Stunting, fictional positioning, and the tyranny of human intuition

There’s a mechanic that I hate, whenever I see it.

It goes something like this:

“When a player narrates their action in a cool or exciting way, they gain [insert bonus].” Or, even worse, if it’s paired with: “If they narrate their action in a repetitive or uninteresting way, they lose [insert penalty].”

Now, on its face, there’s nothing too objectionable about this. The incentives are very simple. We take something desirable for gameplay, having exciting narration and framing for actions, and tempt the players to go out of their way to indulge in it, because a mechanical reward is offered, and, we assume, the players want mechanical rewards. Simple enough.

However, you might already see some of the issues with it. For one, what is it that makes a certain piece of narration ‘cool’? How do we know if something is exciting, and, more specifically, exciting enough to warrant a reward? What happens if everything a player says is really cool, and they just get more power than the other players because of this? Do we have to raise the bar for that person specifically, to balance it out? What if someone’s shy? Wait, do the developers expect me to give this bonus a lot, or am I breaking the numbers if I do?

Usually, the answers start with “the GM has to adjudicate that,” and that means they end somewhere pretty messy. The impulse for this, too, is simple to understand. Suppose the other players adjudicate it amongst themselves. One of the things RPGs tend to take as given is that the players are angling for their characters to materially succeed, sometimes to the level of failure actively grinding play to a halt. That means the players have a vested interest in going “oh yeah that was definitely cool,” because they stand to gain from it. Now, that’s framed dishonestly, and obviously, most players aren’t going to be weaseling like that. But. What if they’re on the fence? What if, because of this, they decide to err on the side of getting what they want? Or, if they’re a conscientious sort, consider the opposite. Something they think might be cool, but, for fear of not thinking they’re taking advantage of things, they decide it’s not. In that declaration, they’re actively signaling less interest in the play than they’re actually having! That’s bad!

So, putting it onto the GM makes some sense. They have much less of a conflict of interest, or, rather, it comes bundled into the preexisting conflicts of interest of the GM role (which is a doozy of a topic all on its own) – the GM wants to meaningfully challenge the players, but still support their efforts to be cool and succeed, in theory. So, “you don’t get this free bonus at all times, but you do when you do something exciting and neat for the game” sounds well in line.

However. This doesn’t actually remove these concerns. The open question of, how much is too much, is still very much in play. What if the GM has high standards for what’s cool, and so the players don’t get the bonus dice the game’s math assumes they’ll have? Or, in that same scenario – what if the GM thinks to themself, “I’ve been giving this bonus die out a lot, that’s probably not right, I should raise my standards”? I’ve started thinking about [yes fatigue] and [no fatigue] as phenomena of GMing, where, when the game calls on you to say yes to a given player proposal enough times (or, to say no), GMs will end up standardizing to a more even adjudication just because they get tired of it. This is a prime example of where both can come up. If the GM needs to be asked if a given narration counts as cool enough, then, even if the game wants them to say no except for, say, once an adventure… that’s unlikely to actually be the pace they hit.

Now, obviously, I’m an advocate of communicating things. “You should get this bonus at most once an adventure” is a thing you can just say. You can lay it down as a rule, even! But I think that’s rarely something mechanics like this do, because they’re intended to be inconsistent and stochastic. A cool moment is unpredictable and unpaced, and thus, unbalanced. But, even if you discard balance concerns entirely, in my experience, the actual players at the table won’t discard those concerns, and that worrying will compound the buildup of yes fatigue and no fatigue.

And that’s not the only concept of social fairness at play here. What do you do if one player is just, better at narrating moments the group finds cool than others? If you shift standards for them to avoid unbalancing the game, that’s got a very real risk of feeling discouraging for them. But if you don’t, that’s the game specifically rewarding one player over the others for their performative ability – starting a competition it’s really not great for the social dynamic to have. And if a player is notably bad at it, or even just shy, that gets significantly worse. If they don’t get any mechanical benefit because they can’t pull it off, not only does that feel bad for them, having weaker mechanical control means they have even less control over the spotlight, pushing them into the background even more. If they do get the benefit anyway, then not only is the entire concept revealed to be silly and pointless (since, now it’s not celebrating things the table finds cool at all), it also prompts the other players to feel like they’re wasting their time for trying to make cooler-than-usual beats. If you have both a notably good-at-this player and a notably bad-at-this one at the same table, all of these effects compound. And, really, since the pitch of mechanics like these is “this way, you get more cool moments,” the ways it actively stymies people who might be awkward about that but want to try and get better are the most damning criticisms I could give of the concept.

So, yeah! That’s stunting, and I do not like it. Whenever a designer thinks to introduce it to their game, I highly recommend they consider the perverse social dynamics I outlined above and if they actually want any of that in their experience of play. (Maybe, if it’s a game about unhealthy social expectations, that can fit! But probably not.) Short showing today, but this was mostly just a personal grumble. You can all go home now.

The predictable twist

Yeah, you know I couldn’t leave it at that.

Consider, if you will, a different mechanic, with a similar shape. A player can get bonus dice, or an XP reward, or, any other [insert bonus] idea we might have had from stunting, when they take an action, if they can describe how that action makes sense. How it works, you know? Why is this time that you’ve tried to stab your opponent plausibly more effective than the last one? Riff something about chinks in the armor, whatever suits your fancy.

On the surface, that sounds very different. But in practice, I’ll argue – read everything I wrote in the previous several paragraphs. That also applies here! If a player is uniquely comfortable or uncomfortable with narrating little quirks of the world they interact with, or, say, familiar enough with how electrical engineering to bolster their Elec. Eng. roll (in this hypothetical system, skills have a strict 10 character limit to their names), then, you have the same imbalanced dynamics. If the GM gets tired of giving the bonus every time, or worried the game is getting too easy because of how frequently it comes up, that’s yes fatigue. It’s a different player skill being tested, a little, though both do end up having a core ingredient of [how well can you convince the GM to give you what you want] – but the dynamics haven’t changed. The shape of what that mechanic does, is still the same.

So, arbitrarily-adjudicated bonuses. I don’t like ’em. If you give a consistent pace to them, maybe a resource to spend as a bonus pool, that works for sure, but making it contingent on one player’s judgement of another player’s performance, that’s questionable. Make sense?

Let’s consider another scenario.

A player has a set of skills, which they roll as a dice pool on a challenge. Among their skills, they have Stalk at 2 and Slaughter at 7. (All of the skills start with S, which sounded cute to the designer but in practice is confusing for the table.) That player is currently attempting to sneak up behind and assassinate an NPC, an action that could ostensibly fall under either skill. It’s the GM’s job to declare which skill applies, based on what the player narrates they’re doing, and how.

In other words, the player has 5 bonus dice on the line based on how well they describe their actions to suit one of two overlapping skills, and both they and the GM know that.

See where I’m going with this?

Now, the thing I just described, very intentionally, looks like what a lot of RPGs do for skill systems. In fact, this example is pretty much taken wholesale from Blades In The Dark (which does not do the S thing, the skill names and numbers have been changed to protect the guilty), with one notable exception. Blades affords the players the decision of what skills are valid for a given test – ie, to analogize earlier, letting the players declare how good their stunt was. However, the GM then has their own parameters of difficulty to apply to the test – meaning, a GM could make the Slaughter roll harder and the Stalk roll easier, within those parameters. This might make the Stalk roll a better bet, despite the smaller value! But it also might not. And, even then. If it does make the Stalk roll the better choice, that’s the GM saying “no, you can’t do that stunt for a bonus” by any other name, right?

Now, let’s go one more layer.

A player declares that their character does something. No roll, no mechanics necessary, just, this is a thing that happens. The analogizable reward to the prior levels of stunting is, the thing happens. Most prominently, the thing they’re doing solves a problem or accomplishes a goal.

To that end, they explain to the GM why they think this should work. You see, nuclear reactors always have emergency shutdown buttons that can flood the irradiated material with antimatter nega-radiation to render it inert. Maybe they even cite some real-world science about that! Nega-radiation is a thing, you know. Look it up.

The GM can either accept it, or veto it, or maybe they call for a check of some sort, and we’re back on the previous layer.

In other words, a significant reward for the flow of play is shaped by the GM’s judgement of the description of the acting player. How well it lines up with [what makes sense] and [what should happen]. And, of course, if they do too much of that, the GM gets tired of saying yes, and when another player proves really timid and unable to do this much, that means they trail behind in how much they can contribute to and play the game.

This is what I called in the title the “tyranny of human intuition”, and, that might seem like an odd thing to call it, when I’ve been talking about social pressures first and foremost. And the reason for that is – I don’t actually believe in human intuition. At least, not in the context of tabletop roleplaying games.

There’s a concept that gets taken roughly as given, in my experience, in discussions of RPGs and what they do. That of the [shared world-conception]. That is, all the players, GM included, will, over the course of play, come to an understanding of the world the game is set in, and how it works. That understanding is the same to every player that possesses it, such that everyone can have an intuitive understanding of what would happen if a given action was taken in a given context. Sometimes I see this framed as the most important aspect of an RPG, even, with mechanics as a subservient tool for the purpose of creating this. (For some more detailed exploration of a few concepts ancillary to this, my ghost engine post goes into some detail there.)

Now, I don’t think this is entirely wrong. But I do think it’s somewhat wrong. Specifically in that, while people can share broad ideas with roughly similar shapes, the nature of human interpretation and understanding means perfect translation of thought between beings is impossible. There’s a reason communication is an art form. (Several, actually. Writing, conversation, arguably all art forms are in part communication.) And with an RPG, an actively social activity…

If you think you understand how something will resolve, but the GM is suffering from yes fatigue and declares it won’t work because you’ve done too much, your understanding was wrong. Any meaningful understanding of the world, then, inherently has to involve an understanding of the boundaries and habits of every other player at the table. The GM, especially, a lot of games I see give an outsized amount of adjudication power to that role specifically, but even if we take that as given. If we know the GM is prone to no fatigue, and will say yes more often to people who rack up a bunch of nos, and we know a specific player struggles to narrate things in a persuasive manner, we know that player will, potentially, be able to do things that other players couldn’t get away with, out of an impulse to throw them a bone. (And if we know the GM isn’t prone to no fatigue, we know that player very well might not be able to accomplish things other more well-spoken players could.) If we don’t understand that, we don’t have an accurate understanding of how the fictional world works and interacts with us, but if we do understand that, we’re acknowledging that the world-conception is inconsistent and influenced by social factors.

The [tyranny of human intuition], then, is putting these adjudications on the shoulder of a player role, GM or otherwise, with the baseline expectation that it’s founded on this [shared world-conception]. It’s relying on [what makes sense] or [what feels right], and thus, as influenced by social bleed… on some level, it reduces to the dynamic of stunting.

This is a common ingredient in many RPGs. I won’t say all of them, I know some definitions of RPG would take it as a necessity, but my stance on that is a hardline “nuh-uh”. (It’s always important to elevate the discourse.) And, to be clear, when I said at the beginning that stunting was a mechanic I hate, with each layer of that exploration, some of that hate dissipated. I don’t hate games that have adjudicated skill checks. (Well, I do hate some games that have those, but not because of the skill checks.) I don’t hate games that let things happen based on what [makes sense]. But I do think, on some level, a lot of the perverse social dynamics radiate outwards through the layers. And that’s something to keep in mind! The more you lean on this intuitive adjudication, the more no fatigue, yes fatigue, and the persuasive difference between individual players become pillars of how play shakes out. Lean on that too much, and tables with more of a disparity might very well have problems.

It’s something to consider some more, at least. Among other things, these dynamics get taken for granted so much that you get stunting, their worst form, quite consistently. Stunting’s an old mechanic! Games I otherwise kind of like have it! And because these factors aren’t really considered as potential risks, or things to be built around where possible, it comes up again and again. And that, I hate.

So, yeah!

A callout post, I suppose

…Ugh. I do not enjoy this.

So, a disclaimer. I am a rather negative person, in demeanor in general, but especially in critique. I try to make a point of reining that in when in public. On this blog, and on other public platforms I show up on, I have a policy to focus on talking about things that I think are good and worth getting eyes on. By default… I’m meaner about a lot of things, and that means I have to do a bit of ‘putting on a face’, even for this blog. (Sorry, folks, you’re not getting my entirely authentic self. To anyone parasocial and devastated, my not-quite-sincerest condolences.) This post is born from that, so if I seem crueler than usual, my apologies.

I have a long list of things, games, systems, people, that I don’t like very much. And those do tend to color the way I view other, related things. If I dislike a system enough, and I see a different game is built on that system, sometimes I just give up on that game without looking at it further. Sometimes, if I find an author’s work consistently bad, I’ll inherently mistrust the next thing they write. Is this unfair? Yeah, a bit! It’s a personal privilege due to there being a lot of games I can enjoy out there, so, I’m happier indulging my pettiness than I am trying it all no matter what.

Thus, I do feel obliged to mention. I, the author, have some amount of an axe to grind against Caltrop Core, a prior system by Titanomachy RPG, the author of, well, I’ll get to it. On some level, this colors my reaction. It predisposes me to disliking what I see, and, I’d feel manipulative for not acknowledging that. (I’d also feel rather needless enumerating my dislike of that system here, if there’s a lot of interest I can bring it up later, but, for now this post is already bitter enough, and I don’t want that to grow any more than it has to.)

That said, this is also the product of discussing this piece with several other acquaintances, whose reaction was similarly unpleasant, and who do not share that arbitrary bitter predisposition. Some of them are generally quite positive and lovely, in fact, and seeing the ways this upset them is really what prompted me to write this out.

This is Possibility Crisis, a… well, it’s not a game, but it’s a project for public contribution, a world to make games in. By, as I said, Titanomachy RPG. The concept is that people will take the origin point of this world, elaborate it by creating pieces of it, and thus, a community around the games and world will grow in the process of creating it. It’s a clever structure, even if these sorts of innate community-building endeavors don’t tend to appeal to me. If the seed was something that inspired me, honestly, I think I would appreciate something like it.

The actual content of this world-seed is…

Baffling, is probably the most generous way I can put it.

This is the general pitch on the itch page. It’s several decades in the future, magic exists, and only queer people are capable of it. Hence, several groups of magical queer wizards have banded together to construct a magical island as a safe haven, which travels the world.

The vision of the world beyond is… dubious. To those uninterested in the continental United States, it is an entirely blank slate, and within that context, we have painted a vague vision of calamity, with a strong current of Those Evil Southerners. For those without the extremely specific context of the intensely-tiresome US geopolitical landscape: the southern states trend more right-wing in their elected political bents, for a variety of reasons. This is, of course, bad for the people living there, especially the queer people. It also sometimes prompts a particularly awful sort of callousness from people inclined to tar entire states full of people with that brush, in the vein of, “oh, people in Texas deserve what happens to them for electing Republicans over and over.” As someone with queer acquaintances in Texas and Florida, this is horrendously cruel, and the common second comment in that vein, “perhaps they should move,” is also cruel, but more insidiously so. To lose one’s home, especially to have to travel far away to somewhere new, is no light thing, and claiming that it is the fault of those driven out is a horrendous failure of allyship and support. If you hear anyone say anything to that effect, that means they do not respect your value as a person based entirely on where you happen to live, and they are not your ally.

Now, Titanomachy has not said any of those things. And I don’t wish to claim that’s their intent in this paragraph. But it’s certainly the veneer, alongside a sort of sneering “our enemies are incompetent” vein. That is, Texan militias (all right-wing and evil) are inherently defeated by the “superior Mexican military,” a phrase that strikes me as very out of place in a text that would otherwise seem to benefit greatly from not fetishizing militarization, and Florida’s consumption by Disney is a running gag among people inclined to mock the Republicans there.

The island has some more elaboration to it, but, this is where things really start to get alarming. Mentioned in equal measure are a group of violent accelerationists and complete isolationists, and only then in the final faction do we get any notion of these being groups that are not considered fine and dandy in this hypothetical utopia. (The tone whiplash of half of them being called “Shiteaters” or “Fuckers” and half of them having names that I would recognize as, faction names in a story of magic and politics, is its own complaint, but much lesser than the structural concerns at hand here.) It presents the island as “a fresh start for anyone who wants one,” prompting one to question if we are to assume the Olives are somehow a ruling faction or considered the “right” one, since, that certainly doesn’t seem to suit any of the other concepts offered before us, but, an outwardly hostile veneer and isolationist perspective seem to be supported later on as the ideal, so, no?

It’s trying to be a queer power fantasy. And it is also trying to engage with politics, which queer life in the modern day cannot help but do. But these two goals are not easily compatible. A power fantasy is a complex thing to examine, from a political lens, and not one to easily indulge in. The concept being presented is a semi-isolationist state where queer people have inherent power due to the nature of magic, and inherent structural power due to magic being a core part of how the island sustains itself. This is presented as a triumph, as a utopia, because we assume the reader is queer. And thus, the reader will hear “this is a group of people who can exclude and hurt your enemies, and you can have power over them,” and they will enjoy that. However, I cannot have that and also be genuinely invested in or thinking about the politics at play. If I want to indulge in a power fantasy like that, a prerequisite step is forgetting what a power fantasy like that means, and what ideologies would sell it to me. I don’t want to think about suffering under the boots of power, and then be told, “now you can have power!” and have the followup left unstated but very much gestured at. Especially with what queer separatism has tried to do to people like me.

Which brings me to a more personal reason to feel alienated by this.

This one, I am willing to presume is not the intent. But it was also the first thing that, when reading, made me sigh and go, “ah, got it, this is not for me.”

As an aro/ace person, my relationship to queerness is, complicated. And that is immediately a fraught statement. There’s an unpleasant history of people attempting to externally litigate whether I, or someone like me, can count as [truly queer]. And, my immediate stance, and if you disagree, shut up, is that, yes, I do, and anyone like me does as well.

But, that’s easy to say, and more difficult to internalize. When I realized I was trans, a part of my initial rush of relief was realizing, now, I would likely never be denied being [truly queer] again. That’s an experience I’ve known several other trans people to share, in fact, which speaks to a certain exclusionary vein in many queer spaces I’ve frequented. If you aren’t considered legitimate enough, you will have an inherent push of discomfort at you for your presence in the space, and, often, that gets internally amplified. Which is a reason I’m discontent with the premise in general – being able to draw an easy line between [truly queer] and not based on, hey, you can do magic, simply will never sit right with me.

Here, however, it tells something more than that. It tells me that [love] and [yearning] are fundamental queer experiences. That to be queer, as this game-prompt describes it, those are parts of who I am.

I have, in my own scattered notes, a concept of a game exploring queerness. It’s something I come back to every now and again, but it always leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually make and publish it. The premise is as follows:

Magic is real, and powered by [true love]. You are among a group of chosen ones, who must use this magic to fight against a great evil. You are aro/ace.

Now, it is popular recently to expand [love] into more than just, attraction. Love for one’s hobbies, or love for one’s friends. But, I find that rather dissatisfying. There are words for those sorts of relationships, too. And it removes the exploration of the ways people actually do relate to attraction of various kinds, how that intertwines with their other forms of interactions, and what that is like for someone who Does Not Get It, especially when pressured into going along with it nonetheless. If [true love] gives power, and power can save the world, do you have a right to express discomfort at [true love]?

Like I said, it’s a bitter idea. It’s dear to my heart, but hard to work with for long.

Things like this remind me of it. Things that say, “ah, being in love, yearning, these things are fundamental experiences.” And, for a lot of queer people, I’m sure they are! I don’t mean to discount that at all. But I don’t feel that way. Even in broader, abstracted forms of these definitions, the times I would yearn for, say, a more-fitting body are rare. The times where I care for those I know intensely enough that it might be called “love” are also rare. Matching those titles to my experiences would, at that point, be stretching them to accommodate who I am. And if that, why not stretch them to accommodate anyone? If I love, surely straight people do. This providing of the magical bounds of queerness tells me, I am not queer.

No, worse than that. It tells me, if I found myself in this world, and the world deemed me queer, the powers I got would not suit me. I would feel invalidated for my empowerment. And, of course, I would feel invalidated lacking it! That would be the world cosmically saying, I do not count as queer. And, how dare you, world! You do not define me.

Now, these are critiques of the concept. And, like I said myself, I find the concept of magic entwined with love, or identity, or queerness, or whatever else, fascinating at times. I don’t want to say, this concept should never be explored, or this concept should only be explored in a way that satisfies my fringe existence in particular. If this expresses what queerness is to the author, fair enough. But it rings hollow, it rings exclusive, to the ear I have trained in my heart.

It’s not queerness as queerness is to me.

And now, the part that convinced me to write this post.

Some of these are fine. Mostly the ones exploring the island itself and the relevant locales therein. It’s the first and fifth one, the red ones, that leapt out to me immediately. It’s these that set off my alarm bells.

The last one, the JK Rowling pastiche, is just, entirely hateful. The whole of the prompt is, “You know this person you consider an enemy? You can ruin her life now.” There is no other way to read “she just laid off the majority of her security” and the mention of her not being at home as anything other than an invitation to intrude on the place and… well, it’s left unclear what, exactly, presumably whatever the players feel like, noting that they have literal magic on their side. It’s the entire power fantasy of the pitch laid bare, and exactly what I was disquieted by earlier. “Imagine you could hurt these real life people.” I can’t say I don’t understand the appeal, and I wouldn’t particularly bat an eye at someone having a fantasy of hurting someone who has done a lot of harm to the world, but you cannot sell me a power fantasy and a utopia in the same package. If I am to be working to foster a community and make a better world for all, or, at least, for those the queer separatist factions and the metaphysics deem worthy, then, do not also tell me “hey, here’s an opportunity to cause problems for this celebrity cameo you hate, give it up for being mean to JK Rowling, folks.” And in trying to be both at once, with a mean-spirited veneer, it simply makes me, disquiet with the utopia. It reads like a story being told in a fundamentally unpleasant society.

If I were to write anything for this setting, and, in truth, I did ponder it, it would be of those marginalized by the expectations of the writing. Of those that would not be considered fitting for the island, or the magic, and how they navigate a world where their ostensible allies are seemingly interested only in themselves and those they seek to hurt.

As for the first prompt, I wanted to bring this quote up. It was put at the beginning of the booklet, but I noticed it last. And, in truth, it frustrates me. Not least of which for the angle of, “oh so many people are secretly queer and haven’t even realized it,” but in context of the first prompt? Of the Bad Gay Man? In the same breath, it says both that magic is from self-understanding and if everyone could embrace who they truly are then it might not be locked to queer people at all, and that a politically powerful bastard who happens to be gay can be a problem in a way that he never could if he happened to be straight instead. He has power because he is gay. Not because of any deep inner recognition of himself. I have had many deep conversations with cis people coming to terms with their gender identity, with straight people coming to terms with their attraction. Many lovely internal explorations of who they are. That introspection holds no weight here. It has nothing to do with power. You can be selfish, and cruel, and awful, and so long as you happen to not be a very particular subset of arrangements of gender and sexuality, there you have it.

The prompt seems to take as given that queer people are good, and should be protected, and their vision of a bad queer person is one who hurts other queer people. To that end, being exclusionary, being cruel, being violent – these are fine, as long as you’re in support of the group of [truly queers]. There’s an us, and there’s a them, and we will empower the us and keep the them out.

Like I said, that’s a nice fantasy, but taking that bent to real modern politics that hurts a lot of real people is miserable.

And, I mean that literally. I showed this thing to a group of friends when I stumbled upon it, and, universally, people were hurt. It upset them, it invalidated them, mostly it just activated all of their “oh I recognize that shitty ideology” alarm bells and I can absolutely see why. And that frustrates me. To see something talking about queer existence, something trying a novel structure in the space of game design to build a design community, and the result is it hurts people to read…

I hate that.

And, I don’t know what to do with that. In all likelihood, this post won’t do any material good, right? The best I can hope for is someone reads this and learns a bit on other perspectives of queerness and structures that support that, but, that’s unlikely. Mostly, this is just me spitting vitriol into the void, and either nothing happens or it spits back. I’m wasting my time either way.

But, I had to write these thoughts out, and I had to at least know that they’re out there. For someone to read. I don’t want Possibility Crisis to exist in the world and have people look at it and all they see is people nodding along and collaborating with that. I don’t want to be part of a community that does that.

Honestly, at times when writing this, I thought, “maybe the queer community isn’t a place for me.” And I don’t want a document that does that to exist uncommented on.

So… here I am making an angry callout post, I suppose.

I don’t have a better conclusion than that.

The Ghost Engine, or, shoving the infinitely-complex peg of human imagination into a square hole

I like to talk about games as engines. [Engine] is a term you’ll find here and there in RPG spaces, usually describing specific systems and mechanics – like, ‘running on the PbtA engine’ if a game uses a bunch of specifically-codified moves to shape the progression of play, say. The idea behind that usage is, here’s a mechanical core that defines how you play. It’s what makes the game move forwards, like the engine of a car.

That’s not what I mean here. Or, it’s only a part of it. An RPG, in its entirety, is a process to move ideas around. The players navigate that process, usually through the form of characters, but, there’s plenty of games that provide player-level inputs (metacurrencies, the ability to highlight or veto particulars – arguably, safety tools qualify, even!) – the point is, it’s a series of inputs and outputs that you move through, and that’s what play is.

This is a definition of [engine] that is broad enough to be meaningless. It’s “something that you can argue is consistent but has internal flow”. But, as I’ve talked about a few times on this blog, analyzing that flow in specific is quite valuable. In games with different modes of play, you can split them into sub-engines and examine how the play flows between them. In games with any sort of medium-term resource tracking or modeling, looking at the shape of the flow of play and where things branch into points that cause people to lose or gain resources, gives you an idea of how frequently those will fall down. (Taking the same HP math between two games, but one has several procedural layers that it’s unlikely to get through before you reach an effect that deals damage, yields very different results!) And this isn’t restricted to rigidly-defined mechanisms, either. You can map the flow of intentions, for instance, based on what are desired mechanical or narrative outcomes in a given point of the engine. (And notice conflicts between them – if you’re at the end of a cool boss fight, winning in a way that stops them for good is a mechanical ideal, but, depending on the kind of story your game is built to produce, giving them room to slip away and escalate may be more desirable on that level, and that’s a tension that will put strain on that joint in the engine! (See, the metaphor has lots of ways to apply it like that. That’s why I like it. Pressure on joints being pushed in multiple angles, wear from both overuse and underuse, varying levels of rigidity needed based on the task the component seeks to accomplish, etcetera.)) Figuring out and modeling the flow of what players will want in a given context, and what goals they bring to the table, is quite valuable in modeling how the engine you build will work out.

And here is where we hit a snag.

Players are inscrutable, confusing beasts. You can guess at what they might enjoy, based on what you and the people you know enjoy in RPGs, for instance. You can write a whole sales pitch to tell the players what to expect from your game – hey, come here if you want to play an edgy warrior of destruction having a personal breakdown and struggling to cope with a peaceful life, here’s the kinds of things you’ll do and see here. For instance.

But a player is a whole entire person. Even worse, lots of RPGs are multiplayer affairs – and not only are multiple people much harder to model on an individual scale, you now have interpersonal dynamics to work with. And no matter how elegantly your system of mechanized guilt-tripping and familiar obligation manages the game’s side of the interpersonal dynamics, there’s a whole segment beyond that, that only exists in tables far away that you’ll never get to see. You can’t know, for certain, everything that players will want out of a game. And thus, you can’t figure out, entirely, how that will change over the course of play.

However… you can get a sense of how your game relates to it.

Say, for instance, you’ve got a nice snappy little combat system. A cute little battle egg, a short list of powers that are strings of keywords and numbers ’cause you tightened them up all snazzy-like, great. You get into a fight, you pull out the egg, you get the enemies going, and one of the players says “actually, I want to just talk this out, let’s not fight”.

How does that go?

(This is a trick question, the answer is entirely “it depends on what the game prioritizes,” but, bear with me for a bit here.)

Now, sometimes, your answer, as a very cool and prepared game designer, will be that not only is that a step in the proceedings, if they look at page 4 of their pregen packet, they will find bespoke stats and procedures for the talking-things-out mode. Very well done, best of luck with the game, applause and acclaim for thee. But we’re assuming that’s not the case. This game wasn’t built with mechanisms to perfectly replicate your particular vision of what social interaction is like, you made it to be about fighting things. What then?

Well, if you’re me, you say “no, this is a game about fighting” and that’s that. There’s all these fancy game mechanics, and I’d much rather get them used than not, and if you aren’t here for that, then, you should probably play a game that does support tense deescalation negotiations on a mechanical level. That sounds neat! But it’s not what we’re doing today.

This is, I think, a fair answer to give. It’ll vary from reader to reader how much they would agree with that sentiment, but, this is my default approach to games. They’re built for what they’re built for, and they function only within the context where the players are accepting what the game is built for and staying within those lines. That’s how I design games and how I play games, and, it would be hard, in my eyes, to form an argument where that’s an inherently wrong approach.

But it’s not everyone’s approach. In fact, it’s probably not most people’s approach. Meaning, acting like that’s the one answer, or the correct answer, as much as it’s the one I like the most, would be foolish.

I think, for the most part, people would look at that as an opportunity. Usually, in the story surrounding games about fights, there’s, like, some amount of narrative importance to the fight and the characters involved. Trying to talk that out could, just on a story level, be neat! You can highlight the contrasts in priorities between the sides, what they value and what they won’t budge on. Maybe you decide, this is just going to be pre-fight banter, nobody’s minds will be changed. But, let’s say you don’t decide that. Maybe, after the talk, the foes back off, and decide not to fight. Or maybe the players decide not to fight! Maybe they get convinced, and they decide to work with their enemies, for a bit.

What just happened?

Well, on its face, it’s pretty straightforward what happened. You talked, and, one way or another, you’re not fighting anymore. You’d think that’d be normal.

But, in terms of the game. What just happened?

You hit a point where the next step was to shift to the fight mode. You were all set for that, the mode was queued up, ready to transition everyone’s thinking in there… and then you talked for a while, without using any pieces of the game, and then… you did something else.

From the perspective solely of the game’s engine, this is a failure, or, a glitch, or a user error, or something. It’s wrong. It’s just, not how it works. You had the expected behavior, then you hopped off to do something else, and who knows what’s happening. (This is the primary limitation of that model that I’m trying to address here, spoiler alert.) From the perspective of the engine of play, none of this is part of how the game is supposed to go.

Which means, that piece. The [and then you talked for a while]? That’s just not right, when looking at the engine. It’s not a part of the game.

Which then begs another question: were you playing the game then?

For the most part (I read Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist recently enough to feel compelled to qualify this claim), I think most people would respond, that’s a silly question. You don’t stop playing the game just because you happen to take a digression into nonmechanized places. Playing a game isn’t something you just jump into and out of on a moment’s notice. When you discuss where you want to move or who you want to attack, have you stopped playing the game until you make a decision? When you play a solo journaling and pause to think about what you’re going to write before you do, have you, in that moment, failed as a gamer? It’s a silly question.

But, then, if [playing the game] expands beyond the components that are the game, up to and including actively skipping by or ignoring those parts… that means we’re missing a piece of the [game]. There’s a component that encompasses the rest of it, to get a full model of play, and if we don’t have that, then, we’re flying blind.

In response to this conundrum, I posit that we are all haunted by ghosts. Or rather, our games are.

If we want to model the flow of play, in its entirety, then, we need to address our [glitch] somehow. Our “you are here” dot flows from the [not in a fight] section, moves its way towards the [in a fight] section, and then, something happens and it moves somewhere else. This [something] wasn’t part of the game, at least, as we’ve modeled it thus far. An incorporeal hand grabbed it, and put it somewhere else. That’s the ghost.

These ghosts will be everywhere, to some degree or another. If you watch the flow of play, you’ll see them skip past sections because they seem unimportant, or specifically hold things in place, slow them down, lingering on what they enjoy. You’ll find them moving between modes of play, if your game has modes of play, and sometimes, you’ll find them calcifying whole sections into new modes of play, just through repeated experience. The ghosts move to what’s important to them, and they brush off what isn’t.

However. This is still movement. You can still model it. You can draw an imaginary line between modes of play, a pipe that you haven’t really built, and go, look, this is what the ghosts do. When our current position encounters an [importance gate], the ghosts judge how much it matters, and depending on their answer, either it flows to the fight like it should, or it follows this imaginary pipe off somewhere else.

And then, you may note, [importance gates] exist in more places than just that.

See, the sad truth is, the mechanics of the game don’t tell the full story of play, even beyond when the ghosts intentionally skip around them. Sooner or later, when you look at the start state of the game, you’ll find, [phantom inputs]. Heck, every decision gate is essentially that. If you’ve got a mechanized mode for negotiation to prevent combat, like that very clever game designer hypothesized earlier, then, the play gets to a start of a fight, the engine goes “great, now select between negotiation and combat,” and… well, somewhere, someone presses a button. The ghost nudges us in one direction or another, and off we go. The game didn’t do that. But it sure directed the flow.

There’s [phantom outputs], too. In fact, every part of the engine gives them. We get through our clever mechanical negotiation, we hit the segment that says, “okay, mission accomplished, skip the fight, direct back to the noncombat mode,” and we follow that. The ghosts don’t interject, things flow as expected. But. The ghosts are riled up. They’re opinionated now. The fact that there won’t be a fight, alongside the obvious mechanical repercussions, means something. The way the mechanized negotiation went struck them in a certain way, and now, the next time the character who we were negotiating against shows up, they tug us every which way to avoid fighting them and hear more of their backstory. We didn’t build a learn-their-backstory subsystem, we’re not that clever, and now they’re avoiding anywhere that triggers the fight mode, even conceding on things that are supposed to be tense mechanical downsides to give up. They’re compelled. They care. Because of what all we pumped out of our engine, into the ghosts beyond.

So. To review. Confusing and stressful as it is, we have outputs to them, and inputs from them.

That means we can control them. (Or, at least, model them – see what inputs to them can produce what outputs.)

The will of the beyond

Ghosts want things. They expect things. They want the game to be [cool], or [dramatic], or [heart-wrenching], or [fun], or whatever else. They’re capricious lots.

On its own, that doesn’t help at all. What’s “fun”? We’re an engine, we just move people around. I can show you some dice tricks, I guess? But that doesn’t really help. So, let’s dig a little deeper.

In my experience, the most common reason for ghosts to interfere in standard processes is, “that doesn’t make sense”. That is, something occurs that the ghosts have an idea of what [makes sense to happen] afterwards, and then, what the game outputs to them is different. When this happens, (depending on how hardline these ghosts are about such things,) the position gets nudged. You get moved to where does “make sense” to be instead, and go from there. Sometimes that’s applying effects, sometimes it’s removing or skipping parts of the game entirely, sometimes they add a whole new chunk to the engine that didn’t exist a second ago, and now you have to deal with that. Really, it can be anything.

…Which means we need to go even deeper, because “it can be anything” is, once again, unhelpful.

Your game has a concept. A pitch. A [thing that it is about]. It has a lot of those, actually. (And here’s where we get to how the analogy breaks down just a little, because we’ve hit “the color you paint your car will influence how it drives”.) It communicates that in several ways, one of which is its shape. That is – if you have a chunk of the engine off to the right, then the space off to the right is what the game is about. One would expect it to see use, or it’s just dead weight and shouldn’t be there.

Ghosts aren’t deterministic. They don’t see the decoration and shape of the engine, go, “got it, here’s the pitch,” and work with that. They’d be so convenient if they did! But it’s more complex than that. They interpret, and then they modify, to some degree or another. You give them a whole long explanation of what the game is supposed to be, with aesthetic trappings, and then, with that, they build their own idea of things. (And, “how do aesthetics and communication influence people’s thinking” is unfortunately far too complex a question to solve here.)

That idea of things is what they’re pushing for. What [makes sense] to them. When the engine diverges from that, they’ll nudge it. That’s where the ghost-hands come from. This idea, this concept of [what this game should be], that’s the torso controlling it all.

Like I said, the ghosts build this on the fly. It adapts over time, too, even. The engine’s trappings aren’t its only source, either. You’ll find, depending on the temperament of the ghosts and the needs of the engine, things like “well, this is how it works in the real world,” or, “I think it would be cooler if this happened,” or, “I’m uncomfortable with this, let’s skip it,” or many other such sentiments pouring into the pot as well. And, we can’t control that. It’s outside of our reach. We can’t put pipes in it, we can’t put walls around it, the ghosts have their own realm and we can only communicate with them or put walls around how they move through our engine.

So, we communicate.

We drape our engines in art, and prose, and cool paint jobs, and give them fancy titles, to say, “hey, here’s what this is about.” Maybe we annotate the engine itself, put a little sidebar to tell the ghosts, “hey, this part is for making so and so happen, that’s pretty important, please don’t touch.” Maybe (in fact, often), we have bits of the engine output to nowhere, for the ghosts to take, with a little message saying “hey, think about this, care about this, change what you’re doing because this just happened now.” What’s “thinking”? What’s “caring”? Hell if I know, but by giving the ghosts that, we give them a better idea of what our very fragile little device is supposed to do, so they know what steps are important and when to not skip things.

Again, they’re not deterministic. They don’t actually do it quite right, or quite predictably. But you can do enough to get them to understand, just a little, how to approach your engine, and work with it. And that can be useful!

Sometimes parts of the engine aren’t so important. Hopefully they’re at least a little. If not, just take it out and your thing weighs less. But, you don’t really have a way to control the flow in a way that always goes there when necessary, and skips it otherwise. Heck, maybe you don’t even know how to codify that at all, maybe it’s more of a [does this matter] question. Ghosts are good at that! And if you ask them nicely, “hey, if so and so circumstances regarding this don’t qualify, and you want, you can take the play from here to over there and skip this chunk,” then, maybe, depending on their mood, they might do that for you. They might do it better than you trying to figure out how to automate the skip would.

You can use them as input, too. In fact, most of the time, you already have. They’re who the engine is for, really, though they need you to make it work for what they need. Ghosts can’t quite make everything they want without us. (Wellllll… I’ll get back to this point in a bit, but for now, assume I’m largely right about this, and we’ll put a pin in it.) When we have levers, and buttons, and “choose to go this or that way and that tells you which chunk of the engine to go to next,” it’s the ghosts who actually press those buttons and flip those levers. And, it’s the ghosts who read what happens and go, “hey, that meant something,” and we don’t know what meaning is, but it changes their core, and that changes what their moves are in future.

When a ghost behaves, it’s a well-oiled machine. They fill in all the gaps and the nebulous “assume we get to the next point” steps, and it’s beautiful.

Communicating, through direct input/output, through annotation, and through aesthetics, are how we give them an idea of how to behave. They want to, for the most part, or, at least, you can just brush off and not build for the ones that don’t, but just like we can’t build a device that defines and optimizes [meaning], they can’t just arbitrarily intuit what’s important where.

…Right.

…Okay, fine, yes, I admit it, that was all a bit silly.

To pull back the curtain a little, and maybe make a few things less obfuscated by metaphor. The Ghost Engine is the term I use for the components of an RPG that the players, in play, bring to the game. Specifically, the way those components influence the actual mechanical element, because that’s what we can design for. Sometimes they change or remove important mechanics, sometimes they add play assumptions or homebrew subsystems that don’t make sense, sometimes there’s a whole unhealthy social dynamic between the players, who knows. We don’t, and we can’t predict that, but it’s still on some level a common pillar that games rely upon. (For a time, I used the term Ghost Pillar to refer to this, in fact.)

More specifically… the Ghost Engine is the smallest game there is. It’s freeform roleplay. It’s improv. It’s riffing back and forth on an idea. It’s a conversation! (I’ve read so many passages professing “ah, you see, this game is just a conversation,” and here I profess my counterargument – conversations, in and of themselves, are a type of game.) This is, notably, not mechanicless. I often see freeform roleplay described that way, but that’s certainly not the case. “One player writes a post, then the other does, then repeat” from forum roleplay is not only establishing an order of operations and initiative, it also defines a unit of action in the [post], limited in what can be contained there, defined by the medium the play is being enacted in. “You may not directly narrate the actions of a character another player controls” is another.

But these are… emergent mechanics. Norms, as much as they are walls. They evolve, and twist, and even just in the time it takes for two people to learn the comfort levels and interests of one another, they’ll have grown complex patterns and guidelines for how to engage each other. They’re building, between one another, an engine of interaction.

It’s soft. It’s malleable. It’s, well, ectoplasm. You can shape it, but you can just as easily bend it, or push past it. If the way we approached conversations was rigid and litigious, humanity as a whole would be very different than it is. That isn’t how we work. Freeform roleplay has mechanics, but it doesn’t have, you know. Capital-m Mechanics. There’s caution tape, but no walls. It’s all ghostly.

This is, in my eyes, one of the primary appeals of roleplaying games. They give you walls. When a game tells you “you must do this,” or “you can’t do that,” or even gives you a choice by way of “you must pick one of the following things,” or “you must do something like this,” that’s hard. That’s material. You can’t look the game and put puppydog eyes on and get it to do something else, the way you can when you’re talking to another person. You can shove a ghost around, but the physical engine is gonna stay how it is.

You can just, go past it. You’re a ghost, you can phase, you can throw things that aren’t supposed to move around the room all scary-like. But… well, to tell the truth, I find that as an observation rather unsatisfying. It’s a recognition of autonomy, to be sure, but it also becomes an argument that no game is better than freeform roleplay. That an engine really is just something to push around like so many words, and if it gives you a structure, ignore it. I don’t like that, because, I like RPGs. I enjoy the medium for what it does, and, while I’ll happily spend time doing freeform roleplay, I go to mechanics because I want more. I want the solidity of an engine. I have enough ghost time in my life.

To some degree, all RPGs are hybrids. They have hard sections and they have “ghosts, please fill in here” sections. Even if those aren’t clearly labeled, they’ll grow in the cracks and wrap around it like ivy. Some of the most enjoyable and dramatic stories I’ve ever played out happened in the time between fights in Lancer, without the game prompting that all that much, literally in the pauses of “the next fight is coming our way, but, let’s riff for a bit.” Having the structure of those next fights, and knowing how the game would keep up past that, made me more interested in exploring that than if that hadn’t been there. That’s not something the game brought, it’s something I brought (alongside my fellow player/ghosts, of course,) but the game’s structure supported that.

Some games are more constraining than others. Some are constraining in different ways, at different times. What fits best is a complex question, based on what you want your game to be, how you want people to approach playing it, etcetera. But I will propose a categorization method, of sorts, in the form of another metaphor:

Sometimes a game is aspic, and sometimes a game is a tartufo.

Aspic is something I’ve never actually had, and to tell the truth, I’m somewhat loathe to change that, though, I do believe in the spirit of experimentation and trying new things, so, perhaps one day. In short, as I understand it, it’s a savory gelatin that is served with other ingredients floating inside of it, consumed as such.

A tartufo, by contrast, is something I have very much had, and quite enjoy. It’s a gelato encased in a hard shell of chocolate, sometimes with melted chocolate or fruit in the center. (I may have something of a sweet tooth, but even beyond that, it’s a quite nice dessert! I recommend giving one a try at least once in one’s life.)

As you can see – in the aspic, the solid components are captured within the more wibbly parts, while in a tartufo, the inverse is true. The ghosts are the gelatin and the gelato, and the mechanics are the chocolate and whatever all goes in the aspic.

Aspic is how I would describe a game like Legacy: Life Among The Ruins. The ghosts float around freely, doing their ghostly business as though operating under freeform play. All well and good. Until, eventually, one of them stumbles onto something solid. A piece of “now, resolve this mechanic.” And so, they indulge, and the mechanic tells them where to go next, pushing them forwards. On some level, they could have simply swam around, and ended up anywhere they pleased. But, the solidness of the mechanic saying “this is now true” sends ripples through the gelatin, and reshapes things for the future. For the most part, the mechanics are subordained to the ghost engine, being pulled along as tools to suit the broader needs at had. You can imagine these mechanics as little pipes, floating in the ectoplasm, perhaps slightly more apt than a chunk of meat, since they do have a directive and propulsive character. The ghosts define the space, and the mechanics nudge them around it.

In contrast, in a game like the aforementioned Lancer, encased in its delicious chocolate shell, it’s a lot harder to simply go “I think this should be like that instead” and skip ahead. The game has a solid mechanical framework to its primary mode of play, in combat, and an explicit list of what you are allowed to attempt and at what cost within that mode. Some leeway is given to GM arbitration, but even then, within the mechanical constrains of the action economy and the statistics and powers you have in front of you. And, in turn, the ghosts are expected to look at the engine in terms of, “what can I do here to engineer the outcome I want within the structure of this game system.” (The mechanics are rather more complex than a flat chocolate shell, as that would make for an unimpressive engine.) It’s a tartufo. The ghosts do not have the power to roam free.

Games are very rarely entirely one or the other. In fact, you may note. During the mention in the aspic section of mechanics as pipes, surely, when you enter that pipe, for a moment, have you not made yourself go inside of the engine, constructed a micro-tartufo? In turn, in the Lancer segment, I already mentioned prior how room for freeform character drama found a place in the cracks between play. There’s a hole in that chocolate shell, and the ectoplasm seeping out is looking remarkably aspic-escent.

These are more, design preferences. Expectations of play. They often shift from mode to mode (if a game has multiple modes), and from moment to moment based on how much the mechanics are being engaged with. But, they are especially important to recognize as a designer. The general threshold of “how much do I want the players to be running around in their own ghostly way, skipping past or invoking mechanics as they see fit” has significant impact on how your engine operates, after all! Knowing, and communicating, what moments should be kept as tartufo-like as possible, and what moments are room where you can allow them to control a little more, matters a great deal. After all, if the ghosts don’t know, then, they’ll default to what they’re used to. Some of them assume games are like aspic, some assume they’re like a tartufo, and the ones that assume wrong, one way or another, will have an unpleasant time.

There’s obviously a lot more to be discussed regarding the Ghost Engine. It roughly reduces to the sum total of human interaction and experience, and that’s no easy tool to work with. There’s been a lot of writing, both valuable types and dubious ones, regarding how to control and navigate group dynamics in RPGs, on a human level. And, on a human level that probably needs to stay. You can never entirely control the people who play your game, sad to say. But you can convey to them, here is how I want you to approach it, here is how to make the engine work, here are the points where you must bow your head and subordain yourself to the engine, slip your ethereal form into this juicy chocolate shell and allow to come what may.

They might not always listen. Ghosts are cruel and capricious beings, after all. But the ones that do, if you can learn to work with them, will go through things better than any deterministic machine could. And there’s beauty in that.

In conclusion: freeform roleplay is interesting, and fun, and worth examining further! Especially as it invades and underpins a lot of the fundamental expectations people tend to have in RPGs. But, for the most part in terms of this piece, honest communication to your readers regarding mechanical intent and play expectations is a very valuable thing. One of the primary motivators for me to actually sit down and write this was getting inordinately angry at several games invoking “The Golden Rule”, a dubiously-founded bit of advice to simply change any mechanics as the players desire. That is, declaring the entirety of a game to be aspic, even when it has more mechanically-detailed modes that would have their balance broken entirely by casual shifts. Remember, ghosts are silly creatures! You have to be clearer than that! Tell them what is important, and why, because they’re very bad at figuring out what’s important. They can only see what’s meaningful.

The marriage of those two is what makes RPGs beautiful, I think.