who or what the system gives authority to. How do you determine what things happen, and whether plans translate to success in the game?

Referee and Players
One of Finch's key points about the old school ethos is that authority comes from "rulings, not rules." The examples of tactical play in the Primer in fact show an even more complex principle. It's not just ruling by referee fiat, or player say-so, but by an active conversation between referee and player.

While the referee's authority is final, the player moves things along, proposing and trying actions that generate new rulings from the referee. If the authority tips over too much in favor of the referee, the players don't feel like they are playing. You get bad DMing like the play example in the 1983 Mentzer edition of D&D, where the DM starts to tell the players what they do, think, and feel. But too much in favor of the player, and you get a walkover campaign with no real challenge - an infantile world of primary-process wish-fulfillment.

That's on the tactical level. But it also works on the strategic level. The old school love of open-ended "sandbox" settings and many-forking megadungeons - the distrust of pre-ordained plots - speaks to the same reliance on improvised communication between players and referee.

Even more relevant is the return to underwritten rather than overwritten adventure locations. Yes, crass practical reasons might underlie the appeal of one-page dungeons and one-sentence room descriptions. Grown-up gamers have less prep time on their hands. But the minimal approach to campaigning also gives room for the same kind of conversation between players and referee. Players say where they want to go. Players, not referees, get themselves into trouble, come up with plot material and adventures. Referees improvise dungeon features, creature tactics, villagers and taverns. There is no boxed text to read.

That's great! That's golden! Indeed. But underlying this is the assumption of trust - of fairness. Because the ultimate authority rests with the referee, players have to trust that their referee keeps both tactical and strategic play balanced between possibility and challenge. It's not just a trust in the referee's good will, but trust in ability to generate fair and believable content on the fly.

The referee in turn expects the players to respect his or her authority - to push the implicit limits of play, certainly, but not tiresomely, and never to challenge the referee's final "No."

That describes the improvisational system where referees, and secondarily players, have tactical and strategic authority over the game. Take this idea to the utmost, and you end up with a refereed Engle matrix game, or something like the wonderful Baron Munchausen, where all actions are resolved by proposal and counterproposal. But D&D is not so free-form. There are rules - for characters, combat, saving throws, magic, and (controversially) non-combat skills. Why are there rules?

Rules accumulate in a system where the player-referee conversation cannot by itself supply a sense of fairness. 

And - because I'm trying to keep these posts at a reasonable length - I'll explain what I mean by that in my next post.