Aspect: The best TTRPG system I ever designed

I don’t actually really like big complex ttrpgs. This might come as a shock to a lot of my friends, who see me constantly begging them to plan wildly elaborate heists in games of shadowrun, or assembling intricate battlefields for them in lancer, or letting my mouth water as I read through the Rogue Trader aeronautica rules and dream of a day when I can force players to make dice rolls for ninety degree turns while they try to line up firing angles on pintle guns. They see me do all of that and quite fairly assume that I’m a sort of spreadsheets freak.

But, I don’t even really like spreadsheets.

No, the thing that actually draws me into those games is bookkeeping. That might sound like a somewhat pointless distinction, but what I find electric about a rpg is when someone glances down at their notes, and realises that because of something we all agreed three sessions ago, right now, someone can make a difficult choice.

I ran four games of Only War over the last two years, and whenever a player of mine looked down at their lascarbine and realised that its slightly shorter effective range meant that they had worse odds of hitting a foe than if they were using a lasgun equivalent, they cursed the universe, and I beamed like an idiot. Because the choice they made mattered. It really came up.

My first real disillusionment with rpgs was with fifth edition D&D, as I think it was for a lot of people. Looking at the list of weapons, and realising that there was no real difference between using an axe, a sword, or a warhammer for most of the time, filled me with a kind of forlorn sadness. When I realised that studded leather was in all cases superior to leather armour, I felt such a weighty loss inside of me. I longed for a game that would give me a real reason to choose something, to make a choice that it could then punish me for later.

A lot of my concern with narrative heavy games was this lack of telegraphing the consequences of my choices. It’s not impossible, or even unlikely, for a good referee to dictate that the fact I chose to cut corners and commission a suit of iron armour instead of steel might bite me when the time comes to repair the damn thing, but it’s also very very easy for details like that to be forgotten over the course of a half dozen intervening sessions, and hard to gauge exactly how much those calls should affect the present beyond just making a decision about narrative significance.

So, most of the games that I write and design are very deliberate about the things they track. I end up making spreadsheets not because I like them, but because I like the kinds of decisions they force me to make, even when I’d rather not. I get to ask my players how much ammunition they have left, and see them agonise over having to go back to their quartermaster and endure yet another difficult encounter with the logistics team to ask for more. Or, you know, decide not to do that, and run out at a critical moment. Lovely stuff.

All that to say, I love to write a crunchy game. I love to run a crunchy game. But I sort of dislike crunch. It’s a regrettable medium to get me to the thing that I really like, which is the sort of groaning realisation that you committed to something and are now going to pay the consequences, or the uproarious celebration upon realising that something is going to just work out.

So I decided to design a game with no crunch. Here’s how it went.

A couple of years ago I ran my University RPG Society. I was president of that soc, about four hundred members overall, for four years, and in that time I got to run a tremendous number of weekly games in a lovely underground space. One of the perks of being in a discord server where your nickname starts with “President” is that people sort of automatically trust that you’re a decent GM, so you can pitch some insane games and a few dozen people will still apply to play in them.

The rules of Aspect are about as simple as the rules of Go, in that there are three of them, and it’s one of the most difficult games I’ve ever run in my life.

Firstly: an Aspect is anything that we all agree is true.
Secondly: any time an Aspect is disputed, the dispute is resolved via dice roll.
Thirdly: every Dramatically Relevant Aspect adds one die to the dice roll. Every Critically Relevant Aspect adds two.

That’s it.

The first rule was fairly simple. It incentivised my favourite player behaviour to incentivise, which isn’t roleplaying or creativity or system mastery, but note-taking. Specifically, I wanted to get lore-lawyered. I want my players to say “hey, four sessions ago when we visited this castle, you described the outside stairway as mossy, can I use that?” and for me to swear and curse myself for forgetting that I did that, and to go hell yeah and thrust dice into their hands.

This happened a lot.

Players learned to ask me about descriptors, I would introduce an NPC and after a few minutes of conversation, one of my players would ask “would you say this person is Shrewd?” and I’d think for a second, and then go “yeah I think that’s a fair description” and down it would go into their notes, now canonised as an Aspect they can pull on later. And an aspect I can pull on too.

Until I said something, until we

Any of you who are familiar with FATE will see a lot here echoed, but instead of spending fate points to trigger these things, or creating tags and aspects with free invocations baked in, every Aspect here can be invoked infinitely, as long as it is relevant. FATE was actually one of my first roleplaying experiences, I remember reading through the Dresden Files rpg (long before I ever read the novels) and being entranced by the game. It’s undeniably influenced my writing since, for sure, maybe more so than the many crunchy games that I’ve spent so many more hours running since.

The second rule, this was an absolute lifesaver. I stuck to it, firmly, and the players respected the absolute agency that it gave them. As GM, I did have final say on what counted as a Dramatically Relevant Aspect, or a Critical one when they cropped up, but for pitching an Aspect in general, anything went. In fights, players were pitching Disarmed, Distracted, Put in a Bad Spot, Winded, Wounded, and Killed, at various points, but a good sense of dramatic escalation meant that fights kept a very natural progression. It’s really difficult to kill someone when the aspects in your favour are your sword, and that’s about it, and they have armour, a weapon of their own, good health, good awareness, good stamina, all helping keep them just about alive. In fact, because every dice roll was disputed, that meant that the enemy could get to generate new Aspects off of their victory if you failed, so players instead spent their time setting up the conditions for victory.

The actual mechanics of the dice rolling varied from playgroup to playgroup, the one I ran the longest was d10s, 6-9 meant you could create a new aspect, 10 meant you could make a new critical aspect, and we just ignored anything from 1-5. At the start I was really worried about the prevalence of “do nothing” rolls, it really takes the steam out of a lot of games, but at least from how my players were playing this system, it never did anything to hurt the momentum. Each die having a 50/50 of doing something meant that a pool of four or five dice only very rarely did nothing, and whenever it did, that denial felt like a new aspect in and of itself. In fact, normally, it was a new Aspect, everyone around the table agreed that such a task must have been impossible, or more difficult than expected, and we’d work together to figure out why.

Finally, the words “Dramatically Relevant” and “Critically Relevant” do so much heavy lifting here, but while I spent a lot of time before my first session debating and talking about how to adjudicate them, I actually never really had any difficulty mid-session making a call as to what counted. We sometimes defaulted back to the phrase “Enabling Aspect” to refer to anything that we all agreed was true, but was more or less a prerequisite to even attempting the roll, rather than something relevant to its success. Characters being alive was our go to example, until even that ceased to be a necessary element.

I knew that this system would be wildly difficult to run; it would depend on a lot of arbitration and adjudication; on me maintaining perfect diction; giving rich descriptions and filling out the world with resources for them to take advantage of; opening myself up to their creativity and innovation; letting them take the reigns on narration and run whole scenes independent of their characters when they wanted to; all of this would take a lot of forethought and careful deliberation, so I spent tens of hours writing and discussing the system with anyone who would listen.

I designed huge systems for how to adjudicate tense combat, how to model armour and weapons, how to run complex social scenes and track moods on a series of incremental Aspects that could be ticked up and down over the course of discussion. I designed survival systems, ways to track resources, ways to track body heat and cold and morale and emotional states, from a hundred different points of reference. I was pulling from Unexplored 2’s wandering, from Kingdom Come’s armour statistics, from Legend of the Five Rings’ strife and unmasking, a million things that are baked deep into my psyche as a GM.

And then the last thing I did with Aspect before my game started was to delete everything I had written.

I realised that all of that writing, all those tens of hours of discussion about the game before it hit the table, and after I ran the first few one shots: none of it helped. It is, in retrospect, a lot like Go. Which is insane to me. But it really did feel like every single time I said a word, dropped a noun or an adjective, I was placing a stone onto a board and filling out this tableau of my players’ world. And like Go, writing a book about it before I play my first full game would have been folly. I spent so much time worrying about perfecting things that never really came up, overlooking the fundamentals that I really needed to just practice in play. If I had constantly been referring back to my notes, trying to implement this architecture and structure on top of the game, it would have suffered immensely. The best thing to do was to strip all of that away, to write nothing, to run the three rule game. And it went great. Maybe the best game I ever ran.

That full year-long game was long and complex enough that talking much about it would probably need its own post. I decided to open it with a world primer for my players where I rattled off a few dozen statements that were all diegetically taken to be true, and metaphysically absolutely false. As the system encouraged them, my players diligently noted these down in their notebooks, and over the course of the game, struck them out one by one. No true gods. No true kings. No unalloyed evil. No unalloyed good. The entire game ended up a great structure for delving deep into ideas of truth, reality, oaths, love, and at its very core, the obligations that one is born with, and what it means to grapple with, accept, or reject those. The players were naturally all transgender.

I might write it up if there’s any demand to hear a girl talk a bit about how to encode four years of a philosophy degree into a campaign setting, and trick her players (about half of whom were other philosophy students) into studying her areas of interest in a way that actually contributed to their understanding of course content, but until then, I’m happy to say, I’m glad I never wrote Aspect down as a system. It was a much better game for it, for being negotiated at the table, for being made of rulings and not rules, for even the dice mechanic being something scrapped together as good enough while we get on with the actual business of running a great game: Taking Laborious Notes.

Oh and roleplaying and all that.