“Works on my machine,” or why it’s really hard to talk about RPGs

I don’t do reviews.

I’ve considered it, don’t get me wrong. It’s not as if I’m opposed to reviews as a format, or anything like that. After playing an RPG for some time, I tend to come away with strong opinions, very much encompassing what the game does, what the game fails to do, and if I think anyone should spend money on it. That’s all the necessary ingredients right there.

Every time I try to put those ingredients together, however, it ends up very anecdotal. I only have my experiences to speak on, after all, and how my personal impressions were or were not satisfied. Which parts I personally happened to struggle with, and which happened to bring me joy. By talking with the rest of the group, I can multiply that, but it still only yields perspectives on one instance of play. Any foibles or difficulties this set of individuals may have had are magnified. Are made the only thing, in a sense.

I got to play in a oneshot of His Majesty The Worm somewhat recently. It’s an OSR game of some solid popularity, talked up a fair bit in several of the circles I’m in, and with a handful of interesting mechanics to it.

To be honest, I didn’t really enjoy it much at all.

I found it interesting, certainly. And in many ways, I’d prefer interesting to enjoyable, in the context of trying out a game. But, the parts I had hoped to be more central (card-counting in combat and out to manipulate odds) proved to not be terribly impactful, the combat’s rules served their purpose and didn’t do much more than that for all their theoretical levers, and the general gameplay experience was a slog through a dungeon with primarily one player calling the shots while everyone else murmured assent to go to the next room.

…All this is, of course, intended. It’s more or less how it’s supposed to be. In OSR spaces, the dynamic of having one more boisterous player as the shot-caller is actively codified and supported, as a natural and efficient way to bypass the question of getting a whole group of players to agree on a single direction with relative frequency. The combat system, for all its complexities in theory, is in practice intended to still provide an open vessel for “I’d like to try something tricky to get an edge here” style angles, and otherwise straightforward hitting gameplay is just a matter of considering what card to use for defense. Spellcasting is costly, tricky, and rare, so the fact that I never ended up needing to use a single spell is just a mark of efficient gameplay.

“It does what it wants to, I just don’t like it” isn’t a particularly enthralling or substantive opinion. I’m not sure it qualifies as criticism at all. The closest it is to something is praise – which is more or less where my assessment of Worm has shaken out. Dismissing my not-terribly-useful personal feelings, a game doing what it wants successfully is a triumph of mechanism design, if nothing else. If asked my thoughts on Worm, unless someone actively means my personal emotions, my diplomatic answer is that. If you think you would like the pitch of the gameplay, the OSR play dynamic set up in this way, then you will probably like this game.

“If you think you would like it, you will probably like it” is somehow even more useless.

Complaints, now, those I can do a bit better. Hellpiercers has become one of my go-tos for discussing games that fail in ways that are easy to pinpoint and criticize. (This is perhaps an unfair pick, but, so it has gone.) My playgroup came away with many frustrations, but the biggest were the most straightforward and objective they could be: certain powers that produced instakill terrain outclassed almost anything else you could spend your time doing, and one weapon in particular dealt 5-6 times the damage of any other. Missions to kill bosses were trivialized, as were most major enemies in any other mission. After an errata, the instakill terrain no longer functions, and the weapon has been nerfed to around 3 times the damage of every other weapon. Still shockingly unbalanced, but, at least, steamrolling an encounter will now maybe take around twice as long.

This is also speaking to a subjective experience, mind. The social group I’m in with my fellow players make jokes every so often about the progressive heightened emotions throughout that short campaign about the particular imbalanced weapon I was using. However, it’s also something it’s a lot easier to report and corroborate. There’s numbers here. Something solid and objective to work with. “Here are the knock-on effects of dealing way more damage than expected” may be a bit muddled, but “this deals way more damage than expected” is provable. You don’t need to take my word for it, you can look at the weapon yourself (if you happen to own the game). That’s a criticism I can be confident in.

It’s rare, though. Most games don’t have really big numbers problems like that – and small numbers problems are a lot more subjective in how much they’ll end up mattering. If I tried to limit myself to that, then I’d end up back where I started. Most games, I’d have very little to say about.

So, that’s an interesting little dilemma.

Running the show

All art is subjective. But RPGs are, often, in a league of their own.

For the sizable majority of TTRPGs, you have a GM managing everything. Almost invariably, that position comes with interpretive and creative labor of its own. The GM figures out how the rules work, how they fit together, and what (eg battlemaps, NPC concepts, etcetera) needs making to make it all cohere in one piece. That GM, of course, is only a player, with the same books as everyone else. (Potentially the other players are deprived of a few confidential ones, but the point is the same – all they have is the text, and their prior expectations and experiences with the medium.) What decisions they make, and where, will vary considerably. And, fundamentally, it will shape much of the experience of everyone involved.

One of my larger but less objective critiques of Hellpiercers is of its objective rules. Rather, its lack thereof. It presents the notion that a given fight has the goal of eliminating one given enemy, or destroying a structure, or what have thee. Our GM had to make assassination targets specially immune to instakill terrain, as a parameter of the mission, to hold back my nonense. She also had to decide what enemy to make the target of the assassination in the first place, and what the map would look like to get there. When the time came to destroy a structure, she guessed an HP value entirely arbitrarily, for lack of any guidance. A few hundred, she settled on, considering how much damage I was putting out. A value it would be impossible for any set of builds to hit within the round timer (another thing she had to arbitrarily create), except for the one weapon I had that dealt way too much damage.

Had the GM been different, had the same GM made different choices, the game experience would have been notably distinct. The mechanics themselves would not change – “Ambiguous Intentions deals far too much damage and overshadows the other weapon options” would be just as true – but the experience of gameplay, and what other complaints may or may not have come up, would vary a lot. Depending on the game, the balance of abilities themselves could shift. In Lancer, a significantly better game in the tactical-grid-combat milieu, how much terrain and cover a GM puts on their maps changes whether cover is likely to be a common defense people have access to. I see many calculations of expected damage done by people who presume cover never or rarely factors into the equation, leading them to rely on inaccurate weaponry more than is true to my experience of the game. But, that’s only true to [my experience of the game]. For those that play with minimal terrain, it’s my expectations that would be off.

Which leads to another thing. My way is, in this case, better. Or… both more interesting and more expected by the design and developers of the game. Lancer is made with the expectation that cover is common and navigating an area requires more thought than moving in a straight line through a roughly-blank map. The gameplay is improved by the added complexities of such a thing. But, how does that factor into a critique, then? I can say “well, you’re just doing it wrong” to someone with an empty map, perhaps, but that isn’t all that useful. I can try to persuade GMs to use more terrain, as a matter of improving their skill at running the game, but that’s ultimately something they have to build their own set of tastes and best-practices for, and that is subjective based on their personal interests. (Which is the muddle with GMing as a whole, here.) I can criticize the game based on how well it does or does not communicate how the GM should run the game, perhaps, but that’s a presentation critique rather than a design one – worth consideration, certainly, but not at all where my interests lie.

The final possible angle, my natural state, is to criticize a game for every section wherein the GM’s subjectivity meaningfully alters the game. The more universally-consistent the game can be between tables, the better.

But, that’s an ideology. Worse, it’s a preference. In essence, it reduces to “I want games that are how I like games to be, and will simply dismiss games that fail to be that.” For my own personal use, that’s fine, if a bit snooty. But for critique? For something to be presented to anyone other than myself? I don’t think that’s good at all. We’ve circled back around to the earlier problem.

As with earlier, though, I kind of have to say it.

I have been running Exalted recently. 3e. It’s a game with a very unique setting that appeals to me, in a way that it’s rare any game does. It’s a good thing, too – the system brings me very little but grief. The game demands detailed mechanization for any given relevant NPC, with the only rules for that being to use the PC creation rules up through the relevant power scale they reach or to make it all up yourself, idiosyncratic abilities included. The numbers scaling mean the PCs face very little resistance from most of the world, save for when the GM decides that figuring out a given random fact is probably difficult enough to be nigh-impossible for a normal person, for whatever reason. Even worse, most of the uses and subsystems end up abstracted and relatively ignorable, and how to situate combat and its stakes is entirely dependent on one’s interpretation of the setting. The only saving grace thus far has been the interesting-and-decent social manipulation system, something the vast majority of games utterly ignore – and that has also been the majority of the mechanical interaction people can meaningfully justify or model for themselves. Several skills have their own long-term project rules that amount to rolling a bunch and letting the GM figure it out. Overlapping with that set, several skills are on a gradient from contextual to almost entirely useless. It would be trivial to build a useless character aggressively invested in options that don’t meaningfully contribute to anything – and, one of the stated expectations of the game that the GM will then work to make those skills relevant enough to justify the build.

In a sense, idealized Exalted GMing willfully distorts the world to make relevant the particular skills the players invest in. This, for my skills and interests as a GM, is a massive headache. The primary coping mechanism I have had is complaining alongside my players, who are also unimpressed by most of the system, and focusing on the part we find compelling – the setting.

And for all the fatigue that went into the prior paragraphs, it is, at best, a subjective critique. There are GMs who would not struggle where I have, and ones who would struggle in places I find easy to manage. Not mentioned are the notes of character premises and the overlapping schemes they are acting out in each space the players enter. This is because it is not difficult at all for me to do, and is conceptual labor engaging with the part of the game I like. The only tiresome part is having to eyeball stats, because the NPC rules give me little to work with. For a GM who is bad at conceptualizing a large set of characters with intertwined melodramas and magical plots between them, this requirement of running Exalted could plausibly be a stronger barrier to success than any of my mechanical complaints! Is that not a worth critique to bring up, just because I personally don’t have that problem?

But, then, do I need to imagine every possible GM skill that would go into running the game, to form that critique? What about my blind spots, the things I just take for granted? And even besides that, we’re once again criticizing any part of a game that requires the subjective GM to make work.

“It works on my machine”

…is a concept in bug reporting for computer programs, mostly as a [what not to do].

The series of events is simple. Someone, running a program, encounters a bug or error. They report it to the developer. The developer, following the same behaviors as the reporter, does not encounter the same bug. In other words, “well, it works on my end.”

The reason this is a [what not to do] is that it’s obviously not the end of the story. Was the person who encountered the bug using different hardware, or a different operating system, or running something else at the same time? These factors matter, and ideally that information is included in the report. Replicability is important for understanding problems, but if it’s not replicable, that doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist, only that you don’t understand it. “It works on my machine” is a sign there’s something deeper you need to figure out, but it’s not an answer. Not on its own.

Of course, in RPGs, it’s a sentiment I’ve seen often. “Oh, well, that goes fine when I run it.” Primarily in response to the sort of subjective-result critique from above, but secondarily also to questions of game flow, of player understanding, and other such “how did this feel/how difficult was this to enact” type questions. I find it to be a rather uncompelling response, in the same way as it is in bug reporting – but there’s an interesting difference here. In terms of GM subjectivity, the implicit commentary is, rather… the GM should be able to make this go fine. A computer running a program wrong is not a subject of serious judgement, obviously that won’t fix the bug. A human, however, can absolutely be blamed for their choices and the results thereof.

“A GM should be able to do this and make it run, so, this is an invalid complaint” isn’t quite the same as “a computer should be able to do this and make it run, so, this is an invalid complaint.” In that computers have no ‘should’, and no capacity to learn or change. For an RPG to lean on its subjectivity, to some degree, “the GM must be able to do X set of things competently (for a given definition of competently, specific to this game) to make this work” is not only a coherent statement, but a necessary one.

But, on the same token, I didn’t write all those complaints about the experience of running Exalted to conclude with “mea culpa, I should just get good about it.” And I wouldn’t consider it fair to expect the same out of anyone else.

I think “it works when I run it” is both necessary data and a useless response to criticism. Similarly, I think “this doesn’t work when I run it” is kind of a useless bit of data to someone who does know how to run it correctly, but an understandable form of criticism – and, potentially, room for a teaching moment. For conveying “this is how I run it to make it work,” or, perhaps, “this is how it’s supposed to work, try to do what you need to to make that happen.”

“This is how it’s supposed to work” is another muddle in critique, one that I’ve been on the impolite end of myself. In fact, it’s exactly what I ran afoul of in Worm. The experience wasn’t great, for me. It was also, exactly as it was supposed to be. I am of the mind that this kind of dampens my critique down to nothing – but, is that not valuable data, for someone who also would not enjoy that experience? When an acquaintance grumbles about how long turns take in a complex tactical game, and I respond by salivating over all the choices and complexities that reflects, does it become unfair for them to call the experience a slog? I don’t think it does, really. It just means, after composing those critiques, the conclusion has to be different.

In other words, I suppose, the only meaningful form of review I can envision doing would have to end up mealy-mouthed. Discussing experiences, joys and struggles, and then sorting them all into what conclusions can be reached about them, with very few actually ending up as critiques of the game itself. This sort of enjoyment is an expectations mismatch – you have to expect OSR gameplay if you’re coming to Worm, and you have to want it. This part of the GMing struggle is an expected skill – you have to be able to do this well, or it won’t work on your machine. Only the objective pieces, the straightforwardly-imbalanced damage of Hellpiercers, can actually touch on the question “does this game work or not?”

As a complainer, I don’t think the result would be very good. If I tried to write something like that, I imagine it would come off restrained to the point of corporate. I couldn’t even talk about the games I like well. In my eyes, this approach is essentially a dead end.

So, I don’t do reviews. This blog, and my chats about RPGs elsewhere, have willfully kept a handle on the subjectivity of things. I value my perspective, and I think it’s important for understanding anything I share or have to say. Judgement is just an extension of perspective – I can’t filter that out. I can tell you that Worm is probably a solid game, but I can’t give details on what I think is good. For my interests, none of it really did the trick.

For the purposes of recommendation, that’s usually good enough.

Fixing it in post

GMing subjectivity is actually a worse problem than I let on.

Everything I wrote above was taking one precept as given. The GM is running the game as-is, without meaningful alterations beyond where the game puts empty space to connect things together.

That’s very often not the case.

People homebrew things. A lot. A shocking amount, to my expectations, really. People will change or add to games long before they see whether they actually need to, often for the worse. That’s kind of just how it is. Games will expect that, to a greater or lesser degree. Exalted actively demands it, for designing NPCs, and all the more for designing new PC abilities as they design their own or build some magic items or the like. Lancer changes when the GM is light on cover in their maps – think about how it changes when a new batch of weapons are added to the mix? When NPCs that hit harder than the base ones appear? When you can just take a mech that erases all cover from the map? These will shift the balance of things radically – even those objective details I was so precious towards earlier. Hellpiercers could be so much more balanced, if you just introduce rules that hard-counter this one overpowered weapon down to the little leagues. (It would still have other faultlines of balance, the game has several problems, but it would be much less extreme.)

What do you say, then, when the reason someone encounters a bug is because of something they homebrewed up? Or, heck. What do you say when the game doesn’t work on your machine, and the answer you get is “oh, that works fine for me, I just modified the game like so”?

(If you’re me, you get peeved. But let’s imagine you’re someone with a bit more social graces to your name.)

I’m of the mind that, for a review, you have to avoid doing that. You’re here to take the game as it is, and respond as such. [As it is] is inherently subjective, because the machine it has to run on is a set of humans with interpretations and weaknesses, but, the more you change, the less you can speak to the game that anyone else is experiencing. And that’s what talking about a game has to be trying to do, I think. If what you’re saying can only ever be true for yourself, then, what’s the use in that?

(There might still be a use, actually. Artistic purposes, the expression of self and one’s experiences, providing anecdotes for people actively in the market for anecdotes. I don’t think it shouldn’t be done, per se. But as a review, it’d be a flimsy one.)

All this has been on my mind because I’ve been pondering fixing things in post, myself.

Not for my Exalted game. The group is invested in seeing the game as it is, and sharing complaints about it, so we’ve let things sit. Dismissing stunting is the only actual rules change I’ve made, and I ran that by the players first after they also started getting fed up with it. (And even that change, inarguably, means the experience we’re getting is different from base Exalted!) But I have been pondering, as I spend time with it and Glitch, what I do and don’t like about games in that vein of play, and how I would design one of my own that attempts to resolve some of the wider plains of GM subjectivity therein.

The result is that I’ve been working on a game of my own, something like a World-of-Darkness-like with a definite structure for “this NPC is doing this set of magic nonsense to change the world for the worse, go stop them.” Immediately, of course, structuring that is making a statement. For a GM who can conceptualize that on their own – of which I am one! – this is solving a problem that is already solved. It’s building a bypass for a segment that already works on their machine. But, it’s where I’ve been pondering.

I think that’s one of the big virtues of game mechanics. They ensure a consistency between GMs, and beyond the context of GM skill. Even if the subjectivity isn’t fully squeezed out, it takes homebrew to do a mechanic wrong.

You have troubles, still, even with an excellent mechanic, of fitting it in a wider world. Exalted is an extreme end of “augmented freeform” gameplay – the mechanics are all there to accent a baseline of just doing freeform play back and forth, picking up rules only as they’re invoked. Within that freeform, I’ve been struggling to have combats sensibly appear at all. So, for my thoughts on a fixed-in-post game in that vein, the freeform has to go. The structure is all you’re working in.

It’s trivial to conceptualize a mindset where that isn’t “fixing” the game, but “breaking” it. The freeform navigation is an appeal, and, for contexts with the subjective skill to manage it well, a pillar in its own right. Which defines a bound for the appeal of the game – it’s for players who don’t want that freeform exploration, or who struggle to make it work. Wherever one considers a [legitimate review] to fall, whether “this does not work for or appeal to me” is a legitimate criticism or not, it’s good to know that in terms of who to recommend a game to.

What I’m working on is, primarily, a game I would recommend to myself. Reliant on my strengths (the ability to think of several conflicting dubious schemes at speed, and the mental back-and-forth of arguing whether a given esoteric ability can address a given obstacle) and using structure to bypass my weaknesses. I’m trying to be cognizant of it as I develop, but I think it’s inevitable that the result is a game that will work on my machine, and therefore that I’ll struggle to connect with mindsets that don’t work like mine. To be honest, I have no idea how different the game would look when run by someone who isn’t me.

For any game that has any significant amount of interpretation, or wiggleroom within its structure, it’s kind of the same way. I suspect that’s inevitable.

It also makes RPGs really hard to talk about.

Genre emulation, or “how can birds be real if our eyes aren’t real”

I’ve had a really longstanding game project on the back-burner for many years now, long enough to have gone through several iterations of “now that I know more about game design, I need to scrap all of this and start over from the base concept”. It’s called Draw Your Last, and it’s specifically built to emulate card game anime. (By which I mean, “I watched Yugioh Duel Monsters and the first half of 5Ds and really liked them.”) In the last few weeks I have once again pulled it out from the pile and started chipping away at a new draft, and, with the benefit of once again getting to examine the first principles I’m building the game from, I wanted to talk about them, and how they can inform how you form your own concepts of games to build.

In short, the premise of Draw Your Last is an opinion shared by I and my sister: that card game animes rule and the drama and heroic willpower and battles of conviction are amazing, but actual card games are miserable to play and work nothing like that. At least that last point is true: if you’ve ever sat down to play a game of Magic with someone, and held within your heart a burning conviction to win, well, that doesn’t really mean you do win, now does it? That’s down to what strategies your deck is built with, and what luck you get in draws and effects and blunders on both sides. Which is, y’know. How you’d expect a multiplayer competitive game to work. Dare I say, how you’d want it to work.

But not if you’re trying to build a story about it.

See, in a card game anime, there’s a whole lot of waffle about the heart of the cards, and how your deck is a manifestation of the friendships you’ve made and the ways you’ve grown, and you can demonstrate how you’ve learned to use your power for good and not hurt the people you care about if you just draw the one symbolically-relevant card that happens to finish up your combo and assure a win, and what a surprise, you do. When I say I want to make a card game anime rpg, that’s what I mean! That, to me, is what makes card game anime cool, and what I’d want to build a game to emulate.

That’s not everyone’s take.

(It’s certainly not something my card-game-enjoying friends appreciate, when I tell them I think their fun hobby is boring and sucks and needs more speeches about the power of friendship.)

That’s the big trick of genre emulation. It’s about identifying your take on what makes a given dynamic tick, and building for that. I’ve seen a handful of other card game anime rpgs here and there, and while none of them are ones I particularly like for my take, they’re clear about what their own take is! Sometimes they’re building specifically for tournament arcs, sometimes they’re trying for a more casual “just two friends playing cards (while still having speeches about friendship)”. sometimes they’re actually directly in opposition to my thing and trying to build the direct feel of playing a card game. All of those are neat, and, if you were to set out to make a card game anime game (gotta love turning nouns into adjectives to get nonsensical strings like that), they’d be fair approaches. If they were what you wanted. But they’re not what I want, which is why I’m setting out once again to make this one.

This is, I find, the biggest stumbling block people have when discussing and recommending games to each other. (Especially people with little games literacy.) They’ll be able to go “got it, this is [insert genre]” – y’know, like, “got it, this is fantasy”, “got it, this is horror”, “got it, this is a paranormal romance”, they’ll be able to read narrative signifiers and look at the cool art and figure out what the genre is, but not the structure of what’s going on. Not the most important question. How is this genre being emulated, what bits of it are, and how.

Genre is an arbitrary categorization for reader convenience. It’s not actually a real thing.

Which means you’ve got the surprise homework of understanding what you actually want to emulate, in order to emulate it.

There’s an old CGI show that I really really love, called ReBoot. It’s mostly a kids show, with a fun episodic premise for the first big chunk of it, and it’s a concept that, every so often, I feel the urge to try to put to dice and paper. (When all you have is a hammer, every interest looks like a nail, okay? This is just how I enjoy things.) The concept of ReBoot is that it’s set entirely inside of a computer, called Mainframe, with the main characters being somewhat-unclearly-defined parts of that computer as people called Sprites. Other than being, say, blue and with metallic hair (there to flex the bleeding-edge ability to kind of render reflections, ish), they’re more or less just people – one of the main characters runs a diner, and has episodic shenanigans and not-intense-enough-to-mess-with-the-kids-show-dynamic romantic tension with the charming trickster hero here to protect the place from the evil computer viruses. (The viruses are amazing. Banger characters. Really all of the characters in this show are amazing.)

…Right, sorry, I was going somewhere with this. This isn’t just an excuse to gush about the show.

One of the big overarching dangers in ReBoot is the threat of games. (This isn’t going anywhere meta, I promise.) Essentially, whenever the user wants to play a video game, a big apocalypse cube descends from on high, and consumes a whole chunk of the city. Unless the citizens from that chunk manage to fight the user off, they win, and then that whole chunk of the city is destroyed and everyone who was caught in that game is dead. Which is a hell of a premise! And it’s a big part of what said charming hero is here to do – dash into games as they come down, play them well enough to make the user lose, save the day. Throw in tension with said diner-owner and her precocious younger brother, and whatever shenanigans the viruses have decided to get up to this week, and some now-outdated pop culture references, and you’ve got a solid episodic format for a show.

Gamifying that formula can go in a lot of different ways, really, depending on how you wanna do it – rotate the players through various “power sources” of what kinds of shenanigans occur, one getting to be a game, one getting to be one of the viruses, one getting to be the dissatisfaction in one of the main characters prompting them to do something dumb with catastrophic consequences, use that as a scenario-builder, then go through a codified series of steps to guide the roleplay of fixing that scenario, for instance. Focus specifically on dealing with games as the primary mechanical space, with something like abstracted node-map combat/control rules for fighting against the user and keeping them at bay, with the sections outside of games being more framing sequences. Specifically running a virus as an automated boss fight where one player has to do a territory-control phase to manage their infection of the city, one player has a social dueling game to charm them and keep them distracted, one player has a stealth game for sneaking through their base and stealing the terminal window they have open or some such, etcetera. There’s a lot of things in this format you could point at and go “that, there, that’s what I want to make”, and build for that!

But, see, I’ve buried the lede a bit. ‘Cause ReBoot takes a turn at the end of season two. The rather-routine x-files reference turns into a bit more than it bargained for when a full-on nightmare alien from murder space (the web, as opposed to the cool space of other bigger city-computers called the net) shows up, and then opens a portal in the sky to said murder space and now there’s a whole army of nightmare aliens attacking the city. Which, as you can imagine, puts the status quo on pause! Everything becomes a battle for control of the whole city, with the viruses working with the heroes to fight off the nightmare aliens, and none of those game ideas built for the old format would work. You could totally make a new thing for this! A system-structured war game about battling for territory, maybe actually using more literal computer architecture than the show used, with different kinds of powers for retrofitted command programs and for computer viruses, fighting together against invading code-monsters, could absolutely be a neat game, and I’d love to see that, but it wouldn’t really be what the rest of the show was until now, now was it? And a game that encompasses both wouldn’t really be good at either.

That’s not the end of the story, either. This is where the show gets wild.

At the end of the invasion, right before they seal the portal murder space, the evil virus who’d been allying with the heroes betrays them (shocker) and full-on launches the cool hero main character into said murder space. Which then closes. Leaving a season finale where the protagonist is fucking gone. And next season is not his cool adventures in murder space, no no! It’s still in the computer world, exploring how rapidly things go to shit without him. ‘Cause he was the only one fighting off the viruses well! So suddenly it’s another war of control, and we follow the kid sidekick character as he tries really hard to fill the shoes of the old protagonist, and fails.

He fails hard. Like, he full-on loses in a game, which, if you recall, kills you. Which is a traumatizing moment for the now-dwindling cast of characters for sure. But we do follow him thereafter. Thanks to some prior shenanigans involving an actual AI (which is distinct from a Sprite), he manages to survive losing the game by changing himself into also the form of an AI and “riding” the game out. The game then goes to a different computer (this is how video games work in real life, trust me, I know what I’m talking about), and he gets out there. And now it’s a quest of hopping games and exploring new computers to find his way home. Which, remember, his home thinks he’s dead.

Also he becomes turbo-ripped and becomes an edgy badass who calls himself a “renegade, lost in the net” and he has an actual gun and the gun has a name, the gun’s name is gun.

I fucking love this show.

This is a hell of a shark-jump. And it makes for a whole new status quo for the show! A badass one! It’s now a matter of hopping between whole new computer worlds, some of which are fucked up in various ways and heavily overtaken by a virus or some such, and using the games to transport between them. That, too, is its own cool setup you could build a game around. A concrete rhythm of “here’s a new computer world, go explore it and solve its problems and find out what’s going on with it” to then riding a game out of there, and once you leave a world, you proper leave it all behind? That’s absolutely a gameplay rhythm you can mechanize, and a balance of how much you wanna focus on the games vs the computers is a valid question no matter what your answer is. But, all that stuff we talked about earlier for a ReBoot game? None of it meshes, because so much of it is about your interaction with the computer-world and how it changes over time, not leaving it all behind with each step! Could you make two similar-functioning games with different focuses for that? Yeah, but the same game wouldn’t fit.

Eventually, we meet back up with the old protagonist stranded in murder-space, and there’s some scary space adventures, and once they get back to their home computer, there’s a big ol’ war for control with the virus who conquered the whole place essentially unopposed, and it’s also really cool and you should watch it. I’ve already spoiled a bunch of what happens, but trust me, it’s cool as hell, the first three seasons of this show are a fantastic watch. And, again, this can kinda be lined up with an earlier game concept for this – it’s the same war for territory-control against the viruses premise, just much higher-stakes and with a harsher tone. (And, naturally, the stakes and the tone are things that affect how you build a game.)

But, the point is, given all that… how would you build a ReBoot game?

You wouldn’t! ‘Cause that’s a lot of totally different things that that show does, and it has explicit moments where the formula and status quo changes. You could easily have two or three completely different games that line up with one particular status quo of this show, and then get a whole new batch whenever it pivots. And any one of those could do great for the specific status quo they’re trying to emulate and what parts of that they want to focus on, but put them in the other dynamics and they sure don’t align well.

That’s the thing with trying to emulate a genre, or a show, or what have you. There’s always gonna be moments like that that fundamentally change the game, one way or another. Usually not as extreme as ReBoot‘s, but, that’s why I picked it as an example! Sometimes they’re not really great, or they’re just not done at all – Leverage‘s season with Damien Moreau as an overall arc villain, a big change from their usual format, kinda just… forgets about him, such that in the finale when they do actually take him out he has no idea who they are, but if they had proper committed to the whole season being about targeting and taking out one big guy, well, that’d be a lot different from the episodic stuff! You could do it with an episodic game, with just handwaving the impact each individual caper does on the big bad as just a lead-in into the next one, but actually playing up the “taking down an empire” premise and dealing with inter-episode backlash would be its own neat thing! It’s a different status quo, and thus, the potential for a different game.

What composes a “genre” is a difficult question, in part because it’s actually a nonsense one – genre is a categorization for readers, not for writers. They can be useful aesthetic shorthand, and communicate a sense of tone, for sure, but as designers, it’s important we expand and analyze all the shorthand we use. The same comes from wanting to make a game “like [insert X other piece of media]”. You have to analyze the core structure of how that media flows, and then decide which parts you think are important and you want to emulate. A ReBoot game specifically about the cool computer-hopping with a gun is a separate beast from a ReBoot game about the desperate territory war with a rampaging computer virus. A card game anime game about tournament arcs where everyone is coming in with their own dream and it’s up to the cards to see who reaches it is different from a card game anime game where a small friend group challenge a man who would become god to save the city he rules with an iron fist. They’ve got different dynamics, different needs, and thus, different mechanizations that would be right for them.

As for which choice is correct, well, that depends entirely on what you prioritize! And your audience is gonna be the people who also look at the media or genre you’re emulating and go “yeah, this is the bit that’s important”. (Or, at least, that agree that it’s important enough to want to try out the thing you made.) That’s the actual meaning behind what “genre” something is – what dynamic you choose to make most important in it.

So, yeah!

So what was up with Champions?

So, I had a chat with my dad a bit ago, and, as our conversations are wont to do, it turned into ranting about tabletop roleplaying games. Specifically, as it had been on my mind lately, I expressed my retrospective bafflement at what exactly Champions, a superhero rpg that honestly doesn’t feel much like that, thought it was going for, when it so clearly did not capture anything that accurately modeled superheroics.

In response, my dad brought up a different game of the era, Villains and Vigilantes.

In Villains and Vigilantes, he explained, the characters begin as unpowered humans, and, they don’t know what powers they’ll get at the first session. They’re completely randomized, character creation is of the mundane stats and whatnot. This, obviously, makes it hard to plan things out or build up expectations, and, notably, it’s absolutely not an accurate portrayal of what superhero comics are like to read, nor does it mesh with a writer’s perspective of the same.

What it is emulating is the experience of the characters. Plenty of origin stories are things the character has no idea is coming, and, like, if you’d asked Peter Parker what superpowers he would imagine himself with, he probably wouldn’t say the athletic capabilities of a spider. Once that occurs, what you end up with is definitely not what superhero stories are like when there’s, y’know, a team of writers and a universe to create and play with that are planned around what is planned to happen, but that beginning step, the panicked confusion phase and awkward working out of how one’s powers work, that’s what it’s trying to capture.

Which brought us back to Champions. What Champions is trying to capture isn’t a character experience, but an audience experience. (I think those are the three obvious categories to fit things into – is this a thing that lines up with something the characters experience, something the audience experiences, or something the writers experience? Usually, it’s a mix, but it’s a mix with priorities and focuses.) Specifically, it’s going for the kind of audience experience that does distill superheroes down to a list of powers from generalized types.

It’s power-wiki fannishness. Who-would-win-in-a-fight fannishness. The approach of going “we’ll consider this person’s powerset to be Level X Energy Blasting, Level Y Energy Shielding, Level Z Physical Shielding, etcetera”. And, obviously, the upshot of this is you don’t really get something that fits the flow of superhero comics, and it especially stumbles into the problem that, lukewarm take alert, “who would win in a fight” is boring and dumb and the answer is, especially in superhero comics, always “whoever the plot/authors want to win”. So, this didn’t really increase my respect for Champions as a game. But it did make it more understandable to me, and, I think, for that as being the angle of what it’s trying to do, it’s not so bad at it.

This then came back to how we got on this topic. I’d been reading through Legacy, and was talking about some of its design decisions, and how while it looked pretty well-composed, it didn’t really thrill me to read. (Which is a far less tangible response, but, so it goes.) Being a writer, and as scornfully opinionated as I in his own way, dad presented his take on the various PbtAs he’s encountered as mostly being built from an authorial perspective, but, as he put it, a bad one. Specifically building things from “and then here’s what happens because it’s the plot beat this character archetype would cause”, like someone writing solely from having read tvtropes. I’m of the mind that this is a bit unfair, but, I do think it catches a bit of the thing with move design there – it’s making “here’s a thing that this character archetype does that affects the plot” into the explicit mechanics of it, and so the structure of the game and what approach it’s trying to emulate becomes building the arc of a story built around things like that. The comparisons to prestige tv writing have resonated the most with me there.

Cool! Now let’s talk about me

It’s been bandied about a few times, for good reason, the advice that to design a game you must capture the vision you’re designing for. What do mech battles look like and mean to you, and what parts do you want to emphasize? What about card games? Whatever your game’s premise, everything you mechanize is something you claim to be capital-i Important. I think part of the core of capturing this vision, as well as clarifying and extrapolating upon it, is determining the cocktail of perspectives it is from.

To use myself as an example, Draw Your Last, a game which is in progress but technically fully playable, is a card game anime rpg I’ve been working on for several years, and, at times, struggled with quite significantly. Specifically in this regard. What I’ve settled on, vision-wise, is in contrast with every other card game anime rpg I have encountered – there aren’t very many out there, but, there are a few interesting notes.

Specifically, most ones I encounter emphasize, as I aim to, the large thematic and motivational stakes present in any given card game. This is something that exists in all three perspectives – the writers must insert high stakes, often literal life or death, to give the card games “legitimacy”, the audience, similarly, is rarely there wholly for a play-by-play of card games, and the characters are obviously most invested in their own motivations being in conflict. Some of the games I encountered, one in particular, is there to construct a play-by-play of a card game – it operates one level of abstraction above simply building its own Yugioh-alike, and is explicitly made for the target audience of genuine card game players watching such an anime, those who would enjoy recognizing the specific strategies at play from a real-world card games perspective. This is, essentially, similar to what Champions does. It’s taking one section of the interest base, one category of fannish approach to a given subject, and saying, “here, this approach, this is what our game will be”. (I respect this choice of approach far more than what Champions aimed for, but, well, so it goes.)

One thing in which I definitely took a more authorial-perspective focus than any of the card game rpgs I examined were was the outcome of a given card game. In Draw Your Last, it is an explicit narrative certainty that the protagonist in a given card game wins. This is, generally speaking, how card game anime works. There are rare instances otherwise, at pivotal arc moments, and the game includes in the arc-building rules mention of how to construct such darkest-hour occurrences, but, from a structural perspective, that is the only context where such a thing occurs.

Obviously, however, from a character perspective, from trying to emulate fully what any given character experiences, the risk of failing the card game must exist. This yields something like the Villains and Vigilantes arrangement, where things do not go as a superhero story would, because, what happens in a card game with sufficiently drastic stakes, but then the hero loses? This must be papered over in some way to keep the story on its original track, but, doing so would be very inelegant, and so most card game anime rpgs I have seen take a concessional stance. This will not accept the grand stakes where heroes simply cannot fail, because, in the terms of the game, they can.

This is also one of those things I’ve seen come up in, like, tactical fighty rpg spaces. One of the easy GM issues to fall into is just not being prepared for what happens if the main characters lose, because in cool dramatic fight stories, when the heroes go off for a dramatic fight, usually, they win. This can depend from story to story, tone to tone, and setting to setting, of course, but a lot of the time for dramatic fights especially it’s common for less experienced GMs to end up floundering to avoid just having a game-over when things suddenly don’t go as expected.

Now, I’m a big proponent of “every outcome, every choice, in a given game should be worth making, otherwise why is it there” as a thesis. And to their credit, I’ve seen a lot of tactical rpgs put in work to communicate how to make the outcome of losing worth occurring, how to make it interesting if it happens instead of just “alright well I guess we stop playing now”. I do think it’s fair to include choices and outcomes that are conditionally bad, I won’t rail on Lancer for “I can pick talents for weapon types I don’t have and then have no usable talents” and whatnot, but especially for things like this, what possible outcomes of a given scenario, encounter, what have you, exist, they should all be, like, interesting and fitting.

And what “interesting” and “fitting” are loop back to the earlier thing – they’re entirely based on the vision, and the perspective, you’re building for! For something like the game trying to simulate actual card game play, having the outcome set from the beginning definitely would diminish that experience. But, hell, one of the core thesis statements I’ve been working under is that actual card games are boring as hell, and I’m trying to play to the experience of people who watch card game anime not at all for the mechanics of the card games, and, for that perspective, that level of simulation is absolutely a detrimental design choice! For someone who wants to build a game about superhero team-up episodes that emulates the classic structure of starting off with a fight and then teaming up once the confusion gets resolved, depending on what they want to focus on regarding the dynamic and tone shifts for each character involved, a “who would win in a fight” approach might grind it all to a halt, or it might be exactly what’s called for.

So… yeah! In short, thinking about what perspective and experience you’re trying to build for can tell you a lot about where to go with any rpg you make, and, it’s helped to parse a lot of design decisions I’ve found baffling in various contexts – usually because I absolutely do not share the perspective it’s built for! And that’s okay.

(Edit: The game being discussed was Villains and Vigilantes, not Mutants and Masterminds. M&M is a different superhero rpg with the alliterative naming scheme of Dungeons & Dragons. Whoopsie.)