I like to talk about games as engines. [Engine] is a term you’ll find here and there in RPG spaces, usually describing specific systems and mechanics – like, ‘running on the PbtA engine’ if a game uses a bunch of specifically-codified moves to shape the progression of play, say. The idea behind that usage is, here’s a mechanical core that defines how you play. It’s what makes the game move forwards, like the engine of a car.
That’s not what I mean here. Or, it’s only a part of it. An RPG, in its entirety, is a process to move ideas around. The players navigate that process, usually through the form of characters, but, there’s plenty of games that provide player-level inputs (metacurrencies, the ability to highlight or veto particulars – arguably, safety tools qualify, even!) – the point is, it’s a series of inputs and outputs that you move through, and that’s what play is.
This is a definition of [engine] that is broad enough to be meaningless. It’s “something that you can argue is consistent but has internal flow”. But, as I’ve talked about a few times on this blog, analyzing that flow in specific is quite valuable. In games with different modes of play, you can split them into sub-engines and examine how the play flows between them. In games with any sort of medium-term resource tracking or modeling, looking at the shape of the flow of play and where things branch into points that cause people to lose or gain resources, gives you an idea of how frequently those will fall down. (Taking the same HP math between two games, but one has several procedural layers that it’s unlikely to get through before you reach an effect that deals damage, yields very different results!) And this isn’t restricted to rigidly-defined mechanisms, either. You can map the flow of intentions, for instance, based on what are desired mechanical or narrative outcomes in a given point of the engine. (And notice conflicts between them – if you’re at the end of a cool boss fight, winning in a way that stops them for good is a mechanical ideal, but, depending on the kind of story your game is built to produce, giving them room to slip away and escalate may be more desirable on that level, and that’s a tension that will put strain on that joint in the engine! (See, the metaphor has lots of ways to apply it like that. That’s why I like it. Pressure on joints being pushed in multiple angles, wear from both overuse and underuse, varying levels of rigidity needed based on the task the component seeks to accomplish, etcetera.)) Figuring out and modeling the flow of what players will want in a given context, and what goals they bring to the table, is quite valuable in modeling how the engine you build will work out.
And here is where we hit a snag.
Players are inscrutable, confusing beasts. You can guess at what they might enjoy, based on what you and the people you know enjoy in RPGs, for instance. You can write a whole sales pitch to tell the players what to expect from your game – hey, come here if you want to play an edgy warrior of destruction having a personal breakdown and struggling to cope with a peaceful life, here’s the kinds of things you’ll do and see here. For instance.
But a player is a whole entire person. Even worse, lots of RPGs are multiplayer affairs – and not only are multiple people much harder to model on an individual scale, you now have interpersonal dynamics to work with. And no matter how elegantly your system of mechanized guilt-tripping and familiar obligation manages the game’s side of the interpersonal dynamics, there’s a whole segment beyond that, that only exists in tables far away that you’ll never get to see. You can’t know, for certain, everything that players will want out of a game. And thus, you can’t figure out, entirely, how that will change over the course of play.
However… you can get a sense of how your game relates to it.
Say, for instance, you’ve got a nice snappy little combat system. A cute little battle egg, a short list of powers that are strings of keywords and numbers ’cause you tightened them up all snazzy-like, great. You get into a fight, you pull out the egg, you get the enemies going, and one of the players says “actually, I want to just talk this out, let’s not fight”.
How does that go?
(This is a trick question, the answer is entirely “it depends on what the game prioritizes,” but, bear with me for a bit here.)
Now, sometimes, your answer, as a very cool and prepared game designer, will be that not only is that a step in the proceedings, if they look at page 4 of their pregen packet, they will find bespoke stats and procedures for the talking-things-out mode. Very well done, best of luck with the game, applause and acclaim for thee. But we’re assuming that’s not the case. This game wasn’t built with mechanisms to perfectly replicate your particular vision of what social interaction is like, you made it to be about fighting things. What then?
Well, if you’re me, you say “no, this is a game about fighting” and that’s that. There’s all these fancy game mechanics, and I’d much rather get them used than not, and if you aren’t here for that, then, you should probably play a game that does support tense deescalation negotiations on a mechanical level. That sounds neat! But it’s not what we’re doing today.
This is, I think, a fair answer to give. It’ll vary from reader to reader how much they would agree with that sentiment, but, this is my default approach to games. They’re built for what they’re built for, and they function only within the context where the players are accepting what the game is built for and staying within those lines. That’s how I design games and how I play games, and, it would be hard, in my eyes, to form an argument where that’s an inherently wrong approach.
But it’s not everyone’s approach. In fact, it’s probably not most people’s approach. Meaning, acting like that’s the one answer, or the correct answer, as much as it’s the one I like the most, would be foolish.
I think, for the most part, people would look at that as an opportunity. Usually, in the story surrounding games about fights, there’s, like, some amount of narrative importance to the fight and the characters involved. Trying to talk that out could, just on a story level, be neat! You can highlight the contrasts in priorities between the sides, what they value and what they won’t budge on. Maybe you decide, this is just going to be pre-fight banter, nobody’s minds will be changed. But, let’s say you don’t decide that. Maybe, after the talk, the foes back off, and decide not to fight. Or maybe the players decide not to fight! Maybe they get convinced, and they decide to work with their enemies, for a bit.
What just happened?
Well, on its face, it’s pretty straightforward what happened. You talked, and, one way or another, you’re not fighting anymore. You’d think that’d be normal.
But, in terms of the game. What just happened?
You hit a point where the next step was to shift to the fight mode. You were all set for that, the mode was queued up, ready to transition everyone’s thinking in there… and then you talked for a while, without using any pieces of the game, and then… you did something else.
From the perspective solely of the game’s engine, this is a failure, or, a glitch, or a user error, or something. It’s wrong. It’s just, not how it works. You had the expected behavior, then you hopped off to do something else, and who knows what’s happening. (This is the primary limitation of that model that I’m trying to address here, spoiler alert.) From the perspective of the engine of play, none of this is part of how the game is supposed to go.
Which means, that piece. The [and then you talked for a while]? That’s just not right, when looking at the engine. It’s not a part of the game.
Which then begs another question: were you playing the game then?
For the most part (I read Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist recently enough to feel compelled to qualify this claim), I think most people would respond, that’s a silly question. You don’t stop playing the game just because you happen to take a digression into nonmechanized places. Playing a game isn’t something you just jump into and out of on a moment’s notice. When you discuss where you want to move or who you want to attack, have you stopped playing the game until you make a decision? When you play a solo journaling and pause to think about what you’re going to write before you do, have you, in that moment, failed as a gamer? It’s a silly question.
But, then, if [playing the game] expands beyond the components that are the game, up to and including actively skipping by or ignoring those parts… that means we’re missing a piece of the [game]. There’s a component that encompasses the rest of it, to get a full model of play, and if we don’t have that, then, we’re flying blind.
In response to this conundrum, I posit that we are all haunted by ghosts. Or rather, our games are.
If we want to model the flow of play, in its entirety, then, we need to address our [glitch] somehow. Our “you are here” dot flows from the [not in a fight] section, moves its way towards the [in a fight] section, and then, something happens and it moves somewhere else. This [something] wasn’t part of the game, at least, as we’ve modeled it thus far. An incorporeal hand grabbed it, and put it somewhere else. That’s the ghost.
These ghosts will be everywhere, to some degree or another. If you watch the flow of play, you’ll see them skip past sections because they seem unimportant, or specifically hold things in place, slow them down, lingering on what they enjoy. You’ll find them moving between modes of play, if your game has modes of play, and sometimes, you’ll find them calcifying whole sections into new modes of play, just through repeated experience. The ghosts move to what’s important to them, and they brush off what isn’t.
However. This is still movement. You can still model it. You can draw an imaginary line between modes of play, a pipe that you haven’t really built, and go, look, this is what the ghosts do. When our current position encounters an [importance gate], the ghosts judge how much it matters, and depending on their answer, either it flows to the fight like it should, or it follows this imaginary pipe off somewhere else.
And then, you may note, [importance gates] exist in more places than just that.
See, the sad truth is, the mechanics of the game don’t tell the full story of play, even beyond when the ghosts intentionally skip around them. Sooner or later, when you look at the start state of the game, you’ll find, [phantom inputs]. Heck, every decision gate is essentially that. If you’ve got a mechanized mode for negotiation to prevent combat, like that very clever game designer hypothesized earlier, then, the play gets to a start of a fight, the engine goes “great, now select between negotiation and combat,” and… well, somewhere, someone presses a button. The ghost nudges us in one direction or another, and off we go. The game didn’t do that. But it sure directed the flow.
There’s [phantom outputs], too. In fact, every part of the engine gives them. We get through our clever mechanical negotiation, we hit the segment that says, “okay, mission accomplished, skip the fight, direct back to the noncombat mode,” and we follow that. The ghosts don’t interject, things flow as expected. But. The ghosts are riled up. They’re opinionated now. The fact that there won’t be a fight, alongside the obvious mechanical repercussions, means something. The way the mechanized negotiation went struck them in a certain way, and now, the next time the character who we were negotiating against shows up, they tug us every which way to avoid fighting them and hear more of their backstory. We didn’t build a learn-their-backstory subsystem, we’re not that clever, and now they’re avoiding anywhere that triggers the fight mode, even conceding on things that are supposed to be tense mechanical downsides to give up. They’re compelled. They care. Because of what all we pumped out of our engine, into the ghosts beyond.
So. To review. Confusing and stressful as it is, we have outputs to them, and inputs from them.
That means we can control them. (Or, at least, model them – see what inputs to them can produce what outputs.)
The will of the beyond
Ghosts want things. They expect things. They want the game to be [cool], or [dramatic], or [heart-wrenching], or [fun], or whatever else. They’re capricious lots.
On its own, that doesn’t help at all. What’s “fun”? We’re an engine, we just move people around. I can show you some dice tricks, I guess? But that doesn’t really help. So, let’s dig a little deeper.
In my experience, the most common reason for ghosts to interfere in standard processes is, “that doesn’t make sense”. That is, something occurs that the ghosts have an idea of what [makes sense to happen] afterwards, and then, what the game outputs to them is different. When this happens, (depending on how hardline these ghosts are about such things,) the position gets nudged. You get moved to where does “make sense” to be instead, and go from there. Sometimes that’s applying effects, sometimes it’s removing or skipping parts of the game entirely, sometimes they add a whole new chunk to the engine that didn’t exist a second ago, and now you have to deal with that. Really, it can be anything.
…Which means we need to go even deeper, because “it can be anything” is, once again, unhelpful.
Your game has a concept. A pitch. A [thing that it is about]. It has a lot of those, actually. (And here’s where we get to how the analogy breaks down just a little, because we’ve hit “the color you paint your car will influence how it drives”.) It communicates that in several ways, one of which is its shape. That is – if you have a chunk of the engine off to the right, then the space off to the right is what the game is about. One would expect it to see use, or it’s just dead weight and shouldn’t be there.
Ghosts aren’t deterministic. They don’t see the decoration and shape of the engine, go, “got it, here’s the pitch,” and work with that. They’d be so convenient if they did! But it’s more complex than that. They interpret, and then they modify, to some degree or another. You give them a whole long explanation of what the game is supposed to be, with aesthetic trappings, and then, with that, they build their own idea of things. (And, “how do aesthetics and communication influence people’s thinking” is unfortunately far too complex a question to solve here.)
That idea of things is what they’re pushing for. What [makes sense] to them. When the engine diverges from that, they’ll nudge it. That’s where the ghost-hands come from. This idea, this concept of [what this game should be], that’s the torso controlling it all.
Like I said, the ghosts build this on the fly. It adapts over time, too, even. The engine’s trappings aren’t its only source, either. You’ll find, depending on the temperament of the ghosts and the needs of the engine, things like “well, this is how it works in the real world,” or, “I think it would be cooler if this happened,” or, “I’m uncomfortable with this, let’s skip it,” or many other such sentiments pouring into the pot as well. And, we can’t control that. It’s outside of our reach. We can’t put pipes in it, we can’t put walls around it, the ghosts have their own realm and we can only communicate with them or put walls around how they move through our engine.
So, we communicate.
We drape our engines in art, and prose, and cool paint jobs, and give them fancy titles, to say, “hey, here’s what this is about.” Maybe we annotate the engine itself, put a little sidebar to tell the ghosts, “hey, this part is for making so and so happen, that’s pretty important, please don’t touch.” Maybe (in fact, often), we have bits of the engine output to nowhere, for the ghosts to take, with a little message saying “hey, think about this, care about this, change what you’re doing because this just happened now.” What’s “thinking”? What’s “caring”? Hell if I know, but by giving the ghosts that, we give them a better idea of what our very fragile little device is supposed to do, so they know what steps are important and when to not skip things.
Again, they’re not deterministic. They don’t actually do it quite right, or quite predictably. But you can do enough to get them to understand, just a little, how to approach your engine, and work with it. And that can be useful!
Sometimes parts of the engine aren’t so important. Hopefully they’re at least a little. If not, just take it out and your thing weighs less. But, you don’t really have a way to control the flow in a way that always goes there when necessary, and skips it otherwise. Heck, maybe you don’t even know how to codify that at all, maybe it’s more of a [does this matter] question. Ghosts are good at that! And if you ask them nicely, “hey, if so and so circumstances regarding this don’t qualify, and you want, you can take the play from here to over there and skip this chunk,” then, maybe, depending on their mood, they might do that for you. They might do it better than you trying to figure out how to automate the skip would.
You can use them as input, too. In fact, most of the time, you already have. They’re who the engine is for, really, though they need you to make it work for what they need. Ghosts can’t quite make everything they want without us. (Wellllll… I’ll get back to this point in a bit, but for now, assume I’m largely right about this, and we’ll put a pin in it.) When we have levers, and buttons, and “choose to go this or that way and that tells you which chunk of the engine to go to next,” it’s the ghosts who actually press those buttons and flip those levers. And, it’s the ghosts who read what happens and go, “hey, that meant something,” and we don’t know what meaning is, but it changes their core, and that changes what their moves are in future.
When a ghost behaves, it’s a well-oiled machine. They fill in all the gaps and the nebulous “assume we get to the next point” steps, and it’s beautiful.
Communicating, through direct input/output, through annotation, and through aesthetics, are how we give them an idea of how to behave. They want to, for the most part, or, at least, you can just brush off and not build for the ones that don’t, but just like we can’t build a device that defines and optimizes [meaning], they can’t just arbitrarily intuit what’s important where.
…Right.
…Okay, fine, yes, I admit it, that was all a bit silly.
To pull back the curtain a little, and maybe make a few things less obfuscated by metaphor. The Ghost Engine is the term I use for the components of an RPG that the players, in play, bring to the game. Specifically, the way those components influence the actual mechanical element, because that’s what we can design for. Sometimes they change or remove important mechanics, sometimes they add play assumptions or homebrew subsystems that don’t make sense, sometimes there’s a whole unhealthy social dynamic between the players, who knows. We don’t, and we can’t predict that, but it’s still on some level a common pillar that games rely upon. (For a time, I used the term Ghost Pillar to refer to this, in fact.)
More specifically… the Ghost Engine is the smallest game there is. It’s freeform roleplay. It’s improv. It’s riffing back and forth on an idea. It’s a conversation! (I’ve read so many passages professing “ah, you see, this game is just a conversation,” and here I profess my counterargument – conversations, in and of themselves, are a type of game.) This is, notably, not mechanicless. I often see freeform roleplay described that way, but that’s certainly not the case. “One player writes a post, then the other does, then repeat” from forum roleplay is not only establishing an order of operations and initiative, it also defines a unit of action in the [post], limited in what can be contained there, defined by the medium the play is being enacted in. “You may not directly narrate the actions of a character another player controls” is another.
But these are… emergent mechanics. Norms, as much as they are walls. They evolve, and twist, and even just in the time it takes for two people to learn the comfort levels and interests of one another, they’ll have grown complex patterns and guidelines for how to engage each other. They’re building, between one another, an engine of interaction.
It’s soft. It’s malleable. It’s, well, ectoplasm. You can shape it, but you can just as easily bend it, or push past it. If the way we approached conversations was rigid and litigious, humanity as a whole would be very different than it is. That isn’t how we work. Freeform roleplay has mechanics, but it doesn’t have, you know. Capital-m Mechanics. There’s caution tape, but no walls. It’s all ghostly.
This is, in my eyes, one of the primary appeals of roleplaying games. They give you walls. When a game tells you “you must do this,” or “you can’t do that,” or even gives you a choice by way of “you must pick one of the following things,” or “you must do something like this,” that’s hard. That’s material. You can’t look the game and put puppydog eyes on and get it to do something else, the way you can when you’re talking to another person. You can shove a ghost around, but the physical engine is gonna stay how it is.
You can just, go past it. You’re a ghost, you can phase, you can throw things that aren’t supposed to move around the room all scary-like. But… well, to tell the truth, I find that as an observation rather unsatisfying. It’s a recognition of autonomy, to be sure, but it also becomes an argument that no game is better than freeform roleplay. That an engine really is just something to push around like so many words, and if it gives you a structure, ignore it. I don’t like that, because, I like RPGs. I enjoy the medium for what it does, and, while I’ll happily spend time doing freeform roleplay, I go to mechanics because I want more. I want the solidity of an engine. I have enough ghost time in my life.
To some degree, all RPGs are hybrids. They have hard sections and they have “ghosts, please fill in here” sections. Even if those aren’t clearly labeled, they’ll grow in the cracks and wrap around it like ivy. Some of the most enjoyable and dramatic stories I’ve ever played out happened in the time between fights in Lancer, without the game prompting that all that much, literally in the pauses of “the next fight is coming our way, but, let’s riff for a bit.” Having the structure of those next fights, and knowing how the game would keep up past that, made me more interested in exploring that than if that hadn’t been there. That’s not something the game brought, it’s something I brought (alongside my fellow player/ghosts, of course,) but the game’s structure supported that.
Some games are more constraining than others. Some are constraining in different ways, at different times. What fits best is a complex question, based on what you want your game to be, how you want people to approach playing it, etcetera. But I will propose a categorization method, of sorts, in the form of another metaphor:
Sometimes a game is aspic, and sometimes a game is a tartufo.
Aspic is something I’ve never actually had, and to tell the truth, I’m somewhat loathe to change that, though, I do believe in the spirit of experimentation and trying new things, so, perhaps one day. In short, as I understand it, it’s a savory gelatin that is served with other ingredients floating inside of it, consumed as such.
A tartufo, by contrast, is something I have very much had, and quite enjoy. It’s a gelato encased in a hard shell of chocolate, sometimes with melted chocolate or fruit in the center. (I may have something of a sweet tooth, but even beyond that, it’s a quite nice dessert! I recommend giving one a try at least once in one’s life.)
As you can see – in the aspic, the solid components are captured within the more wibbly parts, while in a tartufo, the inverse is true. The ghosts are the gelatin and the gelato, and the mechanics are the chocolate and whatever all goes in the aspic.
Aspic is how I would describe a game like Legacy: Life Among The Ruins. The ghosts float around freely, doing their ghostly business as though operating under freeform play. All well and good. Until, eventually, one of them stumbles onto something solid. A piece of “now, resolve this mechanic.” And so, they indulge, and the mechanic tells them where to go next, pushing them forwards. On some level, they could have simply swam around, and ended up anywhere they pleased. But, the solidness of the mechanic saying “this is now true” sends ripples through the gelatin, and reshapes things for the future. For the most part, the mechanics are subordained to the ghost engine, being pulled along as tools to suit the broader needs at had. You can imagine these mechanics as little pipes, floating in the ectoplasm, perhaps slightly more apt than a chunk of meat, since they do have a directive and propulsive character. The ghosts define the space, and the mechanics nudge them around it.
In contrast, in a game like the aforementioned Lancer, encased in its delicious chocolate shell, it’s a lot harder to simply go “I think this should be like that instead” and skip ahead. The game has a solid mechanical framework to its primary mode of play, in combat, and an explicit list of what you are allowed to attempt and at what cost within that mode. Some leeway is given to GM arbitration, but even then, within the mechanical constrains of the action economy and the statistics and powers you have in front of you. And, in turn, the ghosts are expected to look at the engine in terms of, “what can I do here to engineer the outcome I want within the structure of this game system.” (The mechanics are rather more complex than a flat chocolate shell, as that would make for an unimpressive engine.) It’s a tartufo. The ghosts do not have the power to roam free.
Games are very rarely entirely one or the other. In fact, you may note. During the mention in the aspic section of mechanics as pipes, surely, when you enter that pipe, for a moment, have you not made yourself go inside of the engine, constructed a micro-tartufo? In turn, in the Lancer segment, I already mentioned prior how room for freeform character drama found a place in the cracks between play. There’s a hole in that chocolate shell, and the ectoplasm seeping out is looking remarkably aspic-escent.
These are more, design preferences. Expectations of play. They often shift from mode to mode (if a game has multiple modes), and from moment to moment based on how much the mechanics are being engaged with. But, they are especially important to recognize as a designer. The general threshold of “how much do I want the players to be running around in their own ghostly way, skipping past or invoking mechanics as they see fit” has significant impact on how your engine operates, after all! Knowing, and communicating, what moments should be kept as tartufo-like as possible, and what moments are room where you can allow them to control a little more, matters a great deal. After all, if the ghosts don’t know, then, they’ll default to what they’re used to. Some of them assume games are like aspic, some assume they’re like a tartufo, and the ones that assume wrong, one way or another, will have an unpleasant time.
There’s obviously a lot more to be discussed regarding the Ghost Engine. It roughly reduces to the sum total of human interaction and experience, and that’s no easy tool to work with. There’s been a lot of writing, both valuable types and dubious ones, regarding how to control and navigate group dynamics in RPGs, on a human level. And, on a human level that probably needs to stay. You can never entirely control the people who play your game, sad to say. But you can convey to them, here is how I want you to approach it, here is how to make the engine work, here are the points where you must bow your head and subordain yourself to the engine, slip your ethereal form into this juicy chocolate shell and allow to come what may.
They might not always listen. Ghosts are cruel and capricious beings, after all. But the ones that do, if you can learn to work with them, will go through things better than any deterministic machine could. And there’s beauty in that.
In conclusion: freeform roleplay is interesting, and fun, and worth examining further! Especially as it invades and underpins a lot of the fundamental expectations people tend to have in RPGs. But, for the most part in terms of this piece, honest communication to your readers regarding mechanical intent and play expectations is a very valuable thing. One of the primary motivators for me to actually sit down and write this was getting inordinately angry at several games invoking “The Golden Rule”, a dubiously-founded bit of advice to simply change any mechanics as the players desire. That is, declaring the entirety of a game to be aspic, even when it has more mechanically-detailed modes that would have their balance broken entirely by casual shifts. Remember, ghosts are silly creatures! You have to be clearer than that! Tell them what is important, and why, because they’re very bad at figuring out what’s important. They can only see what’s meaningful.
The marriage of those two is what makes RPGs beautiful, I think.
Ru's Roleplay Rants 