GNS is not a Theory; it is a Tradition
This post is a brain-fart—me trying to jot a thought, lurking and seeing TTRPG folks react to GNS Theory for the upteenth time.
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Context:
GNS Theory seeks to frame, understand, categorise, and model tabletop roleplay—and, via this framework, suggest solutions and improvements to the craft of TTRPG design as a whole. Understanding GNS Theory, it is asserted, will allow you to create better-designed (“more coherent”) games.
Edwards compares the utility of understanding GNS to that of understanding physics:
I use a physics analogy: prior to the insights of Newtonian physics, bridges could be built. Some of them were built rather well. However, in retrospect, we are well aware that in order to build the bridge, the designer must have been at the very least according with Newtonian physics through (1) luck, (2) imitation of something else that worked, (3) use of principles that did not conflict with Newtonian physics in a way that mattered for the job, or (4) a non-articulated understanding of those principles. I consider the analogy to be exact for role-playing games.
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“Is GNS Theory right or wrong?” is usually the question when TTRPG folks talk about it. This feels unusual for an art theory—but is perhaps understandable in GNS’s specific case.
Edwards presents his ideas as actionable: a science by which you can make better games; principles you can rely on to build your own bridge. It becomes paramount, then, that those principles be factual. Otherwise the bridge collapses.
(Edwards infamously called people who enjoyed “incoherent” games [according GNS standards] brain-damaged, but the less said about this the better.)
Also because nerds are perverts about taxonomy:
Here is a sorting hat that will let us categorise and self-select our fandoms and selves.
We love this tribal shit. “Are you a Gamist? Narrativist? Simulationist? Take this quiz! Argue in the comments!”
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GNS is two decades old by this point.
It was the chief theoretical framework of the Forge. It guides the work of designers like Vincent Baker and Paul Czege. Game lines like Burning Wheel and its descendants are entirely informed by GNS conclusions about players and player behaviour, resulting in specific strengths, quirks, and frustrating design “solutions”.
On the other hand:
From the Noughties onwards there has been any number of interesting and excellent games made without adherence to (or even knowledge of) GNS. Tabletop roleplaying games have flowered much since the Forge’s heyday.
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All that long-winded shit to get to the thought I had:
Rather than asking: “Is GNS true? Does GNS work? Does GNS accurately describe tabletop roleplaying games?”
It is probably more useful to consider GNS as a TTRPG art tradition. A school or movement or genre, that creators and designers have chosen to belong to / define themselves by / work in the lineage of.
Similar to:
- Dadaism as a movement; or
- Animation that falls within the anime genre due to context and lineage; or
- Tanztheater / Pina Bausch’s place in contemporary dance; or
- How employing Method techniques results in specific styles; or
- Music theory, which should be more accurately called the “harmonic style of 18th Century European composers”.
But Dada is not the whole of art; nor is anime synonymous with animation. Pina Bausch is just one albeit influential choreographer; nowadays method acting has an antiquated, faintly ridiculous legacy.
Meanwhile, European music theory today is often seen as the scientific yardstick by which all music should be measured, just as nerds are wont to do with GNS vis a vis tabletop roleplaying games in general.
But we should remember that GNS is a lens, one way of considering and practicising the craft of TTRPGs. It is one lens amongst a multitude. Whether it is a good lens is up to you. Some designers have followed its precepts, and made games informed by said precepts; such games vary in quality but share a particular vibe.
A bridge built in the Moorish style isn’t necessarily superior or more stable than a bridge built any other other way; but you may find it beautiful, provided you are partial to Moorish architecture.
I think that analogy works for GNS.
Monument vs Shrine
In “Replica, Aura, and Late Nationalist Imaginings”, the political scientist Benedict Anderson (most famous for his Southeast Asia scholarship and that definitive critique of nationalism, Imagined Communities) muses on the Lincoln memorial:
- Within a temple explicitly mimicking “the religious edifices of a safely pagan Greece”;
- Mazda Corp floodlights designed “to ward off unnatural, indifferent sunlight”;
- The abstract enshrinements of “Lincoln’s memory” in the “hearts of the people”, while neither Lincoln’s actual remains or any rites for people to perform are present;
- The sense that ultimately the most reverential thing to do there is to take photographs.
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The Lincoln Memorial; the Jefferson memorial next to it; both figures repeated again on Mt Rushmore; both figures repeated ad nauseum on dollar bills.
These monuments are designed to proliferate. Not only must they create a sober, stately experience for the visitor—but they must also do so consistently, because they are built for visitors: the mass audience of the national population.
Otherwise they must be physically replicable: a memorial to a particular national hero, erected in every city.
The very format of monument-building get copied:
Post-colonial countries, in need of new myths, choose to manufacture national cenotaphs of their own, in imitation of Western models.
Malaysia has Putrajaya, a federal capital sprung ex nihilo from palm-oil agricultural land, its buildings all arches and onion domes and imitation arc de triomphes in inhuman scale, its avenues broad and utterly unwalkable in the tropical heat.
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At such monuments the citizen is cast as tourist.
Of this state-sanctioned object of devotion you are encouraged to take photographs, sell merchandise—ie: continue the process of replication. With every copy nationalism is reified.
God forbid you tweak the official monument with your own meanings, though! While writing this post, I found the following story, from December 2023:
“Lincoln Memorial temporarily closed after being vandalized with ‘Free Gaza’ graffiti”
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Anderson’s essay cites instances where the personal and irreproducible sneak back into, or leak out from, or vandalise, national monuments:
“Early in the 1910s,”—in Manila’s Cementerio del Norte, a municipal cemetery planned by an American urban designer—“a small pantheon was constructed for the interment of Filipino national heroes.”
This monument was to emulate the Pantheon in Paris, where “great Frenchmen” of the national canon are memorialised.
But the Filipino version failed.
“Today, hardly anyone in the Philippines is aware of this dilapidated pantheon’s existence … What has happened is that the Filipino Voltaire and Rousseau have managed to escape, summoning devoted, often familial bodysnatchers, to convey them to home-town shrines.”
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Not that the municipal cemetery itself is deserted. Custodians and their families live in the very mausoleums they care for.
Further, Anderson describes All Saints’ Eve in the Cementerio del Norte, when thousands pour into its precincts.
But these multitudes adjourn to their own myriad family graves and small ancestral shrines: spending the day with immediate loved ones, “drinking, praying, gambling, making offerings …”
Most of the Philippines’ presidents have mausoleums in Norte, “but no one pays attention to them … and only their separate descendants come to attend them.”
“There is something exhilarating here that one rarely sees in national celebrations, maybe because the structure of the ceremonial is not serial, but entirely cellular.”
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Hometowns re-exerting themselves within the nation; ordinary people scrawling meaning onto the edifices of the uppercase-P People. A multitude of the singular, instead of a single mass.
Despite nationalism’s efforts to centralise and clone a national identity, still we mutate, still we bootleg, still we graffiti, becoming once again ourselves.
And—particular to post-colonial societies—in doing so we casually continue the work of liberation, sneaking the idea of freedom away from our own architects and elites and prime ministers, who would seek to seize its meaning for their own purposes.
The churches or mosques or temples to demos that the federal government builds are ours to transform. To take from. To ignore.
“No need. We’ve got our own shrines at home.”
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National heroes become local saints and slip out of national control.
Does the Filipino government really control the various Rizalista sects? Karpal Singh is now a datuk kong, without his political dynasty’s consent.
Across Melaka and Negeri Sembilan there once existed shrines dedicated to Hang Tuah, Malay folk hero, now a powerful figurehead of Malay-Muslim ethno-nationalism.
One such shrine existed at Tanjung Tuan:
- With a plain altar—more a porch, really—of poured cement, for folk to leave food offerings;
- Sunlight mottled from the surrounding forest, and fluorescent lights from a nearby gazebo;
- A large rock, with an indent on its crown, said to be Hang Tuah’s actual footprint;
- The idea that this was a sacred space, where you could come to ask the spirits of the place for love or children.
The shrine that existed was sited in a forest reserve. It was swept clean of leaves by locals; its adherents belonged to all faiths and ethnicities; following the transactional logic of folk religion, those who had received its blessing would’ve paid for its maintenance.
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“Existed”.
Because the Religious Department of the State of Melaka destroyed the Hang Tuah shrine sometime in 2022, for the crime of idolatry.
A double heresy. An affront to both orthodox Sunni Islam—
But also to the Malaysian state, that sanctions Sunni Islam as its official religion; whose nationalism requires its mythic hero to have only the attributes and magics the state ulama and historians say he must have—and no others.
Local shrines are destroyed, because the nation-state intuits them to be threats to its exclusive franchise.
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Image sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_five-dollar_bill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_de_Triomphe
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putrajaya
https://www.facebook.com/PilipinasRetrostalgia
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/984521.shtml
https://www.facebook.com/PerakPress
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malays_(ethnic_group)
How To Play The Revolution
So: I do not like the idea of TTRPGs making formal mechanics designed to incentivise ethical play.
But, to be honest, I do not like the idea of any single game pushing any particular formal mechanics about ethical play at all.
So here I am, trying to think through the reasons why, and proposing a solution. (Sort of. A procedure, really.)
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Assumptions:
1.
Some genres of game resist ethical play. A grand strategy game dehumanises people into census data. The fun of a shooter is violence. This is truest in videogames, but applies to tabletop games also.
Games can question their own ethics, to an extent. Terra Nil is an anti-city-builder. But it is a management game at heart, so may elide critiques of “efficiency = virtue”.
Not all games should try to design for ethical play. I believe games that incentivise “bad” behaviour have a lot to teach us about those behaviours, if you approach them with eyes open.
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The systems that currently govern our real lives are terrible: oligarchy, profit motive; patriarchy, nation-states, ethno-centrisms. They fuel our problems: class and sectarian strife, destruction of climate and people, spiritual desertification.
They are so total that the aspiration to ethical behaviour is subsumed by their logics. See: social enterprise; corpos and occupying forces flying rainbow flags; etc.
Nowadays, when I hear “ethical”, I don’t hear “we remember to be decent”. I hear “we must work to be better”. Good ethics is radical transformation.
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If a videogame shooter crosses a line for you, your only real response is to stop playing. This is true for other mechanically-bounded games, like CCGs or boardgames.
In TTRPGs, players have the innate capability to act as their own referees. (even in GM-ed games adjudications are / should be by consensus.) If you don’t like certain aspects of a game, you could avoid it—but also you could change it.
Only in TTRPGs can you ditch basic rules of the game and keep playing.
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So:
D&D’s rules are an engine for accumulation: more levels, more power, more stuff, more numbers going up.
If you build a subsystem in D&D for egalitarian action, but have to quantify it in ways legible to the game’s other mechanical parts—what does that mean? Is your radical aspiration feeding into / providing cover for the game’s underlying logics of accumulation?
At the very least it feels unsatisfactory—“non-representative of what critique / revolution entails as a rupture,” to quote Marcia, in conversations we’ve been having around this subject, over on Discord.
How do we imagine and represent rupture, to the extent that the word “revolution” evokes?
My proposal: we rupture the game.
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How To Play The Revolution
Over the course of play, your player-characters have decided to begin a revolution:
An armed struggle against an invader; overturning a feudal hierarchy; a community-wide decision to abandon the silver standard.
So:
Toss out your rule book and sheets.
And then:
Keep playing.
You already know who your characters are: how they prefer to act; what they are capable of; how well they might do at certain tasks; what their context is. You and your group are quite capable of improv-ing what happens next.
Of course, this might be unsatisfactory; you are here to play a TTRPG, after all. Structures are fun. Therefore:
Decide what the rules of your game will be, going forward.
Which rules you want to keep. Which you want to discard. Jury-rig different bits from different games. Shoe-horn a tarot deck into a map-making game—play that. Be as comprehensive or as freeform as you like. Patchwork and house-rule the mechanics of your new reality.
The god designer will not lead you to the revolution. You broke the tyranny of their design. You will lead yourself. You, as a group, together. The revolution is DIY.
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Notes:
This is mostly a thought experiment into a personal obsession. I am genuinely tempted to write a ruleset just so I can stick the above bit into it as a codified procedure.
I am tickled to imagine how the way this works may mirror the ways revolutions have played out in history.
A group might already have alternative ruleset in mind, that they want to replace the old ruleset with wholesale. A vanguard for their preferred system.
Things could happen piecemeal, progressively. Abandon fiat currency and a game’s equipment price list. Adopt pacifism and replace the combat system with an alternative resolution mechanic. As contradictions pile up, do you continue, or revert?
Discover that the shift is too uncomfortable, too unpredictable, and default back to more familiar rules. The old order reacting, reasserting itself.
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I keep returning to this damn idea, of players crossing thresholds between rulesets through the course of play. The Revolution is a rupture of ethical reality like Faerie or the Zone is a rupture in geography.
But writing all this down is primarily spurred by this post from Sofinho talking about his game PARIAH and the idea that “switching games/systems mid-session” is an opportunity to explore different lives and ethics:
Granted this is not an original conceit (I’m not claiming to have done anything not already explored by Plato or Zhuangzi) but I think it’s a fun possibility to present to your players: dropping into a parallel nightmare realm where their characters can lead different lives and chase different goals.
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Jay Dragon tells me she is already exploring this idea in a new game, Seven Part Pact:
“the game mechanics are downright oppressive but also present the capacity to sunder them utterly, so the only way to behave ethically is to reject the rules of the game and build something new.”
VINDICATION! If other designers are also thinking along these lines this means the idea isn’t dumb and I’m not alone!
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( Images:
https://www.thestranger.com/race/2017/04/05/25059127/if-you-give-a-cop-a-pepsi
(Don’t) Incentivise Ethical Behaviour
In the ongoing project of rescuing useful thoughts off Xwitter, here’s another hot take of mine, reheated:
“Being good for a reward isn’t being good—it’s just optimal play.”
The quote comes from Luke Gearing and his excellent post “Against Incentive”, to which I had been reacting.
My thread was mainly intended as a fulsome nodding along to one of Luke’s points. It was posted in 2021, and extended in 2023 after Sidney Icarus posed a question to it. So it is two threads.
Here they are, properly paragraphed, hopefully more cleanly expressed:
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(Don’t) Incentivise Ethical Behaviour
This is my main problem with mechanically rewarding pro-social play: a character’s ethical choice is rendered mercenary.
As Luke Gearing puts it:
“Being good for a reward isn’t being good—it’s just optimal play.”
Bear in mind that I’m not saying that pro-social play can’t have rewarding outcomes for players. Any decision should have consequences in the fiction. It serves the ideal of portraying a living, world to have these consequences rendered diegetic:
The townsfolk are thankful; the goblins remember your mercy; pamphlets appear, quoting from your revolutionary speech.
What I am saying is that rewarding abstract mechanical benefits (XP tickets, metacurrency points, etc) for ethical decisions stinks.
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A subtle but absolutely essential distinction, when it comes to portraying and exploring ethics / morality, in roleplaying games.
Say you reward bonus XP for sparing goblins.
Are your players making a decisions based on how much they value life / the personhood of goblins? Or are they making a decision based on how much they want XP?
Say you declare: “If you help the villagers, the party receives a +1 attitude modifier in this village.”
Are your players assisting the community because it is the right thing to do, or are they playing optimally, for a +1 effect?
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XP As Currency
XP is the ur-example of incentive in TTRPGs. It began with D&D’s gold-for-XP, and has never strayed far from that logic.
XP is still currency. Do things the GM / game designer wants you to do? Get paid.
Players use XP to buy better mechanical tools (levels, skills, abilities)—which they can then in turn use to better perform the actions that will net them XP.
Like using gold you stole from goblins to buy a sword, so you can now rob orcs.
I genuinely feel that such systems are valuable. They are models that illuminate the drives fuelling amoral / unethical behaviour.
Material gain is the drive of land-grabbing and colonialism. Logger-barons and empires do get wealthier and more privileged, as a reward for their terrible actions.
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If you want to present an ethical choice in play, congruent to our real-life dilemmas, there is value in asking:
“Hey, if you kill the goblins you can grab their treasure, and you will get richer. There’s no reward for sparing their lives, except that they are thankful.”
Which is another way of asking:
“Does your commitment to the ideal of preserving life outweigh the guaranteed material incentives for taking life?”
The ethical choice is the difficult choice, precisely because it involves—as it often does, in real life—sacrificing personal growth and gain. Doling out an XP bounty for doing the right thing makes the ethical choice moot.
“I as the player am making a mechanically optimal choice, but my character is making an ethical choice!”
A cop-out. Owning your cake and eating it too. The fictional fig-leaf of empathy over a calculated a decision to make profit.
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Sidney Icarus asks a question which I will quote here:
“… those who hold to their beliefs of good behaviour don’t feel rewarded, and therefore feel punished. And that’s not a good feeling.
It’s an unpleasant experience to play a game where the righteous players are in rags, and the mercenary fucks have crowns and sceptres.
So, what’s the design opportunity? How do we make doing the right thing feel pleasant without making it mercenary? Or, like reality, do we acknowledge that ethical acts are valuable only intrinsically and philosophically?
I have no idea how to reconcile this.”
I would suggest that the above dichotomy—“righteous players in rags, mercs in crowns”—is true if property is recognised as the only true incentive.
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Friends As Property
Modern games try to solve the righteous-players-in-rags “problem” in various ways. Virtue might not net you treasure or XP, but may give you:
- Contact or ally slots, which you can fill in;
- Relationship meters you can watch tick up;
- Favour points you can cash in later;
- etc.
How different are these mechanical incentives from treasure or XP, really?
Your relationships with supposedly living, breathing beings are transformed into abilities for your character: skills you can train; powers you can reliably proc. Pump your relationship score with the orc tribe until calling on them for reinforcements becomes a once-per-month ability.
Relationships become contracts. Regard becomes debt. Put your friend in an ally slot, so they become a tool.
If this is what you want play to be—totally fine! As stated previously, games say powerful things when they portray the engines of profit and property.
But I personally don’t think game designers should design employer-employee relationships and disguise these as instances of mutual aid.
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Friends As Friends
In the OSR campaigns I’m part of, I keep forgetting to record money. Which is usually a big deal in such games, seeing as they are in the grand tradition of gold-for-XP?
In both games, my characters are still 1st-Level pukes, though it’s been months.
I’m having a blast, anyway.
My GMs, by virtue of running organic, reactive worlds, have made play rewarding for me. NPCs / geographies remember the party’s previous actions, and respond accordingly.
- I’ve been given gills from a river god, after constant prayer;
- I’ve befriended a village of monsters, where we now live;
- I’ve parleyed with the witch of a whole forest, where we may now tread;
- I’ve a boon from the touch of wood wose, after answering his summons.
I cannot count on the wood wose showing up. He is a character in the world, not a power I control. Calling on the wood wose might become a whole adventure.
Little of this stuff is codified my stats or abilities or equipment list. They are mostly all under “misc notes”.
Diegetic growth. Narrative change that spirals into more play.
This is the design opportunity, to me:
How do we shape TTRPG play culture in such a way that the “misc notes” gaps in our games are as fun as the systemised bits? What kinds of orientation tools must we provide? What should we say, in our advice sections?
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A Note About Trust
The reason why it is so hard to imagine play beyond conventional incentive structures has a lot to do with trust.
Sidney again:
One of the core issues is the “low trust table”. I’m not designing just for myself but for my audience. For a product. How much can I ask purchasers and their friends to codesign this part with me?
Nerds love numbers and things we can write down in inventories or slots because they are sureties. We’ve learned to fear fiat or player discretion, traumatised as we are by Problem GMs or That Guys.
The reason why the poverty in Sidney’s hypothetical (“righteous players are in rags”) sounds so bad is because in truth it represents risk at the game table. If you don’t participate in the mechanics legible to your ruleset (the XP and gear to do more game things), you risk gradually being excluded from play.
You have no assurance your fellow players will know how hold space for you; be considerate; work together to portray a living world where NPCs react in meaningful ways—in ways that will be fun and rewarding for everybody playing.
You are giving up the guarantee of mechanical relevance for the possibility of fun interactions and creative social play.
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The “low trust table” is learned behaviour–the cruft of gamer culture and trauma.
When I game with folks new to TTRPGs, they tend to be decent, considerate. I think there’s enough anecdotal evidence from folks playing with school kids / newcomers / etc to suggest my experience is not unique.
If the “low trust table” is indeed learned behaviour, it can be unlearned.
Which rules conventions, now part of the hobby mainstream, were the result of designers designing defensively—shadowboxing against terrible players and the spectre of “unfairness”?
How can we “undesign” such conventions?
Lack of trust is a problem that we have to address in play culture, not rulesets. You cannot cook a dish so good it forces diners to have good table manners.
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This is too long already. I’ll end with an observation:
Elfgames are not praxis, but doesn’t this specific dilemma in the microcosm of our silly elfgames ultimately mirror real-world ethics?
To be moral is to trust in a better world; to be amoral / immoral is to hedge against the guarantee of a worse one.
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Further Reading
Some words from around the TTRPG community about incentive and advancement in games:
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However, the reason there is a big debate about this is that behavioural incentives in games clearly do work, either entirely or at various levels. This applies outside gaming, as well. Why do advertising companies and retail business use “rewards” structures to convince people to buy more of their products? Why do people chase after “Likes” on social media?
A comment by Paul_T to “A Hypothesis on Behavioral Incentives”
from a discussion on Story-Games.com
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the structure and symbolism of the D&D game align with certain structures and values of patriarchy. The game is designed to last infinitely by shifting goalposts of character experience in terms of increasing amounts of gold pieces acquired; this resembles the modus operandi of phallic desire which seeks out object after object (most typically, women) in order to quench a lack which always reasserts itself.
D&D’s Obsession With Phallic Desire
from Traverse Fantasy
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In short, my feeling is that rewarding players with character improvement in return for achieving goals in a specific way impedes some of the key strengths of TTRPGs for little or no benefit in return.
Incentives
from Bastionland
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When good deeds arise naturally out of the players choices, especially when players rejected other options that were more beneficial to them, it is immensely satisfying. Far more than if players are just assumed to be heroic by default. It gives agency and meaning to player choice.
Make Players Choose To Be Kind
from Cosmic Orrery
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Much has been made about 1 GP = 1 XP as the core gameplay loop driver of TSR D+D. But XP for gold retrieved also winds up being something of a de facto capitalistic outlook as well. Success is driven by accumulation of individual wealth – by an adventuring company, even! So what’s a new framework that can be used for underpinning a leftist OSR campaign?
A Spectre (7+3 HD) Is Haunting the Flaeness: Towards a Leftist OSR
from Legacy of the Bieth
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Growth should be tied to a specific experience occurring in the fiction.
It is more important for a PC to grow more interesting than more skilled or capable.
PCs experience growth not necessarily because they’ve gotten more skill and experience, but because they are changed in a significant way.
Cairn FAQ
from Cairn RPG / Yochai Gal
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Thank you Ram for the Story-Games.com deep cut!
( Image sources:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/neuron-activation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majesty:_The_Fantasy_Kingdom_Sim
https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/special-reports-pdfs/10490978.pdf
https://varnam.my/34311/untold-tales-of-indian-labourers-from-rubber-plantations-during-pre-independence-malaya/
https://nobonzo.com/ )
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PS: used with permission from Sandro, art by Maxa’, a reminder to self:
What Do Ability Scores Represent?
Recently, Into The Odd and the players in my home game helped me realise something fundamental:
Ability scores represent how good you are at acting under pressure.
- STR isn’t strength, it’s toughness;
- DEX really means reflexes;
- WIS is more accurately calm or willpower;
- etc.
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It is convention in roleplaying games that your ability scores / attributes / six stats determine who your character is.
High DEX means your character is spry, capable of acrobatic flourish; a good Willpower generally means you can browbeat others / themselves / reality (if you are spellcaster) into doing what they want; etc.
There is pleasure in looking at a sheet and seeing: Oh! These are the things my character is good at.
But you do run into problems. Does my 18 DEX rogue know they are fleeter than the 17 DEX bard? What if my wizard thinks she is stronger than her 10 STR? What if I have a brilliant scheme but my barbarian only has 9 INT?
How well, in other words, does the map represent the territory?
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(Art by Vesha, who is an illustrator! source)
I’ve got three players in my home game:
- Vesha plays the teenaged trader Khabar (and his buffalo friend / parent-figure, Paal);
- Amanda plays the monkey warrior Boots-Ra, now going white-furred;
- Aish plays Captain Phung.
Phung does not yet own a proper sea-going vessel. Perhaps he lost his previous ship? Perhaps he never had one. (He does have a magic five-person sampan, though!)
He is impulsive. He tends to make dodgy deals with hapless village-folk, pick up dangerous-looking objects, and flirt with dangerous-looking men.
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Mechanics-wise, here’s how my interactions with Aish / Phung tend to go:
Me: Okay, make a DEX save to duck before the hunter stabs you.
Aish: Damn, my DEX is only 6, guess we’ll see …
Amanda: Oh, no, Phung!
In a previous session:
Me: Okay, I think I’ll call for a WIL save, because the ghost in the goat skull is trying to possess you.
Aish: Well, my WIL is 5, hopefully this works out …
Vesha: Oh shit, Phung!
Some sessions back:
Me: The automaton shoves you. Make a STR save? Otherwise you’ll be on the ground at its mercy.
Aish: Guys I have 6 STR, I may be in trouble here.
Me: Wait wait wait. What are your stats again?
So it turns out that Aish had terrible rolls at chargen. STR 6 DEX 6 WIL 5. Just going by ability scores, Phung is an idiot weakling.
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Thing is, Phung isn’t an idiot weakling.
I’ve got crafty players; they are pretty good at cooking up multi-part schemes. (Their go-to tactic is bamboozling rival factions to show up at the same place, then benefit from the fallout.)
Phung is generally the face for whatever racket they’ve got going: he’s the most obvious leader (the party is generally “Captain Phung and crew”), and Aish plays him as a capable, charismatic go-getter.
Looking at the character sheet, is Aish playing Phung wrong?
Fuck that. A player cannot play their own character wrong. I reject this notion outright.
What’s going on?
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Different rulesets try to bridge the gaps between player action, character ability, and abstract math in different ways: eliminating mental attributes; going totally skill-based; etc.
The ruleset that comes closest to “solving” this, for me, is Into The Odd.
Saves are the only kind of test player-characters make, in ITO and its derivatives. This is key.
The ruleset assumes competency on the part of characters; you only go to the dice if you need to figure out stuff that is out of your control.
How badly a straight-up fight goes; whether you can jump aside in time if you’ve accidentally sprung a trap; whether you can improvise a lie on the fly.
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Implicitly, and in practice:
The STR stat in ITO is more accurately toughness—ie: how well you can withstand a physically demanding situation you didn’t prepare for.
Ditto DEX, which is an abstraction for how quickly your reflexes trigger.
Same with WIL, which is how well you stay calm under duress.
I can be sharp when I’ve got time and it is a subject I have experience in. But suddenly ask me to make a speech and I’m toast (low INT).
Some folks have no martial arts training but can hold their own if a brawl breaks out in a bar (high STR).
Captain Phung is a pretty cool operator when he’s in control, but tends to seize up when things go off the rails (low WIL).
There’s my answer to the conundrum of Captain Phung: he’s a genuinely capable guy. He’s just not necessarily great under stress. His reach exceeds his grasp, sometimes.
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Your ability scores don’t represent who your character is. Your ability scores represent who your character is, when under duress.
In other words:
Ability scores are who your character is when they are not in control. Ability scores are your character’s reactions.
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I do feel slow on the uptake, for only grokking this now.
Chris McDowall probably has a post from the mid 2010s or something where he discusses this aspect design in detail, the clever genius bastard. It is probably internalised play-culture within the ITO-and-descendants community; Emms points out that the current edition of Mothership explicitly talks about stats in this way.
Still!
Am glad to have a regular TTRPG group again, and I have them to thank for my epiphany!
(They are kickass. I ran them through Whirling Mummy a while back and it was a RIOT)
DECOLONISING D&D
In 2019, after seeing yet another round of alarmist discourse in Xwitter about how Dungeons & Dragons is FULL of COLONIALIST tropes and patterns, and needs to be revised, SCRUBBED of its PROBLEMATIC FILTH—I rage-tweeted this brainfart:
I’ve seen this thread round the community, since. Humza K quotes it in Productive Scab-picking: On Oppressive Themes in Gaming. Prismatic Wasteland quotes it in Apolitical RPGs Don’t Exist. Most recently, it was referenced in a 1999AD post about Western TTRPGs (an interesting discussion on its own merit; one that already has a counterpoint from Sandro / Fail Forward.)
If folks are still referring to it five years later, maybe I should give the thread a little more credit? Perhaps the fart miasma has crystalised into something concrete.
In the interest of record / saving this thought from the ephemerality of Xwitter, here is the text in full, properly paragraphed, and somewhat more cleanly expressed:
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“DECOLONISING D&D”
Firstly: saying “D&D is colonialist” is similar to saying: “the English language is colonialist”.
If your method of decolonising RPGs is to abandon D&D—well, some folks abandon English; they don’t want to work in the language of the coloniser. More power to them!
For those who want to continue using the “language” of D&D—
- Going forth into the “wild hinterland” (as if this weren’t somebody’s homeland);
- to “seek treasure” (as if this didn’t belong to anybody);
- and “slay monsters” (monsters to whom?)
Yeah. There’s some problematic stuff here, and definitely these aspects should make more people uncomfortable.
But! I think it is an error to “decolonise D&D” by scrubbing such content from the game.
That feels like erasure; like an unwillingness to face history / context; like a way to appease one’s own settler guilt.
Do you live in the West? Do you live in any Asian urban metropole? White or Person of Colour™—you are already complicit in colonialist / capitalist (yes, of course they are inextricably linked) behaviour. (I can’t speak for urban metropoles elsewhere, but I bet they are similar centres of extraction.)
Removing such patterns from the TTRPGs you play might let you feel better, at your game table. But won’t change what you are.
I think it is more truthful and more useful NOT to avert one’s eyes from D&D’s colonialism.
The fact that going forth into the hinterland to seek treasure and slay monsters is a thing, and fucking fun, tells us valuable things about the shape and psychology of colonialism. Why conquistadors in the past did it; why liberal foreign policy, corporations, and post-colonial societies do it today.
Speaking personally:
I write stuff that evokes / deals with the context I’m in—Southeast Asia. An intrinsic part of that is looking at the ways colonial violence has happened to us—as well as the ways / reasons we now, supposedly free, perpetrate it on others.
A long chain of suffering. Heavy stuff.
I also write for people who want to have fun / kill monsters / pretend to be elves, of course. But for those people who want to consider serious stuff like colonialism: I offer no FIGHT THE POWER righteousness, no good feeling, no answers.
Only discomfort. Because the truth is uncomfortable.
Here’s a screenshot of the Author’s Note for Lorn Song of the Bachelor:
“Any text inspired by Southeast Asia has to reckon with colonialism … This text presents a difficult situation; there are no easy solutions.
”… If I offered a mechanical incentive for you to fight colonial invaders, you wouldn’t be making a moral decision, but a mercenary one.
“The choice you face should echo … the kind of calculus my grandparents faced.”
I stand by that.
Also: might we be more precise and more careful about using the term “decolonising”, please?
Here I quote Tuck and Yang’s landmark and (sadly) still trenchant “Decolonization is not a metaphor”:
“Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies …”
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Further Reading
So this post isn’t just me reheating a hot take, here are some touchstone writings from around the TTRPG community about colonialism as a subject and mode of play in games:
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“Jim Corbett was called upon to hunt down another fifty maneaters over the course of the next 35 years. Together, those tigers had killed over 2000 people, for much the same reasons as the Champawat Tiger - injury, desperation, starvation, and habitat loss.
Would you look at that.
The root cause was British colonialism.”
D&D Doesn’t Understand What Monsters Are
from Throne of Salt
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“Another effect of having colonizers in my setting would be giving players the opportunity to drive them away from the islands, their home. This maybe just be for the catharsis. After all, isn’t catharsis a big part of why we play roleplaying games?”
I’m Adding Colonizers To My Setting
from Goobernut’s Blog
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“When you have a slime boy and the other characters are a really fat lizard and one’s playing Humpty Dumpty, it completely shatters the straight-faced serious authoritarian illusion of race, and replaces it with complete fucking nonsense. I love the idea of proliferating the number and types of "races” into absurdity, to the point where the entire logical structure of it collapses in on itself and race as a category ceases to become coherent or meaningful in any sense.“
Interview with Ava Islam - Designer of the RPG Errant
from Ava Islam / The Lost Bay
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"Perhaps most critically, the fundamental basis of power is not land or even money but manpower. That’s what local rulers fight over, and what Chinese commercial networks export, in return for unique island products. It’s what the European colonists really need (even if it’s not what they most desire). There is rich loot to be grabbed in the form of spices, Spanish silver, Indian gold, sea cucumbers (the Chinese love ’em), perfumes, dyes, cloth etc. so there’s ample opportunity for piracy, trade and smuggling, but the key to long-term success – the key to independent survival – is nakedly and unquestionably uniting people.”
Counter-colonial Heistcrawl: previous high scores
from Richard’s Dystopian Pokeverse
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“They worked their own land—which they dispossessed from American Indians—or became small shop owners or opportunistic gold diggers or bounty hunters or itinerant ranchers. To me, substituting these situations for one ruled by industrial monopoly ignores that the Wild West is a perfect example of how capitalism operates outside of (or prior to) mass industry, instead being composed of self-employers and self-sustainers.”
Fantastic Detours - Frontier Scum
from Traverse Fantasy / Bones of Contention
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“… using the Western framing and D&D’s baked-in imperialist and capitalist structure to get people earnestly participating in the experience of forming imperial power structures and the early roots of regional capitalism … The PCs aren’t the drifters on the train or the townsfolk watching with apprehension - they’re the railroad itself.”
An Arrow for the General: Confronting D&D-as-Western in the Kalahari
from A Most Majestic Fly Whisk
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BLOGGIES 2023 THEORY WINNERS
A week of voting has passed, and the results of the final round are in. We have our winners for the BLOGGIES 2023 Theory category.
And now: winner announcements, medals, acceptance texts!
(I asked the winners to say a few words about their winning work—where they were at when they wrote the posts; whether they have additional insights; how they feel about winning.)
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BRONZE BLOGGIE FOR THEORY POST:
🥉 being a problem - playable orcs at the limits of humanity 🥉
from A Most Majestic Fly Whisk
Ènziramire:
Wrote this while putting my nieces to sleep (exhausted by the Pete the Cat incident mentioned in the post) and they helped me pick the Marshall painting so it’s only fitting that I name Ms. Amaya and Ms. Malia as my co-authors. Race / orcs talk will probably be bad forever, or at least as long as the hobby is structured this way, but a benefit of The Discourse’s remarkable ability to trivialize and misinterpret is that it illustrates the flaws of liberal incorporationism in a manner seldom achieved by other critical traditions. I’d like to thank Sylvia Wynter and white guilt for this bronze medal.
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SILVER BLOGGIE FOR THEORY POST:
🥈 Critical GLOG: Base Resolution Mechanics 🥈
from Goblin Punch
Arnold K:
I see no reason why tabletop RPG systems shouldn’t be as customizable as the characters; the hobby would very much be enriched if they were.
Certainly there is interest–DMs are continually generating their own small hacks, but only the most adventurous are writing their own systems. The largest obstacle is a lack of familiarity with system design. People may know what they are trading when they sacrifice Dex in favor of Con, but the pains and joys of trading d20 resolution for a highest-in-a-dice-pool are still clouded.
If I have been able to empower even one person to design their own system–the last push that they needed–then the blog post has been a success.
Thank you everyone who voted for me. You guys fucking rock.
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(In lieu of a medal, Gold winners will get a linocut print; here’s the plate inspired by Marcia’s post: a dragon intertwined in / strangled by a banyan’s branches and roots.)
GOLD BLOGGIE FOR THEORY POST:
from Traverse Fantasy
Marcia B:
Zedeck asked me to say a couple words about this post, so I figured I’d say that (although I’m not sure how many people voted one way or another) I haven’t been satisfied with its reception in general. It’s been read as a neutral feat of statistics, a basis for taxonomic discourse, or a celebration of the OSR.
As the author I’m obviously dead, but as a fellow reader I’d like to suggest an alternative interpretation: there is so much collective effort spent on making books of rules that are ultimately formal and predictable permutations of each other. Only a few of the books originated rules that would then be incorporated into many of the other books.
Maybe it’s that game designers aren’t that creative; maybe it’s that authors prefer to write systems over adventures; maybe it’s that hobbyists feel pressured to systematize and christen their house rules. You can argue for one or more of these angles, each one representing a lens through which to criticize and re-envision the hobby. Whichever lens you prefer, though, I think they are all preferable to seeing no problem at all.
That being said, I am glad that for some people it helped them find a ruleset that works for them, or to just know what’s out there. I hope this spurs us to find new ways to (literally, i.e., mathematically) break the norm.
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Congratulations everybody!
(Special thanks to Martin / Sharkbomb for his assistance tidying up the medal graphics; I dunno how to photograph art properly …)
