Posts tagged TTRPG design

What I Do

RPG Life RPG Campaigns

If you’ve wound up at this blog, I thought it might be worth laying out where my thoughts about TTRPGs are coming from. I’m not suggesting that I’m especially interesting, but if you’re going to take the time to consider my opinions about games, you might want some context. So…

What I don’t Do: First of all, I don’t look at social media anymore than I have to. I have a lot of trouble expressing myself or connecting in that setting. I also don’t spend much time looking at reddit or anything like that. I’m largely ignorant of a lot of things that are happening, outside of what I hear from my players, people I meet at conventions, or what I read on creator or crowdfunding websites. I am not quite a luddite, but am often out of the loop. 

What I Do: I spend a lot of time preparing and running games. Nowadays, I run about 2 games a week, but I’ve pared back from a heavier load only in the last year or so. I used to run about 3 games a week, but I began to feel that the quality of some of these games suffered—though I’ve been told otherwise—and that I was enjoying the whole endeavor less. I have not gotten rich running games, so if I’m not enjoying them, there seems to be little reason to continue. So I cut back. Sometimes I have to fight the urge to start up another game, and sometimes I lose that fight and find myself taking on another game. It really is an issue sometimes, but I tell myself that I’m managing it. It bothers me most of all that my compulsion keeps me from game design, scenario design, and matters that are unrelated to games.

The bulletin board from my Delta Green “God’s Teeth campaign

Still, I am fascinated by TTRPGs in general and enjoy time spent prepping and running them. I mix up genres and systems a lot. I also shuffle longer campaigns with mini-campaigns and with one-shots or two-shots. My favorite genre is horror, but I’ve run a lot of super hero, cozy, sci-fi, heroic fantasy, gritty drama, etc., with tones ranging from deeply sill to very bleak; cerebral to visceral; immersive to detached. My favorite campaign game ever was a recent run-though of the Delta Green campaign of God’s Teeth, even though it was heavy, and at times difficult. My favorite mini-campaign was a 3-arc/24 session game of Masks: A New Generation (which, overall, ran about as long as God’s Teeth). Close runners-up for mini-campaigns would be Tales from the Loop, City of Mist, and Velvet Glove. My favorite one-shot is harder to locate, because there have been so many, but I can think of standout sessions of Ten Candles, Bluebeard’s Bride, Kult, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast (technically GMless), Dialect (also GMless), World Wide Wrestling. I’ve had a few really good public pickup games, including runs of Dark Places & Demogorgons, Hypertellurians, and CyBorg—D20 systems all 3.

There are two broad types of TTRPG that I tend to avoid. One is tactical combat. I get antsy, and I like fast, brutal combat, if you’re gonna focus on combat at all. I lean way left, politically, but I’m also not a fan of power fantasy games that are self-consciously focused on fighting against “the government” or “capitalism,” because, for me, they lead to a sort of closed-circuit anger, and then I have to go off and decompress somewhere or just wander around feeling really bad. It is a weakness that I have, and I don’t believe it reflects at all on the validity of the games or the personalities of the people who do like them in any negative sort of way. (Also, for the record, I am not talking about something over the top and pulpy like, say, Eat the Reich, which I did enjoy a great deal.)

I mentioned above that I have interest in game and scenario design. Of necessity, I’ve had to do some of both—as I imagine most GMs have to, if they run a lot of games of different types. It is often necessary to fill in some element or other to keep a game moving. Most of those things are improvised and/or fragmentary, but at other times, you want or need something more deliberate—so you end up manufacturing weird little props, calculating situational mechanics, drawing maps, (badly,) outlining biographical details for an NPC, defining lore, etc. Sometimes you go even farther, and you wind up with a scenario, a setting, and/or a game system.

Inspo board in my office

Necessity aside, if you GM a lot, you’ve probably read a lot of games and scenarios and have developed opinions, notions, and theories about what you think works or might work. For me, sometimes, I’m inspired by a fascination with everything that games can do. At other times, I’m acting out of frustration—a feeling (no doubt driven by hubris) that whatever I’m reading could be better. Eventually, I found myself writing stuff and thinking about unleashing it into the wild. (Maybe then other people can recognize how I could have done better—if I’m lucky.) I have one scenario on itch already, which is a quickie one-shot for Dread. It was something I put together for a charity event in Chicago. (Money was raised to help stop the practice of shark-finning.) I ran it along with another scenario that I’m finishing for a limited print run soon. The players are lifeguards, who are rescuing people from a sharknami. It’s Powered by the Apocalypse. I also have a Cthulhu scenario upcoming, in which all of the PCs are nuns at a rural convent in the early 1960s.

So if you’ve read this far, you know what I do. Here’s hoping that provides some context for the other stuff I’ve written here.

System versus Synthesis

RPG Life

Not too long ago, I became preoccupied by how permeable the popular notions of system and setting seemed to have become in mainstream TTRPGs. I’m not talking specifically about the idea of a “traditional” universal system, such as GURPS, BRP, Cypher, Savage Worlds, etc. (Thankfully, ‘cuz blecchh!) Neither, particularly, am I talking about systems that foreground “story mechanics,” such as Fate, Powered by the Apocalypse, Forged in the Dark, etc. (Though I like them a good deal more than the blecchh stuff…) All of these systems have small to medium sized armies of adherents and sit above any infinitesimal objections I might raise toward them. Hmm…so why am I writing this?

Oh yeah! Because I want to provide a public service, I think, and I’m just monomaniacal enough and needlessly analytic enough to do so. So listen up, I’m gonna break it down… None of those systems matter anymore than the other. Don’t care who’s moving the most units or occupying the greatest numbers of shelfies… If you’ll allow an argument that might seem initially facile… systems are not the same thing as story concepts, genres, or settings. If you are in love with, say, the steampunk meets heist movie optics of Blades in the Dark, that does not necessarily mean that you love the Forged in the Dark system, mechanically. If you’re enthusiastic enough about the former, you might work around, or at the very least forgive, the inevitable bumpiness of the latter. I’m not denigrating FitD. All systems are more or less bumpy here and there. (Except for Rifts, obviously. My heart broke the day they ported that shit to Savage Worlds 🙁 ) I am saying that, in itself, it does not guarantee a fully satisfying experience of the Blades setting.

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that we live in a world without FitD. If someone had the vision to develop the Doskvol world and then left it stat-less—or system agnostic or mechanically inert or whatever—how do you think it’d’ve sold? My guess is: not very well, for two reasons. First, people are presented with Blades in the Dark as a solid product, wherein system and setting determine one another. (Not true!) Second, because people are intimidated by adapting story elements to a system. These fictional “people” aren’t lazy—however much they might (tend to) otherwise insist. In my experience, they are intimidated. It’s understandable—remember the Mercer Effect? Some people are so gifted when it comes to building worlds, so adept at ushering them from system to system, and so annoyingly charismatic that they can flood a whole (admittedly small) industry with romance. Screw Wizards or Paizo—without the evangelization of Mercer, many of us aren’t doing this hobby. And if Mercer can move a gateway drug that leads people to, say, Dialect, I’m not gonna hate him.

But what about the example of Blades? Well, back in this part of my life in which I used to worry about people mistaking system with setting with scenario, etc., I would get frustrated with how many systems were springing up. Most of them, it seemed, weren’t really contributing anything to an existing set of resources and were, sometimes, exploiting that gamer who didn’t want to port things from one system to another or to hack an existing system into something that would better suit a setting or individuated styles of play or whatever. To be fair to myself, my frustration was largely the frustration of a consumer…one who found himself studying —and shelling out for—system after system—many of them dubious— when really the established field of systems was, if not wholly adequate to every fictional notion, at least robust enough to allow for a good pairing of baseline mechanics to fictional setting.

There is a problem here, and I think some very good games are looking ahead to one kind of a solution. (Some examples would be Brindlewood Bay, Blades in the Dark, and Trophy, which, in turn, pull together elements from existing design systems like Cthulhu Dark, PbtA, and, by extension, Fate.) What we need is not more systems, but rather a lot of solid synthesis of existing rules. The path to every kind of gaming setting you like is right there…you just have to figure out how to follow it.