A pictoral representation of the state of conversation regarding game design available through the internet.

Simon Rogers did a little stint of interviews among RPG publishers and compiled it all into an article, View from the Pelgrane’s Nest: Is the RPG Industry Screwed?, which is pretty interesting and you should go read it. Go ahead; I’ll wait here.

“The Industry” and its Woes

Now, I’m just going to skip over the guys who can’t quite see past the way the business model worked twenty years ago, because, while they’re quaint and all… well, they’re like that uncle who kind of forgets that he retired but he wants to tell you how the business world works but he has trouble sending email. Three things interest me:

The d20 Glut - A lot of the interviewees mentioned this, and while I certainly saw the terrible fruits of the d20 phenomenon on the local game store shelves, I can’t say that I was very impressed, or that it really registered on me. Oh look, another d20 product, cleverly titled 17 Rings of Power and containing… 128 pages dedicated to said seventeen rings, all of which are… pretty boring. I expected that this stuff either (a) sold slowly to people who either didn’t think or didn’t care about how they would use it in an actual game (the fetish-value of some of this material was relatively high) or (b) didn’t sell and got returned to the distributor and hence to the publisher and the publisher went under, which they should have. You put out a dumbass product, you lose your money. That’s justice. But apparently the retailers still have these copies? For some reason? Did they buy these books without part of the contract covering returns of unsaleable merchandise? Cause that’s… oh yeah, more stupid business practices. You make dumbass decisions running your store, you lose money. More justice.

Which is all well and good except it means that the retail outlets, outlets that guys who didn’t fall into the giant sucking hole called the d20 Supplement Mill rely on, are clogged with unsaleable merchandise. Which brings us to…

The Death of Gaming Retail - I have regularly patronized exactly three gaming stores my entire gaming life, which is now going on, like, 16 years or something. The first, I’m Comics, went under but as the name suggests, it wasn’t really a gaming store so much as a comics store with some games. But there’s nothing new or surprising about a hobby store going under; I remember way back when I was little there used to be hobby stores that sold model airplanes and model rockets. They’re gone, too. The second, Metro Games, has sold its soul and become Metro Entertainment, focuses far more on memorabilia and fan-fetish merchandise, and stays in business, as far as I can tell, by getting genre celebrities to come sign things every two weeks. I imagine that this works for them since they’re in Santa Barbara — hey James Marsden, come spend a weekend in Santa Barbara, oh, and sign posters for a couple hours. The third store, Game Castle, has stayed true to the gaming mother lode, sells roleplaying games and high-strategy board games (Catan, Rio Grande Games, etc), and a year or two ago had to find a larger space because they were doing too well for their cramped starter storefront. It doesn’t hurt that Game Castle is snugly situated between I don’t even know how many colleges — at least four or five — and is two blocks from the freeway (essential in LA).

When I was 12, I went to I’m Comics about once a week; when I was 20, I went to Metro every few weeks; these days, I go to Game Castle once every few months. My last gaming purchase that wasn’t online was Blue Rose, when it came out, and that’s like… three years ago, now? I get my gaming on via the internet. Which brings us to…

MMOs Take Over the World! - My wife and I started in playing WoW shortly after it started, and for a good long time I tried very hard to roleplay on WoW. They had, after all, RP Servers, and you could form guilds, and do guild RP, and… god damn did it suck. It was stilted and cramped and simply didn’t work. There was absolutely no reward system for anything resembling roleplay, and a giant reward system including experience, loot, pretty graphics, and tactical challenges for doing just about anything other than roleplay. In fact I got so frustrated with the difficulties in roleplaying on WoW that I gave up the game for six months or so. Somewhere in there I realized the simple fact: World of Warcraft is not for roleplaying. It’s for pretty graphics and tactical challenges and amassing XP and loot. I’ve since returned to the game with that understanding and it’s a whole lot more fun. It is more fun, in fact, than most tactics-based roleplaying games I’ve ever played, and certainly much more fun than all that d20 crap that won’t sell off the shelves.

“The Industry” Loses… and Gains

One of the best quotes in the article comes from Jeff Tidball, who says: “You can divide roleplayers into two general camps based on style of play, with smash-and-grab-and-level-uppers on one side, and everyone else (storytellers, world-builders, wanna-be novelists, etc.) on the other. The first, much larger, group is now — with current network and console technology — much better served by computer RPGs than tabletop RPGs. The computers are just plain better and faster at the game experience they want.” I think he’s spot-on. For tactical challenge, second-to-second action and suspense, and even the wonder of exploring exotic locales, computer games have RPGs beat. I’m not particularly disturbed by this; it’s a lot like saying “For creaming butter and making mashed potatoes, electric blenders have RPGs beat.” MMOs and computers do that stuff better than we can; let them. We do other stuff better.

However, there is the simple fact that the RPG “Industry” has long subsisted on the audience that enjoys that sort of thing, and for a long time RPGs have been one of the few ways to produce that sort of content. With that audience leaving, it signals some pretty big changes for the “Industry.” Jeff goes on to say “As those customers (the smash-and-grabbers) stop buying tabletop RPGs, it stops being economically viable to produce them professionally for the second group.” and here I disagree. I think Jeff’s got a little case of “industry blinders” and can’t see the opportunities that this shift opens up for RPGs.

Computer gaming can have tactical challenge and thrilling, pretty action. That’s what it does, and it does it well, and I’m going to be playing WoW this weekend. What RPGs need to do is focus on what they do better, and the things that are unique to tabletop gaming. From my perspective, the thing in question is people. RPGs can involve emotions, beliefs, ideals, creative endeavor, friendship, rivalry, and even romance in ways that computer gaming can’t (yet) replicate, because those things come from people and come from people interacting with each other. Now, I’ve spent lots of my life defending the internet’s ability to connect people — I’m not in any way saying that somehow with a computer involved it’s no longer socializing with real people, because it is. But the specific medium of online computer games is a pretty poor medium for — yep, emotions, beliefs, ideals, creative endeavor, friendship, rivalry, and even romance. That’s what RPGs do better.

The Roleplaying Game has spent its entire history hampered by geek status. The association has been so strong, in fact, that D&D has become one of the prime identifiers of geekdom. The irony, of course, is that RPGs aren’t a substitute for social activity; they are a social activity — just, historically, with a rather high barrier to entry in terms of tactical finesse, mathematical ability, and genre familiarity (what’s a drow?). However, if RPGs cede the tactical challenge territory to MMOs (which can handle the math internally) and focus instead on real people and crises that derive from real people, the resulting product can shed that barrier to entry and gain a far broader appeal to a hugely expanded market. When I ran a game store, the biggest seller (after jigsaw puzzles) was How to Host a Mystery which is, when you get down to it, a boxed one-shot LARP for eight players. Nobody thinks HHM games are geeky; in fact they’re kind of quirky and cool. Anybody who can throw a dinner party can run it. Now: which, do you suppose, is the larger market: (a) geeks who read Tolkein when they were 13 and who enjoy fiddling with math and (b) anybody who can throw a dinner party?

Games recently out and on the horizon — Primetime Adventures, Breaking the Ice, and 1000 Stories come immediately to mind — serve as stellar examples of games that can be marketted, not just to gamers, but to just about anybody. My mother, who has regular little get-togethers with her friends all the time, could take PTA to one such evening. Everybody’s familiar with television; everybody’s dreamed at least once of being in a television show or writing for one. For an extra added bonus, PTA uses a deck of cards, which is a much more common household item than polyhedral or even six-sided dice. Bunco night can be PTA night. If losing one part of the audience to MMOs expands the potential market for RPGs to include my mom and her friends and people like them, statements like “it’s not economically viable to produce RPGs without the smash-and-grabbers” become pretty ludicrous. In fact, the reverse is probably more true: roleplaying games become economically viable without the smash-and-grabbers.

The only obstacle is reaching that market, who are either completely ignorant of RPGs or burdened with Jack Chick-inspired misunderstandings. It’s a two-pronged problem of promotion and distribution. Luckily, the answer to the distribution half is already here, killing the retail game stores — the internet. With RPGs available to anyone anywhere with an internet connection, we’re already in billions of homes worldwide. And that’s not just the indie games — I can get a copy of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Player Guide or Mage: the Whatever They Renamed It just as easily as I can get Dogs in the Vineyard or Dust Devils. There is very literally nothing that a brick-and-mortar retail store can offer RPGs that a well-designed website can’t replicate (theoretically, a b&m offers face-to-face sales… but when was the last time that happened in your FLGS? — and nobody ever sold bunco to somebody else in a store).

Which leaves us with promotion, and that’s a sticky problem. Promotion is tough, and most of its success stories happen by happy accident. Promoters have to be in the right place at the right time to benefit, but they also have to be prepared to take advantage of the opportunity when it arrives. And that is the greater part of promotion — having material ready for when an opportunity arises. Primarily, we need sample games that anybody can get at and run with minimal fuss, with URLs printed on them for where they can find more. Then we need to put them in the spotlight, and be in the spotlight, ourselves. Now, I have a new-found love of the gaming conventions, but that is not the spotlight. That is, in fact, the opposite of the spotlight, a safe place and time away from everyday life where gamers can not worry about scrutiny. We don’t need to abandon the con, but we do need to outgrow it and start placing RPGs in other contexts. RPGs need to invade dinner parties, coffee shops, schools (take it home to your parents!), parks, community centers, and — I can barely believe I’m suggesting this — church groups.

It’s a huge undertaking, and not one that I expect anybody will be flinging themselves at wholeheartedly, but it also doesn’t need anybody to fling themselves at it. We’re already moving in this direction, anyway, and the distributed work of a few hundred people is, I suspect, going to push RPGs in some of these directions with or without conscious intent. And you never know, if such a thing happens and RPGs start getting played by millions of people all over the place, I might have to take the scare quotes off of “The Industry.”

Hot damn why did I not get around to attending gaming conventions until now? All the years of unexploited opportunities! It makes me weep.

I’m back from Gamex, and despite coming down with a little Con Crud the day after, and despite quite possibly the worst My Life with Master player ever, I am coming away from the weekend all smiles and exultation. Sadly, I have to wait until August to do it all over again. I am so saving my pennies for GenCon Indy next year — I’m sure it’s completely different, but that just makes it more intriguing.

Here’s what I played:

Dogs in the Vineyard — I ran with six players, none of whom had played before, and we managed to pull off a good game. Not a great game, but at least a good, solid game. Solid enough that three of the players asked where to get the game when it was done, and as far as success metrics go, that’s a pretty good one.

Prophecy — I didn’t wake up early enough for Paul’s first Nine Worlds game, so I ended up playing this board game, instead. It was pretty neat — sort of like Talisman, except designed well. “But have you played Runebound?” everyone keeps asking me, and no, and I’ll fix that soon, but Prophecy was pretty hot shit, too.

Shab al-Hiri Roach — It was me and Jesse and his wife Meghan and some total stranger Doug playing; I had not had the pleasure before. It was lots of fun. I grabbed the Roach early on, when I got the card that turned all of my dice to d12s, and stocked up a high stack of reputation. I ditched the Roach in the next event, and was sailing towards winning… only to pull the Roach in the last Event. Sadness. But Regina Sutton died, so I suppose not everything is lost.

Primetime Adventures — The Ward — Judson and his SO Stacey came down to Gamex and paid admission to play only one game, and it was this one. And I have no idea why they paid admission. But! This was awesome. I’ve never had the pleasure here, either, and that has been revealed to me to be a travesty of untapped opportunity, much akin to not having gone to gaming conventions. I admit, I was skeptical and somewhat put off by the “groupthink” that everyone always raves about in PTA — skeptical that it would happen and put off by the very suggestion that such a thing might be enjoyable — but wow when it happened it was awesome. We put together our series and played two episodes in five hours. The Ward is a serial set in a mental hospital where the patients’ hallucinatory world is shared for reasons unknown. There was all sorts of lingering doom and unspoken possibilities of what might be happening, but all we did in our two episodes was gleefully pile up the mysteries without a care in the world as to what everything might turn out to be in the end. I would love to play a long-term PTA game to see what it’s like to play an entire season.

Nine Worlds — Paul ran the same scenario/situation twice, and based that situation off of a previous game of Nine Worlds at ForgeCon (you all know that’s what the thing is called, so give up calling it “Forge Midwest Gathering”). Basic idea: six people with diverging agenda are on a ship heading from Point A to Point B. Apparently the first game the day before, which I did not wake up in time for, played out as a soap opera with the principals all flinging love and desperation and whatnot at each other, and ended with people settling down to raise children. Our game, by contrast, played like Paranoia, with everybody spying on everybody else, and follow-up conflicts that were all about finding out that they knew that we knew that he knew that they did something else. We ended with me jettisoning two of the other players out into space. Marvellous.

My Life with Master — I’m going to chalk this one up alongside Sorcerer in the category of “games that were interesting and developed a lot of things in the design-o-sphere but by the time I played them there wasn’t anything new for me there.” Also, the paucity of available options (Villiany or Violence and only character action) drove me up the wall. And it didn’t help that we had a player who had responded to the initial pitch of “you’re a minion of an evil mastermind” without understanding the implied addendum and it sucks. Said player and the friend he brought with him had lots of fun wreaking havoc with their character-pawns, but the fact that they were racking up a stat called Self-Loathing was apparently lost on them. All that said, it was still an entertaining game and I’m happy to add that notch to my belt — although I’m not sure I’d want to play the game again.

Then I was supposed to run Capes next, but I only had two folks sign up — the troublesome player and his friend from My Life with Master. Now, while I had been sitting in MLwM and wishing that I had something like Capes to moderate this guy’s, say, casual “accidental” violence to women, I had no wish to play Capes with just he and his friend. I wouldn’t have the player resources to fight them both off, just to begin with. And Capes with three kinda sucks. So I cancelled the game and went to play (wait for it)…

Vampire LARP — All throughout the con I was complaining that I didn’t get to play any mainstream games, since I wanted to play all the indie games that were on offer and that left me no time to “ground” myself in the default gaming experience that so many gamers assume to be the entire world of gaming. Also, I have never LARPed before. So with Capes shelved, I accepted an invitation to play in a Vampire LARP. Good fucking god. I spent, no joke, twenty minutes trying to get out of a room. While they were calling out initiative order for Round Three of the combat that somebody had conveniently placed right in front of the door, I thought to myself, “Why can’t they just deal everybody a couple cards and decide who wins right now? It worked in Nine Worlds this morning…” I am completely unfamiliar with the new Vampire, and have passing knowledge of the old Vampire, which gives me the level of knowledge of exactly dangerous, and easily confused by statements like “The Brujah are a bloodline of the Gangrel.” So it was very profoundly reiterated to me how much White Wolf games are all about mastery of setting minutiae: lots of stuff was happening, and there were boons and favors being exchanged, but to me all of it happened without any significance, so it was an oddly flat experience — like a four-year-old watching movies. Things explode, but who knows why.

All in all, a very successful, entertaining, and educational weekend. Anybody in southern california that aren’t going to Strategicon events are missing out — they’re not big high-production affairs, but they are a few hundred players gathering in one place and cool games being played. Hard to pass that sort of thing up!

This weekend at the LAX Westin is Gamex, one of Strategicon’s triannual cookie-cutter conventions. I’ll be there running Dogs, Primetime Adventures, and Capes, and playing Nine Worlds, Shab al-Hiri Roach, and My Life with Master. If you’re in Southern California, admission is pretty tiny ($26?) and it’s a nice little con.

Y’all act good while I’m gone.

Over on Story Games, some folks helped me do some brainstorming to compile a list of Player Skills. Much like GM Tasks, these are things that players are commonly asked to do in different games. Also like GM Tasks, though, players are not always expected to always do the same things the same ways in the same proportions. So while they have wide applicability, no skill is universal to all games, and no one means of exercising a skill is universal to all games.

Here’s the list:

Acting / Immersion Skills

1. Bring issues you really care about to the character in ways you can deal with
2. Connect emotionally with your character
3. Keep the character true to its core concept
4. Know when and how to be meaningfully still and silent
5. Speak in Character
6. Think in Character — modeling other minds (e.g. both what are my fellow players thinking, and what are these fictional people thinking, in order to predict behaviour; this may be particularly relevant to playing with young kids when this ability is still emerging)

Creative Skills

1. Build a full-fledged person (character) from given parameters (background, stats, whatever).
2. Build Relationship Maps — attaching Characters to other things (other PCs, NPCs, organizations, etc)
3. Develop Character
4. Develop Setting
5. Contribute ideas — content and color
6. Create Characters with Proactive Motivations
7. Combine ideas from various sources (particularly when the sources are people who aren’t you)
8. Conflict: Creation
9. Conflict: Development
10. Conflict: Escalation
11. Conflict: Resolution
12. Conflict: Setting Up Later Conflicts
13. Doing interesting things
14. Extrapolate from the current state of the fiction to a future state.
15. Identify potential conflict or transition in the fiction, even when they’re not obvious.
16. Identify what actions or events can make your desires concrete.
17. Imagine your surroundings from limited source material (filling up the blanks when someone describes something).
18. Invest Characters in the Situation
19. Juggling multiple characters and plotlines within and without the current game
20. Narrate Action
21. Narrate Color
22. Pacing — ie, know when the story needs something more
23. Frame Scenes
24. Spend Character Resources Unstrategically (because it’s in character)
25. Set Stakes
26. Work within premise (or other restrictions)

Cooperative Skills

1. Compromise
2. Expect other people to react
3. Follow someone else who’s driving the story
4. Get others to emotionally connect with your character
5. Help with rules
6. Know when to hold ‘em, Know when to fold ‘em, Know when to walk away, Know when to run.
7. Know when you’ve got something worth doing unilaterally and giving consensus the quick, raised middle finger and not being ashamed or backing down
8. Lead the GM around by the nose
9. Listen to other people
10. Positively acknowledge other people’s contributions (Cheering other players on)
11. React to what the story drivers are doing
12. Flags - Reading them
13. Flags - Hitting them
14. Read the mood of the room
15. Resolve player disputes
16. Screw the other players over in amusing ways (which sounds odd, but it’s essential in Paranoia)
17. Share your goals (selling)
18. Share others’ goals (buy-in)
19. Step out of the spotlight if there’s no reason for you to be in it.
20. Theme - Identifying and Understanding it
21. Theme - Participating in it
22. Theme - Contributing to it
23. Accept character development in unexpected directions

Reasoning Skills

1. Abductive Reasoning
2. Deductive Reasoning
3. Inductive Reasoning
4. Use different Reasonings together

Game Skills

1. Buy Character Abilities (Traits, Powers, Stats, Whatever)
2. Separate players from characters (both own and other players) after the game.
3. Set Difficulty Levels
4. Spend Character Resources Strategically
5. Spend XP and have a sense of future XP Spends

However, now that I’ve got this very handy list, I’m not sure what to do with it. Because each skill is used in a different way in almost every game out there, it’s difficult to impossible to talk about any of these skills in isolation, and I’m not sure there’s much use in that to begin with. I fear the list is too long to be very useful as a design tool (The Player Skills 64!), and I’m not sure what you’d do with it if you used it in that way. This might be useful fodder for designing drills, but even then how a custom-created drill teaches a skill might differ greatly from how another game might use it.

So right now I’m going to archive this bad boy, put it away for a bit and maybe come back to it later. Additionally, if anybody’s got some bright ideas of how this might be useful, I’d be happy to hear them!

And the whole push/pull thing keeps going, most recently in Story-Games’ Clear and Concise Actual Play Examples of Push/Pull. Tony is jumping up and down making the arguments that I’ve always had in a somewhat quieter way, and I’ve come to the following polyvalent conclusion.

One of the Following is True:

1. Push and Pull do not exist as universal phenomena. Which sounds harsh, but by that I mean that perhaps it’s just something in how Mo (and others) sees the world. Now, I know Mo, and count her a personal friend. Thing is, there is almost nothing that Mo and I have in common outside of gaming. Oh, and we’re both white. But otherwise, just about any descriptor that you could apply to me, the opposite applies to Mo. If I were playing Breaking the Ice, I’d play Mo. Which is all to say that Mo sees the world in ways very differently than I do. Maybe it’s just that.

   To illustrate, this is how I tell left from right: in my kindergarten classroom, posted above the chalkboard was a right hand and a left hand. To this day, I visualize that chalkboard to tell the difference. (Incidentally, that chalkboard is on the west wall, and I can also usually tell you which way is west by visualizing the wall — it’s kind of bizarre.) In any case, I bet you don’t do that. Perhaps Push and Pull is something that Mo uses to understand game interactions like I use the classroom wall to understand left and right.

2. I alternate Push and Pull so much that I can’t make the distinction. Or perhaps the distinction exists and the reason that I don’t see the two as different approaches is that I am utilizing both all the time. I drink water, but I don’t think of it as hydrogen and oxygen, I think of it as water. Mo has said that every pull invites a push back, and vice-versa, and I’ve seen a lot of descriptions that appear to be pushing and pulling at the same time (pullsh!). Perhaps I’m just doing both, and doing both in combination and bouncing back and forth so frequently that I don’t see them as separate phenomena.

3. I Push so much that I can’t even see Pull. In my usual self-depreciating way, this is my lurking suspicion. Perhaps I’m so much a pushy my-way-or-highway kind of guy that I don’t even understand the possibility of another way of approaching things. This would be roughly analogous to trying to talk to my grandparents about Communism — love them as much as I do, they are so embedded in the American Way that they can’t see Communism as anything other than the Evil Empire that’s going to come make everybody drink vodka. When my wife Laura played Conquer the Horizon for the first time, she employed a lot of crazy strategies that I never even envisioned (and won the game), so maybe it’s that — I can’t even see Pull when it’s right in front of me.

Mo has promised an article soon that takes a stab at defining Push and Pull in a more definitive manner. I’m looking forward to it, if only so I can pick one of these three and stick with it!

So you’re reading a book, right? And there’s this character who’s cute and engaging and he’s had some hard lumps so far, and in the part that you’re reading, things are finally turning his way and it looks like he’s getting a brief little spot of sunlight. And you think to yourself, oh, I hope that he’s going to get to be happy for just a little bit; I hope that nothing goes wrong to spoil it. And of course, since it’s a story, something does go wrong. Something has to go wrong. In fact, things have to keep going wrong on a regular basis or else the story will just dissolve into rainbows and bunny rabbits. And you know this. It’s lurking in the back of your mind that it can’t last, and you want to hope but you know that you shouldn’t, cause sure enough, something comes out of the bushes and screws up everything even more for the character. And when that little hope is crushed, you aren’t really that disappointed, cause you knew it was coming. Right? Okay, remember that bit.

So you’re volunteering as a Big Brother, right? And your charge is this thirteen-year-old punk kid who’s had the world piss on his head for thirteen straight years, who’s never had the least breath of opportunity, has been outside the city sprawl maybe three times in his entire life, if ever. But he’s got a thing for octopuses — who the hell knows where he got that from — and so you’re taking him on a road trip to the aquarium upstate. And you think to yourself, oh, I hope he enjoys this, I hope he gets engaged and wants to learn more and sees that there’s more to the world than canyons made of grey buildings, and I hope nothing goes wrong like a flat tire or some punk kids to distract him or whatever else could happen to ruin everything. And you take precautions and you plan appropriately and since I’m not being a cynical bastard for five minutes today you have a fifty-fifty chance that this might be a day that changes the rest of his entire life. So you hope, and when everything goes off without a hitch, you’re elated; and when everything crashes down around your ears you’re crushed, really and truly disappointed. Right? File that away, too.

Now you’re playing a game. You’ve got your character, who’s down on his hit points and luck points and sanity points and the situation is pulling him apart from five different directions. And he stumbles into the underground chamber with the lava flows and the giant demonic idol and the evil sorcerer, and the girl is chained down on the altar, and his father is listening in over the radio connection, and the demon lord that tormented him his whole life is about to be brought into the real world. And you think to yourself I hope he can do this, I hope he makes it, I hope his hit points and luck points and sanity points can stretch that far. And the dice are rolled and… he doesn’t. The girl is killed, the demon lord is summoned, and dad always knew you couldn’t do it. That hope you harbored for your character is crushed, but are you disappointed?

Is it like the story, where you knew things were going to get worse, so now you’re looking forward to fighting the demon lord and contacting to the girl’s ghost and arguing with dad?

Or is it like the aquarium, where this mattered and now the thought of going forward seems like just pushing the ashes around?

But wait wait — go back to the lava and the demons and the last couple of hit points again. You roll the dice and he does it! And he saves the girl, banishes the demon, and wins the approval of dear old dad. Are you disappointed here? Is it like the story, and since everything is resolved now it’s over? Or is it like the aquarium, and now everything is possible?

My wife, for whom I wrote Full Light, Full Steam, hates what the dice system in Dogs in the Vineyard does to the story. In her words, “You say all the right things and pull out the Book and the sacred earth and you pray and you use all the skill available to you, but now there’s a demon floating around in the room. Can something else go wrong?” For her, it’s the aquarium. She’s invested. (And with every Raise and every See, she’s invested even more.) She hopes that it will turn out right, and when she hopes that it will turn out right, she really and truly hopes that, she really wants to see that happen. She doesn’t want to see it reversed at the last minute, defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, no matter how clever the reversal might be. She’s all about Bad Things happening after that, in the next episode or in the next room or whatever, but right here and right now, she desperately hopes things will work out all right. Her investment is in that hope, and when her hope is crushed, it destroys her investment in the story. This is why FLFS has one-roll conflict resolution with counterstakes: she knows what she’s getting into, and it’s set up and resolved before she can invest so much that she can’t bear to lose her stakes. And then we move on to the next Bad Thing.

Me, I like to hurt things. I like to hurt my characters, I like to hurt the NPCs, I like to hurt the setting. Brand once told me about a planned campaign arc that we never got to finish, where my character was going to be given the Red Button, and the choice whether to let the world erode into mediocrity or blow it sky-high and let the mutants and the bunker-psychos fight it out to rebuild civilization. Lemme tell you, I would have been all about pushing the button. Similarly, I love me the Battlestar Galactica, where nothing ever goes right, and every two steps forward is accompanied by one step back and losing a limb. When I watched Jurassic Park, I laughed every time a dinosaur jumped out at the characters. I am invested in character suffering. Hope is merely a sort of spice that makes the suffering all the tastier. The only Nobilis character I ever made, but didn’t quite play, was the Power of Hope, and she followed the Code of Darkness, intent on crushing humanity. So that’s where I stand.

Now, the last thing that gaming needs is one more reductive duality, and so I’m not going to say “There’s two kinds of gamers in the world.” Because really, for the purposes of this article and my current thinking, there’s two kinds of gamers in my house. But I think there’s something in here — somewhere — that’s useful. This isn’t a creative agenda thing; it’s like creative agenda’s cousin. Do you want things to go well for your character, or to go poorly? It’s sort of a strange question, but I think the answers may tell us a great deal about the players who put real thought into the answering.

So Andy’s actually had to take out the big Moderator Mallet on Story Games for the thread Games and Gaming: Ready made out of the box?. The thread is on 24 hour hold and he suggests that the participants take the definitional question out into the blogosphere. Sounds good to me. Here’s my take:

“Out of the Box” is a meaningless term that is based on a faulty assumption — that playing a roleplaying game consists of following procedures outlined in a book and no others. A game playable “Out of the Box” ostensibly has everything you need to play already included. This is an impossibility. Roleplaying games, by their natures, require player investment. Player investment, in turn, requires the players to have something to invest. That something always comes from outside of the box.

Example the First:
Candyland can be played out of the box. Here’s your playing piece, here’s the board, here’s a deck of cards. A computer could play this game. When real people play this game, they are doing one of two things: (a) developing their color-recognition skills, assuming they are small children, or (b) socializing with the other players and using the board game as a pretext for interaction. This is the stupid-simple case, but Monopoly works the same way. Ever played Monopoly against a computer opponent? Using just the published rules and the tiniest bit of code for bidding on properties, a computer opponent is just as good as a flesh-and-blood person. The decisions that players make do not require any real-world experience or knowledge of real estate or even basic strategy; nothing from outside the box is required by the operation of the game.

Example the Second:
A roleplaying game — let’s say Capes — cannot be played outside the box. Click-and-locks, index cards, dice, and tokens are insignificant markers of significant elements of the fiction. Those elements of the fiction are provided by the players. Players must bring information, knowledge, experience, and judgement from outside the “box” into the game or else nothing can happen. From creating a conflict to taking an action, player input almost always comes from outside. A computer cannot play this game, because the computer can’t formulate, “I’m putting out this conflict because it will make the other players care enough to invest in it because their characters are all keyed into this central theme, so then I can harvest a whole lot of tokens off of it.” The game requires human input and human investment.

Now, I pitted two board games against a roleplaying game. By no means am I suggesting that board games are universally playable out of the box. Games like Pit, any trick-taking card game, and a number of poker variants, not to mention Go, all require out-of-game input in order to play, and cannot be played out of the box. However, I can’t think of any roleplaying game that can be played out of the box, simply because the foundational act of role-playing fundamentally requires input from outside the box.

But Josh, you may be saying, all of that isn’t what the question is about. The question is about the rules of the game! And here we come to the real stumbling block. Are we talking about the rules presented in the book or are we talking about the system used in the game? These are not the same thing. One may be based in part off of the other, but the two are never identical.

Game designers sweat and toil to create a set of rules that work together, creating synergetic effects and guiding play in desired directions. Game players use rules to inspire, structure, and adjudicate the fiction that they create. However, the set of rules that the players use — the System — is broader than the set of rules that the designers provide. Every time. The decisions that the players make are rational decisions based on principles that are relatively persistent. You have no idea how many scrappy, cynical, loud-mouthed ideogogues I’ve played through the years. No game rule in any book ever told me to play such a character, and yet I have done it consistently for a long time. Similarily, good GMs and players have been using flags long before Chris Chinn identified and named the phenomenon. A friend of mine, for a third example, has everybody at the table vote for the best roleplayer at the end of each session, and the winner gets a candybar and bragging rights; they do this every game, regardless of what other rules they are using from other sources. These are rules, and these are parts of the System in use at gaming tables around the world.

The “Out of the Box” proposition suggests that the rules in the book can become the system of a game without any interpretation, modification, or addition. While this may be an admirable goal, it’s also impossible to accomplish. All games are individual creations of their players, who take inspiration from multiple sources. One source may be more prominent in a given game than others — a “Dogs in the Vineyard game” may base most of its System on the rules presented in the book Dogs in the Vineyard, but it cannot and will not take all of its System from that book. Vincent knows this; flip through Dogs sometime and look at how many times he references the play group and their preferences, advises everyone to pay attention to their fellow players, and explicitly recognizes that the interpretation of the rules is the responsibility of the players. It doesn’t work any other way.

Nir Shiffer, who started the thread that spawned all of this, said, “My position was that given what I’d like to do with a game, I prefer a system that does this while requiring as little alteration as possible. The ideal system, then, would be one that I wouldn’t have to change at all.” I do think that he’s assuming that system is presented in a book, which I’d quibble with, but on the whole, I can stand behind such a statement in a few different ways.

The ideal System in play does not require changes in the midst of play. Hear, hear! If you can fine-tune your System to do what you and your friends want and do it consistently, then bully for you! If everything that you’re going to encounter already has a provision waiting for it, and everybody’s on board with those provisions, your play is going to move like greased lightning. I suspect that a lot of gaming groups around the world are already there (Emily’s article on the Ennead comes to mind). However, this is system in play, not rules presented in a book.

The ideal gamebook presents a set of rules that can be implemented as the System of a game without any changes at all. I’m perfectly fine with this as an ideal, much like never giving up, but that doesn’t mean that it’s actually acheivable. Unattainable ideals are good — it means we never reach the destination and continue on the journey, and I’m all good with that. Further, challenging those ideals is a continual process that lets us further refine our understanding of how games really work — that is, in fact, what you and I are doing right now in this article. Recognizing that this is an impossible ideal is important, though, else we become fanatics and veer off into crazyland.

The ideal gamebook presents a set of rules that can be implemented, with other rules that come from different sources, in a System-in-play without changing any rules from the book. This works for me, too, and this is a worthy and attainable goal for game designers. This is providing people with tools that don’t need to be jury-rigged in order to operate, tools with access ports for the other tools and rules that come from other sources, tools that work. I suspect this is mostly what Nir and others mean when they say “Out of the Box.”

So why am I railing against using this “Out of the Box” term? Because it short-changes players. It denigrates their creativity. It does not recognize that players are being creative and taking control of their own fun at the table. It suggests that all they are doing is following rules, that the high-almighty gamebook is the sole source of good times, and if you’re not having fun what you need is a better gamebook. That is all utter crap. I’m sure that’s not what Nir means — not at all — but I think it’s a dangerous possibility if we start thinking that we game designers are packaging up experiences and selling them to players.

Games don’t come in boxes. Stuff to play games with come in boxes. Games are created by playing them.

Brand suggested in passing that, by contrast to Design What Matters which pushes you towards Vincent’s Fruitful Void, Design What Doesn’t Matter tries to clear away all the brush from the foot of the Monolith. I like this; I may use it.

This is why I like it:

• Are you a monkey freaking out at the base of the Monolith?
• Or are you some hapless fool losing your sanity by staring into the Void?
• Or do you, you know, alternate every other Sunday?

See? Funny. And as well all know, Funny is more important than True.

So every once in a while we talk about two broad-based philosophies of game design, that being (a) designing for what matters in your game, and (b) designing away what doesn’t matter in your game. So if you wanted to design a game for, I dunnno, clan-based politics, following the Design What Matters method would provide mechanical support for players manipulating relationships with others, forwarding their beliefs, convincing others, maybe blackmail and skullduggery, that sort of thing. Following the Design What Doesn’t Matter method you provide mechanical support for combat, buying things, travel times, and maybe some wilderness encounters. Assuming that the players know what the game is supposed to be about (which is a different matter entirely), two groups using the two games will end up playing something roughly similar in content. If the end result is the same, what’s the big deal? You have to go into a little more detail to find out.

Design What Matters says, “Okay, you want this? Here’s some tools to do that.” It provides explicit and relatively exacting instructions on how to pick and hit that target. These designs are usually highly idiosyncratic, focused, and balanced. As such, they are either resistent to kit-bashing and house ruling or fall apart when subjected to such treatment. Someone once called them “Designer Games” which is pretty accurate, not in the sense of designer jeans, but in the sense of designer drugs. They’re built for a finely-sharpened purpose. Typically speaking, they don’t do anything else, or they do it poorly. These games are tools that allow you how to do something that you may have never done before.

For a nearly exhaustive distillation of Design What Matters, see The Power 19, which is all about identifying what you’re designing for and then figuring out how to design for it.

Examples of Design What Matters: Primetime Adventures. Dogs in the Vineyard. Once Upon a Time. Monopoly. Scrabble. A forklift. A pulley.

Design What Doesn’t Matter says, “Okay, you want this? Let me get rid of all that other stuff for you, so you can focus on what you want.” It provides vague or even non-existent instructions on how to focus on anything; in fact these games shy away from focus as a general concept. Instead, this philosophy provides many and varied methods to not focus on things, to resolve them quickly and move on, to avoid depth and complexity. The goal is not to provide the most superficial experience possible; it’s to marginalize those skipped-over elements so that you can focus on the “real meat” of roleplaying, whatever your group happens to think that is. That’s also an important part of this philosophy — it assumes you have a functional or semi-functional group who is able to decide what they want and do the focusing work themselves. Which is, really, something that any group of adults should be able to do if they know each other marginally well. Because of this philosophy, these games can “do anything” because the game doesn’t actually