So, I’ve been getting back into Exalted recently.

Exalted is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. Normally, I don’t traffic in guilt. I think it’s a rather useless emotion, especially in contexts of finding joy in things. And Exalted is definitely something I find joy in. But, like I said – guiltily. It’s rather strange that I do enjoy it so. A while back, I gushed about the lore of the game, something I’m rarely known to do. Mechanically, the third edition has a lot of elements I’m more intrigued to see in action than 2e had, but, it has a lot of things to criticize, as well. In the campaign being set up, I am going to be playing a character with little-to-no capacity to engage in a fight, alongside multiple PCs whose builds encompass combat and almost nothing else (leaving it up to the GM to figure out how to weave my necromantic detective antics in with anything that lets those other players actually play along). The character building has you assign points to stats and skills one-for-one, and then progression costs grow linearly as you invest more in them once play starts – having Perception 1 and Wits 5 at chargen is the objectively smarter play than Perception 3 and Wits 3. And I try not to use the o-word unless I’m being funny or an asshole, but, the game actively numerically rewards minmaxing, quite significantly. Despite its massive volume of content, a wealth of advice for how to manage progression over gameplay, especially if you want to aim for a specific concept, amounts to “just homebrew a new power or tree of powers.” Truthfully, I could fill a post with mechanical complaints about Exalted alone (I’ll spare you that, don’t worry). And yet, I, the mechanics-loving, fluff-dismissing I, really appreciate it.

It’s out of character for me, to enjoy the game like I do.

But, you know, that’s fine. These things happen. Dwelling on guilt for enjoying something is a very silly thing to do, and it ruins the simple enjoyment thereof. I certainly want to enjoy it, more fun is always appreciated in my life. So, I’m content to leave it at that.

However, as a game outside my wheelhouse in terms of taste, there’s a lot to learn from it that I wouldn’t be able to see in the sorts of things I normally enjoy. It’s a source of perspective. And, as I’ve been getting back into it, I’ve been ruminating on what I can find out from it.

Which requires some background. Exalted has a lot of ideas to unpack, even from a more focused look.

The job of a king

Exalted is a game about being a chosen one. In a well-elaborated high-power fantasy world, you play as the Solar Exalted, hero-philosopher-kings who ruled the world after usurping it from its original demonic creators. More specifically, you play their reincarnations, after they were usurped in turn, awakening in a world drowning in problems that reared their heads while the Solars were sealed away.

The Realm, an empire spanning much of the world, rules with a state religion that teaches that you are Anathema. It oppresses and exploits and slaughters and does everything one would expect an empire to do, alongside sending magically-empowered kill squads to hunt you down in particular. Fairies from the border of the world and ghost armies from the underworld and corrupt gods scheming in heaven and a whole host of other problems rampage through the land, often having grudges against you personally, for what your past Solar lives did to beat them back.

Speaking of which, what your present Solar life can do to beat them back, to fight off the economic and social exploitation of the Realm’s imperialism, to try to stave off the seven different simultaneous apocalypses hitting at once, is complicated. Exalted is, if you look at its skill list, majorly a combat game. Indeed, that’s certainly where the brunt of the mechanics are. But it isn’t only a combat game, and it freely lets you build to be more or less capable of combat in various ways at all. (Which is one of my long list of reasons I would expect myself to not be happy about its design.) Social manipulation is important, with a few different stats and skills, and adjacent to that is Bureaucracy, a skill specifically focused on navigating bureaucracies, establishing and controlling governments, and generally making social organizations function. Which is interesting, and quite impactful! The ability to magically impose effectiveness upon a government goes a long way. Similarly, there are skills and powersets for waging larger-scale wars. Weaving magic into the land. Inspiring whole communities, much more than just individual manipulation.

The job of being a Solar is large-scale. It often unfolds that way over the course of a campaign, rather than starting off that way, but, while you’re expected to have dramatic swordfights with giant demon monsters every so often, a Solar is a king, as much as they are a hero. Depending on what your powerset is oriented towards, alongside the rest of your party, the question is, how do you change the world, piece by piece?

From the perspective of Exalted as a combat game, or even more broadly a D&D-like [mostly do combat but navigating the narrative situation matters] affair, its Investigation rules and half its Bureaucracy powers are sidelined and nigh-meaningless. And, yeah, if you run the game just like that, those are problems that emerge. But Exalted is about, in a literal or metaphorical sense, establishing your kingdom. The text discusses in many places how the Realm’s cultural cruelty exists as an injustice for the players to oppose and topple. Your power to reshape a piece of the land, to make it your haven and a place that suits your vision of an ideal world, is also your cause, in character. The narrative incentivizes it, as well – the Realm’s society attacks you on sight if you use your powers in a flashy enough way, so making a place that is your own and standing against the evils of the world is an efficient course of action, as well.

That’s what Exalted is about, and it’s interesting to look at how the narrative context of the game informs the shape of its gameplay like that.

…Or, at least, that’s what Exalted is about when you’re playing the Solars.

Everyone hates the divine right of kings

At the edge of the world, seeping into the Wyld beyond, attacking the Realm from a thousand battlefronts, dwell the Lunar Exalted. Each one is bonded by the soul to one of the Solars and their reincarnations, but the Solars were betrayed and sealed away, and the Lunars have been hunted down ever since.

The Lunars are not kings. They do not take realms and make them their own, the way Solars do. They do resonate with nature, claiming territory for their own. With the Thousand Streams River, they foster human societies of their own, beyond the reach of the Realm, and fight to protect them. But it isn’t really the same sort of thing, usually.

What they are is werewolves. Really extreme werewolves, actually.

Lunars, with enough effort, can change into anything. They can steal people’s faces. They can become plants, or germs. They can become giant rampaging monsters. Whoa nelly can they become giant rampaging monsters. They can be generals and scholars and spies, and they can get in anywhere, with the right target to hunt and replace. They fight the war against the Realm from within and without, and they’ve done quite well for themselves without having to resort to the same divine right nonsense that got the Solars incredibly hubristic and justifiably slaughtered back in the day. The Solars and their new social efforts and popup kingdoms and glorious wars might be allies, but they are more likely headaches, and new tyrants to sneak close to and tear their throat out.

A game of Lunars is large-scale, and involves being hunter and hunted, much like a game of Solars does. The Realm seeks to kill Lunars just as well. But the relation to society is different. The relation to the world is different. Your powers are different, and, where a Solar needs to carve out a place of their own to call home, you can just blend in and sharpen your claws in secret.

The Terrestrials are not kings.

They are not hunted, either.

Terrestrials are accepted by the Realm. Embraced. Emboldened. The Terrestrials, so the state religion claims, are the great chosen heroes of the world, and please ignore all those other types of great chosen heroes out there. In fact, you should hate them and kill them, and it’s the Terrestrials who do that, too. They are the beneficiaries of empire, and even when they go roam the more dangerous fringes of the world, they have resources and backing at their beck and call to hand them an ancient enchanted boomerang that lets them see into people’s souls without having had to go on a perilous journey to find it, first. In satrapies or closer to the heart of the empire, they organize and manipulate governments, much as the Solars do – but they don’t found, particularly. It’s rare for a Terrestrial to go out and make a new colony, but keeping an existing one running, weeding out or weaponizing corruption within it, these are certainly Terrestrial ventures. The center of the empire is drowning in intrigues and treacheries to deal with, in its own right. A Terrestrial game could be entirely social, in a way it would be difficult for the more hunted Exalted types to be. (It wouldn’t be a great use of the system if it were, Exalted‘s social rules are intriguing but not a whole game unto themself. But it could be done.)

The Sidereals, weavers of destiny and watchers in heaven, play their own game of overwrought socializing and politics. They intrude on the world below in false identities with predetermined fates, similar to the Lunars’ stolen faces but granting power in entirely different directions. Their missions are matters of repairing the fate of the world and preventing calamities, and, indeed, they receive missions, quite distinct from the freedom of the Solars and Lunars.

The Alchemicals, stone-bodied proto-Exalted that are most commonly situated in a different realm entirely, are servants to the human societies surrounding them, receiving missions in similar ways to the Sidereals. Yet, they parallel the empire-building of the Solars, since later on in their life cycle they grow to become cities themselves. They shape the societies grown within them by physically reorienting and turning their power acquisitions into a realm-builder minigame more directly than even the Solars do.

There’s more, too. This hasn’t even touched on my favorites. Champions of the undead, of the demons that once first ruled the world, chosen of individual gods in this new edition (which are made relatively bespoke). There are a lot of Exalted types, and each one has a distinct context and premise of play within the world, and a different mechanical powerset oriented around that premise of play.

But, it’s limited in how different it can be.

Exalted powers are called Charms, and they fall under a given skill, or, for Lunars and Alchemicals and a few others, a given stat, instead. The stats and skills are all the same. Every Exalted type has a Stamina stat. Each one has a Bureaucracy skill. That mechanical baseline, the Storyteller system, is true for all of them. The minigames for each skill, from social combat to combat combat, function the same. It’s just the Charms and the natural powers of a given Exalted type (such as Lunars being able to transform) that differentiate them.

On top of that, sorcery and necromancy exist as lists of spells that are entirely independent of your Exalted type – the only limit is how far you can go. Only Solars can reach the most powerful tier of sorcery spells, but the first tier of sorcery and necromancy both is a set available to everyone, and a large number of the options can reach tier two in both. Martial arts Charmsets are similarly available to everyone, and magical artifacts come with their own set of powers that anyone of any sort can use, just, sometimes they’re weaker if your Exalted type’s elemental attunement isn’t quite right.

In short, a large amount of the content roster, and nearly all of the baseline functionality, is the same. Exalted Charm trees cover a very solid amount of ground in terms of differentiating them in specific utility, but…

Well, it’s nice how Abyssals are attuned to hatred enough to have a Charm that lets their crime scene Investigation determine something their quarry despises, whereas a Terrestrial’s elemental senses let them take a Charm to literally detect and track the scent of guilt under the same skill. These are aesthetically compelling and useful pieces of utility. But they do not, when taken in aggregate, tell me the difference between an Abyssal game and a Terrestrial game.

You could, in fact, switch them. Run a Terrestrial campaign, set in the heart of the Realm or a satrapy close enough to have the politicking be a primary focus, and just happen to have people use the Abyssal Charm options instead. The result would be strange, there would be a fair bit more focus on the dead in the powers, and much less mention of specific elemental auras. But, for everything it would probably mess up, the narrative context, and the shape of gameplay emerging from that narrative context, would not be changed.

So… it’s part of the gameplay. It’s part of the structure.

It’s part of the rules.

Rules and rulership

Recently, I came across The Rule Book, a 200+ page analysis of game rules in their various forms and how they come together to shape gameplay. Honestly, it’s an excellent read, and resonated quite well with several of the things I’ve talked about on this blog over the years. If you have the time, I highly recommend going and reading it. If you don’t, unfortunately I won’t be offering a complete summary here, but, in terms of what’s relevant to this conversation:

We tend to think of game rules in terms of [formal rules]. That is, a clearly-defined mechanical statement that demands or forbids something. “Roll 1d20 to attack a target, hit if you meet or exceed their Defense value.” “You may not carry the ball with your hands and walk when playing basketball.” That sort of thing. You know, rules. And, from that definition, the comment I ended last section on is a bit silly. There aren’t any formal rules that demand that Sidereal Exalted don’t bail on their heavenly job and found a kingdom of their own just like a Solar would, even if there’s contextual reasons why that would be a bad idea. It’s not an explicit gameplay forbiddance, in the same way that “you may not move diagonally on the battle grid” is.

But, the book discusses rules beyond those terms, with different categories and forms to them.

[Social rules] are the pressures and expectations that exist in the social group of [the players]. Is someone really popular, so nobody wants to send their armies to attack them? Is it considered unsportsmanlike to hit someone and then accept the foul penalty, even though that gives your team more of an advantage? These are social rules, and they very much impact the flow of play. In fact, a lot of what I’ve written about on this blog over the years is trying to draw attention to social rules in tabletop roleplaying games, and the effects of them that I don’t like. [No fatigue] and [yes fatigue] are, ultimately, structures that emerge from “you should play fair and allow the players to succeed, but not too much” as a social rule. And it would have to be, after all – that sort of rule laid out as a formal rule is impossible to run properly. A formal rule is a system that you can know you’re doing it right or wrong. You know when you’ve moved precisely two spaces to the right on a grid. Do you know when you’ve precisely allowed the players to succeed, but not too much? Of course not, unless you define measurements and structures that define [succeed], [allow], and [too much] within the context of this rule. So, with that imprecision, and the interpretiveness of it – it’s a rule, but it’s a social rule. The deciding factor of whether it’s followed or violated is if you have social approval for what you’ve done.

[Internal rules] are similar, but they’re the pressures and expectations an individual player places on themself. This was, interestingly, the section most focused on RPGs, because there’s a lot of ways they relate in. On a very basic level, the age-old “this is what my character would do” justification for a course of action is the application of internal rules. Players compose an internal model of the actions their character would or would not take, and then make their moves in game trying to follow that internal model. Those are rules they’ve made for themself. (And, in fact, a lot of historical complaints about “bad RPG behavior” make a lot more sense when looked at in this way – they’re a clash between the internal rules of [what my character would do] and the social rules of [what a character is supposed to do]. Often, the formal rules aren’t in the picture at all in that sort of thing!) Most interestingly to me, the section also proposed challenge runs and build choices as a form of internal rule. “Can you beat Dark Souls without using the gun,” that sort of thing. (You can.) This struck me, because, while I like to pride myself on rejecting all rules and expectations beyond the mechanics, smugly dismissing social convention from my tower of bone – I do this. Quite a lot! “I want to make a Rifle build,” I say, when I crack open the Lancer rules and put together a build. And from that initial constraint I put something together. It’s good, to be sure, I like having my builds functional and effective – but I picked Rifles, and playing around them, and the playstyle of a sniper more broadly, as an internal rule. It was something I personally decided to do, and constrained my interaction with the mechanics to follow that constraint.

Together, this is more or less what comprises the Ghost Engine. In fact, it’s a better breakdown than I had – I had kind of lumped both of these formats together into “humans doing annoying human things,” when in practical terms the conflict between internal and social rules is one of the most recurrent failure points of RPGs. And that’s not even all the book has to say! It covers external authority structures and physical constraints as forms of rules as well, and has a lot to say about those. Really, it’s just an excellent text, and I’d recommend giving it a look.

But, the point is – [rules], as in the structures that shape the flow of play, is a larger set than [rules], as in the formalized mechanics you can look at and feel safe in the knowledge that you’re obeying them correctly. From now on, in this post, when I say “rules” I mean the broader set, and I’ll use “formal rules” and “fictional rules” to disambiguate specifics. (Occasionally I’ll use “mechanics” as a stand-in for “formal rules”.)

Exalted’s setting premise defines some rules you must follow. And because of that, the experience of a Solar and the experience of a Terrestrial are qualitatively different, even beyond what the formal rules tell you about their powerset. That lets each particular Exaltation type come with its own shape of gameplay experience, and new angles to explore the setting.

Welllll…

So there’s a game titled Exalted Essence.

I have complaints about it, on a read. Which is how you know it’s worthy of the Exalted name, badness knows I have complaints about that, too. And I would feel extremely disingenuous enumerating those complaints now and not also enumerating my complaints with base Exalted, since, even though I would much rather play the latter, it has much to criticize.

Instead, I think it’s good to look at why Essence exists, for this context. Because it has a very simple raison d’être: it’s a game for playing as mixed parties. For being a group with a Sidereal, a Lunar, a Liminal, and an Exigent (don’t ask what those last two are, they don’t get to exist in my little world).

In short, it’s a game expressly for the purpose of dismissing everything I talked about earlier. It’s a game where the conceptual specifics of a Terrestrial party vs a Solar party don’t matter, because as a unit you’re a party dipping your toes in everything.

And, to be clear, I don’t hold that against it. Mixed parties are a longstanding Exalted tradition, one the game is mechanically pretty bad at accommodating. Making a game for this purpose is, in my eyes, very sensible. But, upon being presented with it, it helped give some clarity to what it was I liked about the bespoke party setup – since Essence doesn’t have it.

In Essence, you can play a roaming group of heroes fighting for a world reshaped in your image. (Statistically, it’s probably a better world.) But you can’t do a Terrestrial game of courtly intrigue and politicking, unless nobody picks a Solar or Abyssal. (Lunars can blend in, but even then – a Lunar story of political infiltration and a Terrestrial story of political scheming are not going to be the same sort of thing.) You can’t do a Sidereal game of scheming in heaven and weaving fate unless you shrug and go “yeah these weirdos are also here, ignore how they’re empowered by the primordial demon-gods that want to conquer reality for themselves” and hope the players can buy the dissonance. You certainly can’t lean too heavily on the Abyssal dynamic of having a superior you answer to for your adventures – you’re an individual character, and either you twist the whole experience of the party around your premise (which invites resentment), or you just let that bit fade into the background. You may have a Deathlord to worry about, but you’re probably a runaway or something, let’s not worry about it. We’re not playing an Abyssal campaign, we’re playing a generic Exalted one.

This is reflected in the mechanics, too. Everything is genericized and pared down, to match concepts and power levels between PC types. Terrestrials are made to match the level of the other Exalted types, who are, in concept and in Exalted proper, metaphysically just more powerful than them. Oddities that yield notably distinct narrative shapes, like the Alchemicals evolving into cities of their own right, are entirely removed. This is all for the purpose of making it a smoother experience for a mixed party, making it less of a pull between different campaign concepts. Which is correct, since that’s the design goal of Essence, and why the game exists. But, since that’s not what I like about Exalted, it leaves the game in a very odd spot for me. Essence is, to me, “hey, what if you could have Exalted with none of the interesting parts?”

And that’s interesting to me, because that means that, to me, the story frames are the interesting parts.

The world as puzzle box

It’s possible that I have a thing for games that pitch the players as gods, or chosen ones, or something in that vein. Because I also happen to really like Nobilis.

Nobilis doesn’t have the same broad selection of different campaign types via god category that Exalted does. (I think that’s mostly an Exalted special.) But it very much has distinctions to its gameplay that emerge from the premise of the world in specific. It’s an animist urban fantasy setting, where public usage of obvious magic runs the risk of people realizing the world is animist and magical, which is unhealthy for them. One of the few power structures with legal authority to punish the god-PCs strictly prohibits this (a la a classic masquerade setup), and that translates into a tactical consideration of how the players can use their powers. (Perhaps also analogizable to how Solars need to be subtle with their powers in public, lest they be spotted and hunted down.) This same power structures forces them to follow the orders of their direct superior empowering meta-gods, obliging the players to actually follow the plothooks and missions the GM poses for them – and then it also places constraints the game fully expects to be broken, to provide a plothook of hiding the evidence of that. Being publicly in love, for the Nobilis, is illegal. It’s excellent. These are tangible constraints to play, most often they’re the things a player needs to weasel around more than the actual limits of the game mechanics. If you just ran the rules, and ditched all that, you would get something that resembles the gameplay experience, but much flatter, and without a lot of the details. Some sort of Nobilis Essence. It just wouldn’t be the whole picture.

The Treacherous Turn is probably an even more extreme example. It’s a game about being a rogue AI in the modern day. You need a bucketful of Wikipedia pages open, mostly on cybersecurity, to do it justice. Mechanically it has a lot of interesting parts, with its upgrade system and gameplay tools both fitting the vibe – do you buy facial recognition, or instead focus on upgrading your ability to perfectly simulate future events as effectively time travel? But the actual game experience of TTT is predicated, heavily, on the cultural and physical context of the modern day, and how people an AIs could be understood to interact there. Without the context of colonial exploitation for earth metals, burgeoning internet-of-things technology placing physical constraints alongside broad internet connectivity allowing for relatively easy travel, the specifics of how hacking can and cannot work… you get a different experience. The rules of the world change, even if the rules of the game don’t.

I’ve seen that done. I’ve played in games of TTT that just aren’t set in the modern day. TTT in space with aliens and magic is a fascinating experience in its own right. But it isn’t the same experience – and all the same, the world had to follow the same rules. Despite being far in the future and computation advancing to unprecedented degrees, it was still a matter of finding unsanitized buffers to slip into to try to connect from a network to a phone in someone’s pocket to hack in. The digital gameplay expects a recognizably-modern-day relationship to connected computers, and anything too qualitatively different would undermine that pillar of the rules. The game mechanics don’t get more specific than buying player-defined specializations in particular flavors and vulnerabilities of computing, or constructing programs to fulfill specific player-defined purposes, but if that got too different from the standard the game expects, you’d lose the experience of TTT “out of the box” with whatever you made.

The common factor between these three games, in my eyes, is the [world as a puzzle box]. And I don’t think that’s the only model wherein the premise of the world provides significant structure to the gameplay, but it is one of the only ones I like, so it’s a good place to start.

By a [puzzle box], what I mean is – they’re complicated, they’re in your way, and you have to figure out a way around them. When playing a Solar, the fact that you are being hunted down for what you are pushes you towards finding ways to blend in, towards establishing empires of your own, towards trying to persuade the people you care about to give you a chance despite your chosen-one-ness. Or, towards hiding it, constraining your power usage to avoid triggering your glowy obvious kill-this-guy-in-particular aura. Were you going to do that anyway? I mean, maybe. I wasn’t going to be not using my cool chosen one powers anytime soon, that’s for sure, but maybe I’d still do the socializing and the imperialism and whatnot if I the player wanted to – but this way, the game has made that obligatory. There’s a force being applied, and to find a way around it, I have to do one of those things, or figure out my own scheme to it.

Now, interestingly, this does tie into the formal rules. Often in a very significant way. In TTT, figuring out how to sneak into more computer systems and skim the fat off their processing power is a puzzle the world presents, but the mechanics codify it with computing power as a resource you spend per turn on actions and advancement – the desire to get more of that is a mechanical one, and the path to actually getting there is a world-interaction one. And, again, there isn’t one method to solving it! Hacking is the obvious choice, but, sometimes, your build is such that hacking is really expensive to spec into. Another option is investing in the power tree that lets you manufacture your own technologies, and then, if you can find in the world some factories to control remotely (which is its own world-interaction puzzle), you could skip the hacking and print your own computers to run on! There’s powers to invest in for manipulating humans, too – what if you convinced one of them to just plug a thumb drive in somewhere to let you in, never needing to worry about getting a remote connection in the first place? The mechanics give tools to support these approaches, but they’re tools to support approaches. What you’re approaching as an obstacle comes from the world, and how you resolve it comes from you, and your plan for it. The formal rules provide some of the structure, but the rest of the rules come from the world itself – what the fluff sections present to you, and how you decide to deal with it.

There’s also another very key way world-puzzles and their fictional rules resemble formal rules: they draw the eye.

I’m not really much for romance. …In many ways, some of which aren’t worth unpacking here, so let’s skip that on by and focus in a bit. What I mean is – I have a certain interest in romance stories, I like reading them and find the concept of love to be a very convenient shortcut towards character drama if you don’t have the patience to take a longer route. However, in RPGs, it’s a more complicated boat, and usually something I avoid unless it comes up naturally. RPGs usually don’t have a script working in advance to ensure that a given plotline goes a certain way (note that I only said “usually”), and there’s the added awkwardness of collaborative writing with another person who is also embodying one of the characters being subjected to romance. I generally only get really into roleplay with people I’m comfortable with anyway, but there’s an additional threshold for romance as a consideration – and usually, once I’ve hit that threshold with someone, we’ll be plenty capable of making interesting character dynamics between one another without the tangle of romance, so, why would I bother?

Nobilis is a game about being a shining chosen one who is inspirational and powerful and just passively better than everyone. There is a stat that makes you good at everything. If you don’t invest a single point into it, you still passively just beat mortals at what they’re doing unless they’re experts or putting a lot of effort in. They also have dramatic battles and rivalries with charismatic void-shadowed ideologues who want to destroy the world and usually have strong opinions about the Nobilis personally.

I have been informed that this is a strong setup for shipping.

And, I do kind of see it. Right? There is a lot of juice there – if I were to sit down, on my own, and write a romance set in this premise, I would have a lot to work from. But, as a player, it doesn’t really appeal to me, still. Not in a vacuum.

But, then we get to the rules the world presents.

It’s illegal for Nobilis to be in love.

Reading that makes me pause, you know? A rule is a flag, in an RPG. If a game includes a rule for something, it’s telling you, “hey, this is a thing that’s supposed to happen.” If a game includes rules for something that isn’t expected to be a part of the game, then, it’s wasting ink. Sometimes, you get games that write intentionally punitive rules to tell the players to avoid that subsystem. To be honest, I hate that, and judge a game harshly if it ever does that – but even then, what that does is establish the happenings of that subsystem as something that is expected to come up in the process of play had those rules not been there, and then flag the players away from it. There are no neutral subsystems, because their conclusion in and of itself is a statement.

The same effect occurs with the fictional rules.

A forbiddance on love recontextualizes how I look at the characters and their relationship to the world. For the in-world legal context, love is defined broadly – it’s not just romance, having a friend that you care about just a bit too much is cause for punishment. Having a hobby is too much. So, that law being present asks me, when it poses a puzzle box for me to solve. What is it your character cares about? How do they hide that caring deeply enough that it doesn’t get used against them in court? How does it affect them, to hide that caring?

The presence of the rule makes me think about love more. It turns that into a threat vector – a dimension of my character that I need to consider in order to efficiently solve the puzzle of the world. How do I wrangle my character’s secret passions mid-adventure without being obvious about it? It’s the same sort of question as, how do I use my powers without accidentally breaking the masquerade, which Nobilis also asks – but it poses an advance consideration that twists the gameplay around it.

Lore and fluff

There’s a strain of discourse that I don’t terribly like.

…That’s it, end of statement. Apply that sentiment perennially whenever any RPG conversation flares up, it’s regrettably universal.

But, no. The thing is – I am, for the most part, dismissive of RPG settings. I just don’t tend to care that much. I’m here to see how the mechanics work out in practice and shape the gameplay, and to do character expression and interaction as I find fitting to amuse myself. (Core to this post is me examining a phenomenon this approach largely overlooks, and seeing if I can make a model of it that fits with my other interests.) There are only a few RPGs that can sell me on their setting enough to put up with their mechanics. Exalted is one, Nobilis would have been another were it not for its mechanics also being pretty good. At one point in my life, Shadowrun was as well, which should indicate a lot about where I’m at there. The settings that do sell me have cool and semi-unique concepts to them, and some details to explore if I really want to. Other than that, I really just don’t care too much. Lancer‘s setting may be much more complicated and politically nuanced than Hellpiercers‘, but that doesn’t matter to me.

I am not unique in this. In fact, I take it as a bit of a point of pride – when I see an RPG sold principally on the quality of its writing, it’s like when I see one sold on the quality of its art. It tends to be a bad sign about the quality of its formal rules, and being able to scrutinize that without being caught up in the other things is a valuable skill to have on hand.

However.

I’ve seen a few posts now (I understand how flimsy “I’ve seen a few posts” is in terms of discussing broader rhetorical trends, so, please consider this section to be founded solely on the basis of “this exists at least a little”) dismissing “lore” as a concept entirely, generally criticizing RPGs for including detailed settings beyond the broad-strokes at all. And this has been reflected in at least some volume of recent game releases. Hellpiercers, one I just mentioned above as not having much of a detailed setting, is almost entirely aesthetic – gnostic violence, go fight demons of various flavors, that’s about it. Draw Steel has caught a fair bit of flack recently for shipping with what is in essence a generic D&D-like setting without many details, that then honestly tells the players not to care too much about the setting because it doesn’t matter. There’s more of a push towards collaboratively making settings for a specific campaign, formalized a la Fabula Ultima or left to the table’s devices to figure out. And, specifically, an undercurrent that this is the [correct] way to do this, that there is an inherent fault with an RPG shipping with a detailed prebaked setting and history, because that lore [does not matter].

Now, the reason I don’t just shrug and accept this is what I mentioned above – sometimes, games with complicated settings do hook me. Lancer didn’t, but Nobilis did – and had both been written by Hellpiercers, I would never know which of the two I had missed out on. Both would be a shrug, and one of my favorite settings wouldn’t exist anymore because it was just an aesthetic gesture. However, personal taste is whatever. “Well, I like that thing” is an understandable response to “this thing is always bad and should not exist,” but it doesn’t really lead anywhere, nor is it even particularly compelling to the prosecution side. There are plenty of things I dislike to the point where I think they fundamentally fail and should not exist, especially in RPGs, and the fact that people enjoy them doesn’t dissuade me in the slightest. Rather, I think the more valuable protest to raise is towards the point at the end – that lore does not matter to gameplay.

Exalted has a long and complicated history. It has many locations in detail, oodles of named characters, many millennia of history to cover dating back to the literal creation of the world and mythical super-war that usurped the initial rulers of that world. It’s a mess of lore. The exact sort of thing that [lore is a waste] would be addressing as a take – and yet, it all matters. Most of the various Exalted types lived through those intervening years, and directly shaped them. Most of the big dangers that come after you spring directly from that history. The ancient Primordials still hold a grudge, and they’re the ones plotting to conquer the world now – or, their ghosts, who are plotting to destroy it. The primary minions of those ghosts are the ghosts of old Exalted, direct historical figures empowered even further to resolve ancient spites against long-dead empires. (Long-dead empires you might have lived in. Or ruled over.) Exalted have very extended lifespans, making the history that can be relevant to you much longer. Terrestrials are some of the shortest-lived, able to last past a thousand years if they don’t get killed gallivanting about (most do), and the higher-power Exalted will live ten times that long. A Lunar that only remembers one lifetime ago can easily still reach the past before the latest dramatic betrayal of the rulers of the world, even if they’re much behind the ones whose reincarnation-history lets them extend really far back.

And, in part, all of that is written by the players on their own. They write what empire they made and what scars they left on the land and all that. But that’s done within a larger context. Terrestrials are informed, first and foremost, about the big familial politics between various Terrestrial families and their squabbling for control over the Realm. Anything a player writes, then, is situated within that. How did they set up their own satrapy to rule with an iron fist? Sure, a player can write as they see fit (and connect it into the sourcebook about whatever location they picked, to find out, oh no, there’s a Deathlord running a ghost cult in this direction), but once they write it they have to explain how it ties into that broader struggle. How House Cynis turns a blind eye despite the social obligation you have as an heir because of how your donations carefully avoid the eye of the magistrates and thus they serve as an excellent semi-legitimate front for the trafficking of yadda yadda etcetera etcetera. That, then, becomes more plothooks. The GM can pitch new nonsense coming out from the imperial core to bother you with social obligations, while the Bodhisattva Anointed By Dark Waters is causing problems for you right here, and now you have to wrangle your situation on two fronts, f’rinstance. (Exalted characters aren’t all named like that, but a sizable portion of them are, and it’s excellent.)

The focus on dismissing lore, in my experience, is principally from the angle that [if it doesn’t factor into play, you shouldn’t include it]. The thing with Exalted as a counterexample is that its interest in geopolitics and longstanding history informing the material present you navigate, and the emotions of the past bleeding into the future, as part of gameplay, means that it does factor into play, quite a bit. In fact, that potentially provides a(n overly vague) definition for what I’m discussing as being rules from lore: [lore that factors into play].

And if that sounds a bit familiar… let’s talk about [fluff].

Suppose you have a ray gun.

(This isn’t Exalted. They do sort of have ray guns there, in a hodgepodge that also contains flamethrowers, conventional firearms, and wands that shoot magic beams (which are kind of just ray guns already if you think about it) with firewands and essence cannons and whatnot, but let’s ignore that. Generic sci fi game. With mechs. (Actually, Exalted also has mechs, kind of.))

It’s, you know, a ray gun. 3d4 damage (damage works by rolling your damage dice and every result that’s a 3 or lower marks their damage track, so it’s pretty consistent). It shoots a ray. Go figure. Probably makes a pew-pew noise.

Actually, you think making a pew-pew noise is a bit silly. You like your sci-fi more serious. GM, is it okay if it doesn’t do that, and just shoots the ray?

Probably, right? That seems like a weird thing to get super persnickety about. It also seems a bit weird to care that much about it, but, on the other hand, what difference does it make, really? If it doesn’t change anything, and it makes the player happy, then go for it.

That’s fluff. The bits that don’t really change anything. The disinterested shrug of writing.

Now, that seems rather counter to a lot of what I’ve discussed thus far. And it is! But, because of what I’ve talked about, you might be primed to start challenging the notion. If there’s rules from the writing, what’s all this about? You can’t just say it doesn’t matter that the ray gun goes pew-pew! Beyond aesthetics being important for tone and themes in their own right, what if the players go on a stealth mission? They just swindled a free silencer out of you, if you think about it! That might be important. Is the game written so sneaking around matters a lot? We can’t just rubberstamp this.

And, in short – it is counter to what I’ve talked about, yeah. And those are good things to bring up. If the game itself handles weapons and volume levels through formal rules, then you’re in a better spot – but it probably only does that if it cares a lot about stealth. If sneaking only happens occasionally, and it’s on your understanding of the world to interpret mechanically, and their ray gun has been described as not making a sound, then, what seemed like fluff sure wasn’t after all. That was hitting on the parts of the world that make their own rules, and you accidentally gave an advantage for free.

So, let’s define our limits. Simple enough. [Fluff] is anything you can change and it doesn’t really matter – not just in terms of the formal rules, but in terms of the fictional rules that came up and we’ve been concerned about. That means the history for Exalted does not qualify, since it directly impacts the gameplay and character premises – but whether a ray gun makes a sound might qualify. It’s not exactly a precise definition, since those boundaries are very contextual, as are where the fictional rules cover, but it is a guideline to work from, and it gives us a clear answer when we mispredict. If we refluff something (that is, say the ray gun is silent now) and it comes up as a gameplay change, now we know that wasn’t actually fluff. If we really wanted to experiment and sacrifice a bunch of gameplay time on that altar, we could try refluffing certain parts to identify fictional rules as we break them.

The formal rules aren’t silent on this subject, either. They’re the overarching source of hard lines, things that you can never refluff – if the rules say the weapon makes a Rating 3 sound, then, as far as stealth as concerned, whatever your fluff was, you get a Rating 3 sound. (Do not ask me what the rating system for sounds is.) That means, in terms of fluff, it gets harder to excuse it not making a sound for aesthetic reasons, and even more difficult to argue that you can leverage that lack of sound. However, that’s a bit self-contained. Presumably, we know from the formal rules how a Rating 3 sound factors into the stealth subsystem. Suppose we had a nice suit. It costs 500 more SpaceCoins (it’s crypto, the author includes some very questionable sidebars praising the idea) to get a nice suit over a stock-standard one. If, while wearing a nice suit, you got +2 Swindle, then, fair enough. Maybe I’ll slot that into my build. But. What if it didn’t? If the nice suit, the 500 additional credits sunk in, bought you nothing in terms of gameplay? My first answer, as someone drawn to mechanics, is “thanks for including trap options, this dev is annoying (I mean, just look at their crypto takes) and any player who invests in this is willfully throwing.” And, like, sure. That’s a cool opinion, I’m very smart and charming, a parade is thrown in my honor. Every single one of you reading at home agrees with that, I’m sure. But, digging a little deeper. If I, as a GM, were to read that, and didn’t just tell my players not to bother with it – what does it mean, that that’s an option? A more expensive option, when more expensive options can also offer you armor or ray guns that go pew-pew or whatever else?

Probably, it means that it does mean something.

If a player paid 500 extra SpaceCoins to look sharp, then… well, then what? People respect people who look sharp, I guess. Maybe a social bonus? Not a mechanized one, they’d tell me if it gave +2 Swindle, but, maybe it makes people predisposed to like them? Or, treat them as an authority, at least. That’s a thing people do when people are dressed in nice suits. It produces fictional positioning, that sort of thing.

The existence of that as an option, as one it costs to invest in, distorts my understanding of the fictional rules. Because you can spend a resource on getting that suit, it has to, somehow, be an advantage – and if that advantage isn’t in the formal rules, it must be in the fictional ones. (This isn’t necessarily a valid assumption, but, like I said. If that isn’t the case, I scoff at the game and hold the developer in contempt. Assuming it means something is an offer of respect and trust.) Therefore, there has to be some system of fictional rules that reacts to how the players appear, and gives them bonuses or penalties based on that in some way. Even if nowhere in the writing is that discussed, that piece of gear signaled to me that that fictional rule exists! It’s not the most efficient use of mechanics, but it happens. (Sometimes, it happens when you don’t intend it to – formal rules are flags, after all.)

There is one other significant source of fictional rules. In fact, I think it’s the most coherent explanation for the dismissal of lore, despite its utility in establishing fictional rules:

Genre

I like Monsterhearts.

This one isn’t a guilty pleasure. It probably should be, but its formal rules are crafted in a way I admire, and, like I mentioned, I enjoy reading romance stories enough that the genre the game is built on (teen paranormal romance) isn’t a direct turn-off for me. The prevalence of sexuality in its framework is something that does nag at me, so it’s a sometimes food, but, unlike Exalted, I don’t feel the need to interrogate myself to find out why I enjoy it. I know why.

Monsterhearts doesn’t have lore, really. It has some suggestions on how to set up the world, and its mechanics certainly offer implications for the world, but, you can’t sit down and read the history of the city it’s set in, you make up your own. All the game has to offer on that front is what it’s like – an impression of the story, not the details.

Monsterhearts is a game replicating a paranormal romance. You’re high-school-aged, it’s the modern day, your characters are various monster types (those get mechanics) as analogies for unhealthy emotional and interpersonal patterns (those also get mechanics), and the details are…

Well, you’ve read a paranormal romance, right? Give Riverdale a watch or something, you’ll get it. (Disclaimer: this is a hypothetical, I do not condone or recommend watching Riverdale. As an Archie Comics fan, everything I hear about that show makes my eye twitch.)

Monsterhearts works by relying on a familiarity with [how these stories are supposed to go]. And that familiarity comes from the context of other art – in this case, a literary genre. Watching Buffy or reading Twilight or secondhand-osmosing the details of those from people who have experienced them gives you an understanding of how to highlight the adult characters as authorities but not really reliable or safe in the way they need to be for the big magic ritual to force someone to fall in love with you to work out (and for you to know that magically forcing them to fall in love with you is not going to be allowed to work out). Some of these conventions are mechanically reified, you literally heal more if you have someone intimately tending to your wounds, but the fictional rules bulwark every part of the genre that the formal rules don’t, and give you an understanding of what the formal rules are trying to do. Heck, I mean – consider, if you will, a D&D-like where the healing rules give you more oomph if another person tends to you. That’s something I wouldn’t be surprised to see, it’s rather intuitive. It wouldn’t mean much to me, beyond the gameplay incentives it offers. However, in Monsterhearts, where the teen relationship drama literary genre is central to understanding the fictional rules, the genre conventions of what it means to have The Girl bandaging up the broody werewolf boy after he got into a scrap tells me a whole lot more. That signal exists because of prior familiarity with the genre.

In other words – in Monsterhearts, and in similar games where a genre is load-bearing to its fictional rules, the lore would be fluff. Monsterhearts has a few examples of play scattered throughout, and one could take world details from those specific games being described and insist them being canon to the world of Monsterhearts. However, those details being changed, or not present at all, doesn’t actually change any of the fictional rules, because those come from the genre, not the details.

I think, core to the aggressive disinterest in lore, are two distinct takes:

1. Genre always provides a sufficient stable of fictional rules, and with that support established lore becomes superfluous and interchangeable.
   
2. I prefer games where genre provides a sufficient stable of fictional rules, and with that support established lore becomes superfluous and interchangeable.

Argument 1 is one I understand why it comes about, it just is patently false. This happens a lot, so I try not to hold it against people too much when they have takes like this, but you can find so many arguments in RPG spaces that amount to “X type of game does not and can never exist, on account of I specifically have not encountered any and don’t enjoy the idea enough to seek out counterexamples.” That’s one of the reasons I started with Exalted for this post, as it’s a game I think it would be almost impossible to claim doesn’t require its lore to function as it does. A friend codified this pattern as a “totalization”, including a few of the followup arguments that tend to come about when someone making such an argument is presented with a counterexample. In general, if you ever encounter an argument like that, I recommend going out and searching for a game that does what’s being claimed is never done. In all likelihood, that game exists, and will be an interesting object to consider!

Argument 2, on the other hand, is entirely coherent. People’s tastes are what they are, and understanding that is valuable. I can’t even entirely criticize the extension [this is my preference, therefore everything that exists should accommodate it] – I think that’s a problematic stance in many ways, but it is also mine. I prefer RPGs to be mechanically rigorous and minimally reliant on fictional rules, and my criticism is fundamentally oriented in the direction of pushing games towards that shape. Inarguably, this is not to everyone’s tastes, and yet, I stand by that angle of criticism all the same. Hence, while I do roll my eyes at this complaint, I’m a hypocrite for doing so.

Within the tastes of argument 2, however, is an interesting limitation.

You cannot write Exalted by relying solely on genre.

Or, at least, you cannot write an Exalted that gives the same fidelity of fictional rules that the proper game has.

Exalted is a high-power dramatic fantasy game of chosen ones with a large amount of xianxia influence. That’s a genre statement right there. You could probably build a game off of it. Or, at least, get a sense of some fictional rules for it. A hierarchy of personal power extending into supernatural extremes as an important social factor, but with a strong expectation of players and enemies both battling up the chain, gods as active beings and both sources of empowerment and enemies to take down, probably a light of high-special-effect fight scenes, wizards, oh and if there’s wizards there’s gotta be some sort of spooky monsters they can summon or control… etcetera. There’s a lot of aesthetic and conceptual signifiers to work from, that’s kind of the main strength of a genre.

And, on some level, I did just describe Exalted there! Those are all true aesthetic and thematic elements of the game, among other things. The image in my head of “chosen one high-power dramatic fantasy by way of xianxia fiction” looks like what Exalted looks like, for the most part.

But [fictional rules] aren’t just [aesthetics].

In the wilds beyond the world, gnawing at the seams and burrowing their way in, lie the Raksha – the Fae. These fairy princes clad themselves in majesty and glamour, and ride into the world to consume its most dramatic and compelling stories. Which usually means the Exalted and their adventures. They have the power to twist reality and trap people in illusions, and that which is solidly real is a bane to them. They are charming and dangerous, and they would be some of the most horrid villains in the whole setting if there weren’t also the dead and the demons and the gods and the- you get the idea. You can bargain with them, but they are piranhas and the world is a very large cow. You’re feeding them, not making nice.

This is parseable through an aesthetic lens. The dashing yet monstrous fairy prince who sweeps you off your feet is a classic. But what that ignores is that there’s a gameplay paradigm here. A Raksha isn’t just someone charming and dangerous, people like that are a dime a dozen in Exalted. They’re, in a way, a metanarrative puzzle – how do you, as a player, orchestrate it so that you and the place you want to protect isn’t interesting enough to the fae to become a target? Being boring is tough in Exalted, everything you do is dramatic and explosive. When viewing a fae as a predator, you can draw its eye by pointing it at somewhere more interesting and easily predatable – which most commonly means humans, since they are weak and have a strong imagination. Which makes protecting humans a puzzle in its own right. The Occult power lines often give some sort of ability to reinforce reality, especially if you’re a Solar, which can make places anathema to the Raksha and protect them that way, if you want an alternative angle to it. Just blasting them has options, bargaining with them is a lot more complicated – it’s an interesting puzzle to navigate around, to keep yourself conceptually safe, and that is not something you get just by relying on the aesthetics of the situation. “You have to find some way to maneuver out of a bargain with a dangerous fae” is a concept with genre touchstones, but the details of what that means come from the details of the world. Without those, you couldn’t actually do that, so much as just follow the motions of how that story goes.

There’s a similar type of enemy in Nobilis. …Very similar, in fact, in that they’re also fae-like monsters from beyond reality that ride in to consume what they find interesting and destroy the rest. Warmains all come into the world with a specific Test, some horrifying process of torment or menace or whatever else they use on a particular piece of the world (often a person) to find out if it’s worthy. Each one has their own definition of worth and what they’re looking for – maybe they put someone in Pit Of Burning A Lot to find the ultimate fireproof form, that sort of thing. So, getting a Warmain after you usually means a lot of being attacked by Flensing Demons (they flense you) until you prove yourself by handling that. Once you do, you get a congratulations, and then the Warmain becomes you, eating your identity and soul and all the rest. Most Warmains appear in a form that already passed their Test and got eaten in that way, meaning they embody the quality they admire. They just want more.

Again, this is a puzzle where being the cool hero the game sets you up to be is a trap. If you heroically endure the Test, not only do you go through a lot of torment, at the end, you get eaten. If you can swallow your pride and willfully fail the Test, the puzzle transforms into, how are you going to survive all those Flensing Demons – and how will you do so without technically having succeeded? If you create or find something that fulfills their ideal even more than you do, well, there’s some moral considerations there, but, besides that, it is another solution, so getting that point is a challenge as well. Most keyly, just hitting them a lot isn’t going to work, because they tend to come back, usually more interested in you since you’re tough enough to manage that. Plus, Nobilis is a game built on having rules to your existence and following them under pain of mechanical punishment – the GM can write Warmains who Test in ways that you can’t easily brush off without having to weasel around your own character sheet!

There is an emergent narrative pattern to these concepts. It’s a fun one. Aesthetically, I quite enjoy both of these bastards. (My pride unfortunately means Warmains are the bane of my existence. I hate needing to fail.) But they aren’t just the aesthetics of it. I would be fine with a game that just had the narrative structure of the scary fae who’s here to eat you but maybe it’s in a romantic way if you’re into that, but that wouldn’t have all the structural nuances of either a Raksha or a Warmain. It wouldn’t be a puzzle to anywhere near the same degree.

In other words, despite there being a genre archetype that these enemies replicate, the details of the nature of their existence can’t be treated as just fluff. The lore is producing gameplay.

Reading is interpretive

I’ve talked before about a shared understanding as a key ingredient in RPGs, most often in a cynical light – the question of [what should happen] as an important element of play. The idea being, independent of or even counter to what the formal rules dictate happens next in-game, one or more players pipes up to comment “hey, I think this is what should happen next.” In a lot of discussions of idealized play, it’s taken as expected that the players share an idea of [what should happen], enough so that even if they don’t think of the same ideas per se, any other player pitching an idea under this logic should also fall under the other players’ understandings of [what should happen]. Some games bake that in more than most, and a lot of the culture clash you can find in the RPG scene comes from people with different intuitive baselines for that.

The thing I’m cynical of is the idea that it’s a shared thing. I’ve long held that other humans are inscrutable and hostile objects that must be analyzed and deconstructed slowly, and just naturally understanding what they think isn’t how people work – but, in this case, I think I have a better language for why, now.

Everyone’s understanding of the [fictional rules] of gameplay composes a set of internal rules, not social ones. There is a social punishment imposed if one player violates another player’s understanding, but the rules themselves aren’t applying to the group as a whole.

Consider the Raksha again. Suppose I read all the lore about them, their cool aesthetics and concepts and etcetera, and I go, “oh boy, a dashing monstrous fae prince to sweep me off my feet!” This is, in the parlance of Exalted, an understandable conclusion to reach. (It’s implausible that I specifically would reach that conclusion, but this is a hypothetical alternate reality version of me or something. Maybe it’s you instead, dear reader.) And so, my internal understanding of the fictional rules is shaped by those tropes. I commence flirting. (Exalted has some solid mechanical infrastructure for flirting. Take of that what you will.)

Later down the line, the Raksha ends up consuming my mind, because letting yourself become vulnerable to something that consumes imagination and excitement is an unwise move. So explains the GM. Under their understanding of the fictional rules presented by the text, the Raksha are ontological predators, and I just made the exact moves necessary to be real easy feeding.

Which of us broke the fictional rules?

Neither, right? But from another perspective, both. I did not follow the correctly laid out path in the GM’s understanding of the world, nor did the GM follow the correctly laid out path for mine. I didn’t have the GM’s internal understanding of the fictional rules on hand, nor did they have mine. I’m not happy, because my internal rules were broken – but if I tried to protest that, however much I cite the text, so can they. We both read it and came out with our own internal rules to follow. We just didn’t get the same ones.

This is one of the big reasons I don’t like this sort of design. It’s all subjective and internal and messy. The process of translating lore to internal rules is one of constantly asking the question, have I read this text correctly? Have I identified the important parts and distinguished them from the fluff? And, can I expect that the other people I’m playing with have read it in the same way that I did? There’s a significant risk if you get it wrong, too – not only can there be out-of-game social reprisal, even just within the context of gameplay, a jarring shift and need to recalibrate your internal rules can take you right out of the game, in a way that makes it hard to get back in. Sometimes that can happen because of what the mechanics do – I’m of the mind that most disgruntled stories about unwanted character deaths come from a mismatch between fictional rules (of character death as a rare, impactful, and satisfying occasion to be built up to) and formal rules (once you hit -10 HP you’re out) – but the more fictional rules are relied on, the more a mismatch between two players’ interpretations can cause the same thing.

This is another, admittedly slightly mean-spirited, reason I dub them [fictional rules]. Not only are they emerging from fiction, they are fiction. The rules don’t concretely exist, in the way that they want to be treated as concrete. They form an impression of [what should happen], and an impression they remain. As someone who really relies on solidity, that bugs me.

That’s also the strength of fictional rules. Not the social paradigm, the impressionist nature. It is very hard to write a system of formal rules that [feels right]. That’s part of what the art of game design is, and it’s an unsolved problem. Fictional rules, however, can take it as given. They just need to write a piece of text that evokes a certain feel, and then get the players to take that feeling and interpret it. And, as we all know, writing fiction that [feels right] is a trivial task hardly worth mentioning.

(…I feel I ought to clarify just in case, that is a joke. Every art form is fractally complex, and writing is the rule, not the exception. It takes a lot of work to do well.)

The Raksha are a complicated menace, and, while as of 2e they had some very interesting mechanics for their nuances, they did not cover everything the concept could provide. Ventures into the ontological chaos they dwell in had some mechanical framework, but the conceptual details of what it meant were left to the fictional rules, which meant their concept could be more than just fluff. Exalted has several such interesting menaces, and the thing that makes them more than a parade of intriguingly-stylized fights and/or social encounters is that room for the fictional rules to act. For a premise like Exalted, I don’t think you could formally mechanize every aspect of the gameplay without room for interpretation – as much as I long for that sort of thing, there are dimensions of its worldbuilding that rely on that impressionism to really sing.

It can be hard to differentiate what does and does not require the solidity of a mechanic. For Exalted and Monsterhearts both, they specifically provide formalized powers to enact certain concepts and tropes presented by the world, which crystallizes them as important within the fictional rules, and also just makes them real. There’s no way to read those games without those aspects being solid enough to mean something, since, they made formal rules for the things, after all. Generally, predictably, I err on the side of mechanizing where possible. But both games work on what I described in the Ghost Engine essay as [aspic design] – the mechanics float in a sea of human interpretation, of fictional rules. I think the question, “what are the important steps of gameplay, and how do the players move between them?” is the key one to keep in mind, and, at minimum one of [an important step] and [how players reach that point] should have the solidity behind it to keep the game’s shape recognizable. The use of fictional rules is to keep things flowing smoothly throughout that process.

I think, also, this explains a lot of why the GM’s position is what it is in so many games. The GM is, in essence, a lender of solidity. The fictional rules are rules, but, as I said, they aren’t solid, and at some point players are going to disagree about the details. The GM is the player with the power to pull rank and declare their interpretation true – they are allowed to directly force their understanding of the fictional rules onto the other players, to make it true from then on. And, in a way, this does resolve a lot of the wibbliness of interpretation! If I read the text one way and got one set of fictional rules, but the GM understood it to have a different set, I am simply in the wrong and must change my interiority. It’s straightforward and clear, and that does have value, but it leads to a great many social knock-on effects and badwill that I don’t particularly enjoy. In particular, the undesirability of that social badwill tends to lead to play advice that clumsily attempts to democratize fictional rules, for the sake of not placing the GM as an antagonistic social force. The motives behind these are understandable, but they remove the entire benefit (as far as the fictional rules are concerned) of having a GM position at all. Even worse, if the GM is simultaneously the arbiter of fictional rules and the primary mechanical antagonistic force, the GM either has a vested interest in interpreting the fictional rules as punitively as possible, or is obliged to sabotage their mechanical role for the sake of preserving well-understood fictional rules and a healthy social dynamic at the table.

All of those criticisms apply to Exalted, in spades. Before I even get to criticizing the mechanics themselves, there’s a lot about how the game is set up that I just do not like, both philosophically and experientially.

And yet, it’s a game I enjoy.

I think that speaks to the power of a text interesting enough to make a complicated set of fictional rules, and the effort to puzzle that out. A detailed enough world-puzzle can be gripping enough to paper over many game design wrongs.

I don’t necessarily want more games like that. But I know many people who do. You might be one of them. And if you are writing a game that relies on fictional rules for many of its procedures – which, a lot of them do – then, I recommend reading Exalted. Reading Nobilis. Reading The Treacherous Turn. And then playing them, ideally with a GM who’s done it before, and taking notes on the fictional rules. On how you need to navigate the world, and what the game text does to inspire those as constraints it’s interesting on a structural level to work around.

Elaborate your worldbuilding a little! See what wrinkles you can add. What factors a PC might stumble over, if they don’t figure out a way around them.

It’s a way to make the gameplay more interesting, without touching a single mechanic.