A gross perspective on games

If you get squicked out by kinda-disgusting descriptions of anatomy, maybe skip this one. Speaking as someone who fits in that category, why did I write this?

“Mechanics are the bones of a game.” That’s a thing I say a lot. It’s pithy, and short, and kinda communicative. Enough for a quick remark that people can nod along to and move on. But it’s grown in my head to a whole perspective on how to build games, to the point where I think it’s doing it a disservice to not present the whole grisly image. Which is what this will be!

A game in motion, being played by people, is like an animal. It has ways it moves and wants to move, things it wants to go and do, as a product of the pitch and inner workings of the game and people playing it. Maybe it wants to go frolic down to the lake and sip up some of that delicious water of tragic-vengeance-quests-ending-in-a-hollow-victory, or it wants to munch on the higher-altitude leaves of the tree of killing-god-as-an-analogy-for-coming-out-as-trans. That’s great! We love to see a strange new beast taste of the fruits of this world and learn of good end evil.

As designers, we aren’t pet owners, or caretakers, of this creature we seek to gift life. We aren’t even gengineering it, really. We’re building it. We splay out a bunch of diagrams of bones and muscles and “how the fuck do lungs work” onto a table, draft up some plans, and spend the rest of the time frequently panicking and redrawing the plans when we realize that the poor thing needs to vastly increase its oxygen intake or it simply won’t survive.

I say mechanics are bones because the big thing they do is define and support the shape of the creature. Can you make something with very few bones at all? Sure, we’ve all oohed and ahed at Lasers and Feelings, and if we consider its one mechanic to be like a backbone, it can be a pretty nice snake-worm-thing. I love snake-worm-things! But if they try to grow out, or up, or too big, that one thing isn’t going to support all the meat it wants to have. Unless it has other strong supports, it’s gonna collapse. There’s only so intricate a game of Lasers and Feelings can get, and it’s not trying to be intricate.

Suppose you want it to be more than a snake-worm-thing. You wanna give it a lump. Okay, fine, a limb, something useful, whatever. If you don’t extend any bones into its new fork-tendril, it’s kinda gonna struggle and flop there, and be limited in how it can move. It needs strong musculature to compensate, which, I’ll get to that in the analogy a bit later. So, you go, “okay, I want some space politics intrigue in my Lasers and Feelings, and I want it to work with the mechanics, let’s figure something out for that!” And you make a little faction sheet each with their own laser-to-feeling ratio and maybe a little token economy they spend on influencing the PCs to do things, and hey presto! The snake has an arm now, and it can finally fulfill its lifelong dream of punching a rock.

Unfortunately, the players don’t really care about punching rocks. Or, the space politics. So they just don’t interact with that, except for when the mechanics absolutely force them to. Whoops.

So now there’s no meat on that bone! It kinda just dangles there, while the snake-worm-thing slithers about like it would normally, and occasionally its bone-protrusion bangs into a passing rock and hurts it a bit. The thing’s worse off than if the bone wasn’t even there, and, realistically, for a game as simple as that, sooner or later the players are gonna talk and agree to just snip that part off.

See, when a designer’s done with their mad biology and maniacal cackling and “I’ll show those fools at the institute”-ing, the end result isn’t a fully living creature. It’s just a game. Like I said, a game in play is a creature. ‘Cause the players, and the specific dynamics they’ve got, bring another important component a designer can’t make all on their lonesome: muscles.

(Yeah, I said it. No game designers are swole. Not a one.)

A muscle is a way for the creature to move. It’s a way it wants to move. Specifically, it’s a way the players contributing the muscle want the game to move. They all want it to move somehow, since a game that’s still is a game that isn’t doing anything, and if the players wanted to sit around not doing anything, they could just do that in a room or discord call or some such, put on some music, hang out, and call that a day. And honestly? That’d be pretty nice! If you just wanna do that, go for it! We’ll be here grumbling and swearing vengeance against whatever part of the rpg space we imagine to be the foolish academics who cannot comprehend our brilliant but dangerously amoral designs.

But if the players do want a game, they want a game that moves. They want Lasers and Feelings to slither about through the grassy plains. And maybe they want the space-intrigue-arm to reach out and punch rocks! Or maybe they don’t want that at all. If they don’t want it, like I said, they don’t bring the meat to the bone. The arm hangs limp, and does nothing beyond get in the way when it moves.

But what if they do want it, and the bones aren’t there? That is, what would happen if they’re playing Lasers and Feelings normally, with no modified skeletal structure, but wanna focus on space intrigue? Well, bones indicate to players where the muscle might want to go, but players are gonna do what players do. They’re gonna push out a lump-arm, bones or no.

This can work! Kinda. Octopuses have tentacles and elephants have trunks that are supported all by musculature, and don’t need any bones. And there are always microbones – established tone, the frustratingly-unreliable “what would make sense to happen here”, even as simple as the play-by-post etiquette of “player one posts, then player two, then repeat”, all of these are mechanics! Freeform roleplay is not truly ruleless, even if the rules are often left to emerge from community norms. But those aren’t enough to support a whole arm unless the muscles are carrying a lot of the work, like a tentacle. The players have to really go “wow, let’s examine a lot of the power struggles between these space factions and dedicate our focus and thought to that” to grow the snake an arm with no bones in it.

Now, the fact is, the simplest answer to the players who would play Lasers and Feelings and Space Politics and not care about the space politics is “hey, what are you doing, literally just go play Lasers and Feelings“. And it’s important to note that, a lot of the time, that won’t need to be said, the players will do that on their own! Mechanical literacy in players can vary quite a bit, so it’s not something you can always consistently rely on, but mechanics are a way of signalling “this is a thing that is Important to the game”, and players will usually pick up on that enough to go “hmm, this intricate flower-arranging minigame with hooks into every other mode of play doesn’t exactly fit what I want out of Doom Tabletop, I’ll try something else”. (This hypothetical player has terrible taste, and I want to make Doom Tabletop Featuring Flower Arranging now exclusively to spite them, but, so it goes!)

As an aside – this is the core of my dissatisfaction with a lot of the OSR design ethos. (With the disclaimer that this is my understanding of what the OSR design ethos is, and I know that’s somewhat of a contested topic.) In short, the idea is that combat and health-attrition have the most hard mechanics, with other interactions favoring a “rulings over rules” prioritization of making the GM do all the actual design work and arbitration. The thing is, combat is implicitly to be avoided – it’s generally punishing, and pretty much always viewed as a punishment for failing to figure out a way to bypass the combat. Which is fine in its own right, but it means, if the players actually do play “correctly”, it’s a big ol’ ribcage floating in the open air that contains nothing! It’s the snake’s fleshless arm banging into rocks again. The upshot is that either it’s a mechanic you’re never supposed to interact with, or the game is supposed to be set up where the players can never actually do it “right”, and then they get tossed through the ribcage of you-fucked-up in a way they couldn’t avoid, so what’s the point.

Right, grumble over.

Designers are, like I said, beast-builders. Bodybuilders? Wait, but I already said none of them are swole… whatever! The point I want to emphasize is what I didn’t say – that they’re skeletoncrafters. That that’s all they are. ‘Cause it’s not! We do make skeletons, make mechanics, and slot them together, and hoo boy do we grumble and yell at each other about them, and go “ooh, that bone shape is real neat, I gotta remember that one”, but a game is more than just a jumble of mechanics. And a thing to remember about muscles, however insistent the players may be about what they want – muscles need blood to get to them to work. If they don’t have that, they can’t move.

The veins of the creature are its tone. Which, you may note, is a thing designers totally set up! When you write your paragraphs about the Vampire Queens and how the scars of their Profane Right have afflicted the stars to this day, such that every PC has a constellation in their eyes that shall eat their heart in a year and a day, yeah, that’s setting things up for what people expect! People are gonna aim for broody vibes, maybe some angst about impending mortality, probably some edginess, and then if they find out the actual mechanics are about courting your princess of choice for the upcoming ball, well, that might not be where they expected those veins to go. (But, that’s a matter of how you present the prose! You could totally lean into the angle of a temporary romance between those poisoned by the blood rites of the past, and then the tone would be communicated a fair bit more. It’s all in the presentation!)

Except, that’s a lie. It’s only some in the presentation. The rest is in the potluck – the handful of veins the players brought to the table, to stick into the creature as it is being made. They bring the muscles and you bring the bones, but both of you give the veins. Which is why the communication is so important! If you say “broody vampire game”, but don’t tell the specifics of what the point and focus is, well, they’ve got their own ideas of what broody vampires are like, and that’s gonna affect what veins they bring. You can’t control it, either. The one who reads a lot of Blade comics might bring a lot of veins to push towards the cool combat and gratuitous violence wing, and when they find out later that the game doesn’t have a combat wing, it doesn’t have any wings, it can’t even fly, well, that’s a thing to catch before they’ve gotten themselves worked up about the veins they plucked fresh this morning to bring to the potluck.

But hey, even with that example, you can present the whole schtick, and players will still have their own bits of tone to bring! Maybe their thoughts of romance trend light-hearted-adventure-swoop-them-off-their-feet-y, and the impending mortality of the player characters gets sidelined. Or maybe the players really wanna play up the angst, and how their courtship is inherently temporary! Maybe the cutthroat intrigue between the Vampire Princesses sounds most compelling, or maybe they just want a nice moment for all of them to share before half of them die. The beast template you provide them will nudge in directions, to be sure, but it won’t control which ones they take, which veins they bring to the table.

And it shouldn’t! You don’t know the tastes of every group of players who will pick up your game. They might like parts of it you consider only ancillary, and not care about the things you’d say are the point above all else. But if what you’ve got works for them, and with their tones, and their muscles, they can make it live, and set it loose to run and frolic and live, and that’s a beautiful thing.

It’s sometimes hard to remember, when measuring bones down to the millimeter and debating which vein shape will transport our brilliant new hemolymph cocktail and shaking our fist at the ingrates who dared to mock our grand vision, that what we’re making is gonna be out there, eating fruits and basking in sunlight, but we can’t be the ones to bring it all the way there. It’s the contribution of players that makes it live. And that can be a beautiful thing! But, among other things, it’s an important design constraint. If the shell of a beast you make can’t align with what players will think they need to bring to it, the best it can do is limp along. If a bone is jutting through a muscle, or the veins lead out to nothing at all and the blood spills on the ground, that poor beast will suffer, and won’t truly get to live.

And you wouldn’t be showing those fools at the institute that way, now would you?

(Postscript: oh no, I might actually want to make that vampire game. It sounds neat. This is the danger of giving examples, folks!)

“Fun” isn’t real and it can hurt you

(Fair warning, this one’s pretty much just an angry rant.)

So there’s a refrain I’ve heard a bit too often in game design spaces. “You’ve convinced me that it’s bad, but I’m still convinced that it’s fun.” Usually in regards to, like, “hey, this power gives the players a giant headache and screeches the game to a halt as they have to cross-reference several things and completely change how they approach the game”, or “hey, there is literally no way people have any impact on what happens here, so instead of supporting any interesting gameplay dynamics, you’ve essentially just made a gambling machine where the reward is how much you get to play the game”. So, y’know, serious, structural issues with the thing they built.

Thing is, the “fun” defense is… nebulous, at best. “Fun” pretty much means anything people can enjoy, ie, anything, and more specifically when making a game, it’s “the specific kind of enjoyment that this game is designed to induce in its players”. Now, the mechanical framework and flow of the game is how you induce that joy, so, a disruption to it is at baseline a disruption to that, but, you can’t really conclusively prove it won’t produce the brain chemicals, y’know? It might not enable any interesting player incentives, or it might enable actively perverse ones, but, what if that still feels good despite the structure of the game you’re making?

The trick is, that’s not really a useful response to feedback, nor does it actually help give a sense of where to go with a thing from there. If a thing doesn’t give much room for any interaction, or the interaction it incentivizes is fundamentally not good for the dynamic you’ve set up, even if that is fun for players, that means you’ve got a new headache of figuring out why. You’re trying to induce a certain experience in players, and the mechanical framework you’ve built up is supposed to do that – if you make a thing that doesn’t have interesting hooks in, and players enjoy that, that means you’ve gotta shift your framework so that this thing does hook in, and potentially change how the hooks work entirely, ’cause oh no, people aren’t enjoying that as much as this thing that’s a disruption to it! But, the thing is, I rarely ever hear this in response to genuine play feedback. This is from the ideation phase, when trying to think of ideas to fill out a content roster before giving them any testing. And usually, it’s said in resistance to the realization that an idea is not worth pursuing further.

(To be clear, this isn’t just the concept doing the defending. Designers are stubborn lots, and it always stings to have an idea that seems cool and then have it pointed out that it’s fundamentally not gonna work for the setup you’ve got. The impulse to reach for a defense is always gonna be there! The trouble is, it’s decidedly one of the easiest to reach, and it does bad things.)

“Fun” is, in game design terms, doing one of those linguistic tricks where it hides more specific and useful analysis. I’m a big proponent of analyzing player incentives with everything you make – including the incentives you’re relying on that drew players to your game in the first place. In a game where the pitch is being haunted by the ghosts of your past murder victims until you succumb to your guilt, it might sound “fun” to let you have a power that has a random chance to double-murder a ghost, eliminating it for good, but if players came for a story of clinging, eternal guilt, it’s not gonna be. And if it is fun for them, that means what “fun” is isn’t aligning with the original pitch, and you should reexamine that! If players do want the ability to fight back, then that’s now gotta be a part of the game concept, and one power with a random chance nobody has control over isn’t gonna cut it. Can you pivot the game to now being about managing to forgive oneself for one’s past misdeeds, and give the ghosts defeat conditions? Sure, if that would still fit what you want from the game! (Remember, sometimes the answer to players wanting something different like that is “that’s not what this game is going to be, it’s not what you’re looking for, you should go play something else for that”. Make a game to match a concept, but the players have to be willing to align with that concept, too, in order for them to play it right. Figuring out that concept and building for it is what this art is all about!)

What do they want, why do they want it, how can the framework be modified so that something like that can fit with it, should that be a thing they can get considering how it can change the gameplay and themes of what this game is. Those questions are very important to ask, and all are buried under the word “fun” in a most insidious way. When analyzing parts of a game, and when building them, you want as much perspective as you can, to see how the parts fit together and what can be discarded or turned. If you think a thing will be fun, but it doesn’t play well with the framework you’ve got, why will it be fun? That’s not a rhetorical question, it’s a serious one! Analyze and dissect the concept of fun until it’s splayed out in front of you on the anatomy table, and figure out what path of incentives and effects you want the thing you’re building to send your players on. If you conclude the worst, you can just set the thing aside and have it be the seed for a new project in future. Just ’cause you’re committed to the Silent Hill ghost-guilt here, doesn’t mean you can’t make a cool psychopomp-with-a-shotgun romp later down the line, if that still tickles your fancy! It’s just important to recognize that that should be a different thing.

One final note, which a friend brought up – the corollary to this, that because “fun” is a concept that’s more harmful than helpful to consider without elaboration, so is “not fun”, isn’t true. Much of the time, it can be – if you get feedback that an ability isn’t fun, your first step should be to examine what it incentivizes and how that plays with the framework at large, but, sometimes it isn’t that! Lancer, which is a D&D 4e-derived mech combat rpg, has one of the most elegant examples of this. There are two defensive ability types that come up I wanna analyze here – Resistance, which is just “whenever you take damage, halve the amount”, and Invisibility, which is “whenever you are attacked, there’s a 50% chance the attack misses”. There are many foibles and interactions that make these not quite analogous in expected result, damage that doesn’t come from attacks, attacks that deal damage even on a miss, attacks that don’t deal damage but do do nasty things on a hit, etcetera, but the short version is, hey, if you’re getting shot for X damage, the expectation value from having either of those effects is X/2 damage. Different dynamics, similar oomph. Sounds good, right?

Well, it turns out, no. Because everyone complains about Invisibility. Invisible enemies? Utter bastards, hate them every time. Invisibility-granting PC systems? Bane of every GM’s existence. Does Resistance have this same ire? No, of course not! The reason is very simply, if Invisibility does work on you, you lose everything you worked for. Did you unload a gun, or overheat yourself, or move out of position, to try to attack a target, only for Invisibility to mean the attack doesn’t happen? That’s all loss, no gain of any kind. You took a gamble, and you didn’t really have any control over that gamble, and you lost, and that just doesn’t feel good to people. If you’d gotten a half damage hit, that wouldn’t feel anywhere nearly as bad – because it means you get something. Brains like getting things when they try things, and get immensely upset when they don’t.

Now, is this a problem for Lancer? Not necessarily. Every attack has an attack roll alongside it, and while the math is intentionally shifted down so those hit more often than they miss, it still means every attack, Invisible or no, is something of a gamble where the loss condition is just “no forward advancement occurs from this action”. Having played Panic at the Dojo once, I have become infatuated with tactical rpgs where that isn’t a risk, and were I to make something like that myself, I would take cues from Panic in that regard, but Lancer isn’t doing that, and, that’s more than fair! It’s a game where that kind of gamble is part of how a lot of effects work, and that’s central to how it’s built to function. When you find out that something like that is getting consistent “this isn’t fun” responses from players, that can be your answer! But, if you’re making your own Lancer, and don’t know if misses actually add much to the game, and then get feedback like that? It’s something to consider!

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.)

Exalted is pretty neat, y’all

So I’ve been in a bit of a Mood^TM lately, and I wanted to channel it into talking about a game far and… dar from my heart, Exalted. Exalted second edition, specifically, which I’m sure is prompting a few of y’all to recoil in horror, as well you should. It’s rough. It sucks. But I wanted to talk about the bits I think are neat and cool, because, positivity is good.

(That means the setting. Just the setting. Every other part of the game is kind of terrible. Honestly, even the setting has a lot of terrible elements, but, still. It’s a very cool instance of the kind of metaphysics that makes my brain juice happy, and it manages a cool fantasy superheroes premise on top of that.)

(I might get some things wrong here. If I do, shut up, I probably know more than you, maybe it’s you who’s wrong. And the book you’ve got open that directly contradicts me. That’s wrong too.)

So in Exalted, you play a bunch of divinely-ordained chosen ones who are literally perfect and ultimate lifeforms, born to rule all. You’re also the weakest fish in the ultimate lifeform pond, and literally every other fish hates you personally. Also the world is about to explode and your one job nowadays is to make sure the world does not explode. You just woke up and need to act now, and your whole thing is you grow your ridiculous power over time as you live, like, millennia, millennia you do not have.

Good luck!

Let’s back up a bit

So back in the beginning, a bunch of cosmically powerful jerks called Primordials created reality because they wanted to play video games. This pissed off the fairies that were existing where reality was, and, fairyland essentially infinitely expands in all directions around the world. (Oh yeah, the earth is flat. ~~Just like real life.~~

They had to create reality to support the complicated infrastructure that video games require. It’s like an incredibly inefficient gaming PC. Listen, they had to have the RGB light-up keyboard, okay? So the screen is inside of Yu-Shan, the perfect city of heaven, with fountains of ambrosia and a bunch of gods running about and everything’s nice. Outside of it, reality’s there, and fucking superpowered dragon-people and shark-people and whatnot run around and humans are dumbass prey species that are also pray species. Their whole existence is to be scared, pray to gods for help, and then the prayer becomes ambrosia that the gods can eat. It’s a raw deal.

There’re a few chief gods, called the Incarnae. The sun is one – the Unconquered Sun, he’s a mystical super-powerful warrior, and he literally cannot lose a fight. He’s Unconquered! That’s his thing. There’s also Luna, the moon. She was made by compiling from the bubbling possibilities of fairyland every single possible version of her, and then they got put into a battle royale minecraft blitz survival games where they all ate each other. Five came out on top, but all are in there, and she can shapeshift and eat stuff and is a fucking nightmare. Then there’s the five maidens, who are essentially all a package deal as one Incarna total. They, uh… they just showed up? Like, Creation (that’s the world) got made, and, hey presto, they popped up. They can control fate and be cryptic and they’re masters of like Secrets and Endings and Journeys and I gotta say, nobody appears as concerned about this situation as they should be.

There’s a couple more, too, but, spoiler alert, they fucking die. Those three (or seven, depends how you count) are the ones that matter.

The Incarnae are pissed. Life is good, they get to hang out in the cool perfect heaven city, but, dammit, that RGB lighting looks real styling, and mom says it’s their turn to game! The Primordials don’t give them the time of day, they don’t view anything other than them as important, except for two – Gaia, who is essentially the whole realm of Creation, there are magical poles of her five elements (five, it’s a wonk mishmash of water-earth-fire-air and wood-metal-water-earth-fire because wood is an element but air is and metal isn’t) through the world, and Autochthon, who’s like the bullied nerd who makes wind-up toys that everyone breaks but his wind-up toys are absurdly complex. Just, y’know, it’s a gamer friend group, obviously they’re assholes, and they bully him and break his stuff.

Those two, both of them, don’t give a shit about gaming. Autochthon just wants his Etsy craft store to take off, and Gaia is a perpetual tourist who wants to explore scenic fairyland. They kinda can’t leave while the other Primordials are roping them into another fucking round of spleef, so, they figure, fuck it. Looking for the crappiest ingredients so there’s no way anyone will see it coming, they settle on depressed panicking humanity to be their weapon.

(Okay, there’s actually a good reason. See, humans are built to have infinite imagination, so they can imagine really scary things and pray harder. But that also means they can imagine fucking nonsense ideas and weapons and whatnot! Since the Primordials are, like, infinitely cosmically powerful, essentially they need as much of a long-shot gambling build as they can get, and, infinite imagination sure helps there.)

So, they invent the Exalted. Hey, that’s you! You’re in this show. Gaia makes a batch called Terrestrials, who essentially have Secret Bloodline Techniiiiiiiques, and breed like rabbits. They get to work as magic shock troops, and are affiliated with one of the five elements! You’re the cooler ones, though. Autochthon makes the Celestials, each of which is directly affiliated with one of the Incarnae. 300 Solars, who are good at everything and have an aura of constant smugness and hero complexes, 300 Lunars, who are shapeshifters that can turn into whatever the fuck as long as they eat it (including bugs, plagues, rocks, soul parts of Primordials, the giant apocalypse beasts that roam the landscape, what have you), and 100 Sidereals, for the maidens.

…Geez, five times the Incarnae and a third the Exalted? Talk about the short end of the stick.

Sidereals get to fuck with reality and fate and say that um actually they were across the street when you attacked and actually you weren’t allowed to take that action at all so you didn’t. Unlike the Solars and Lunars, and also unlike the whole reason they picked humans in the first place, Sidereals can’t build their own magic powers. They have what the maidens gave them, and that’s it. So instead they design ridiculous martial arts and become Immortal Hot Jackie Chan That Punches A Plague Into Your Heart With A Gun. (Is Jackie Chan hot? Should I have said “Immortal Hotter etcetera etcetera”? Who knows.)

Oh yeah, those other two Incarnae get Celestial Exalted, too, but then they get killed in the rebellion and their Exalted go insane so Autochthon takes them all and locks them up. They never come up again. But, that’s a plothook sitting right there!

So the Exalted are set up, given enough time to, like, start fermenting their power and thinking of terrible ideas, and then, fuck it, it’s war time.

Turns out, gambling pays off! Especially if part of your side contains the perfect warrior whose whole existence is predicated on an inability to ever lose.

Yes I am skipping the whole war. What, did you want to see it? Well, you kinda can’t. See, Exalted reincarnate after they die, and most of them did die a lot. When they did, they got their memories cleaned off. And, like… so, a bunch of the Primordials do legit die during the war. One of them that doesn’t, blows up enough of herself in a fit of pique to destroy 90% of the possibility of things that exist in Creation. So 9/10ths of the things that existed then do not anymore. Essentially, Creation went through a lot of changes then, you just get to see the after picture.

The living Primordials surrender, becoming the Yozis, turning their subcomponent souls into demons, and agreeing to go fuck off inside of Malfeas. Like Gaia, and a lot of the Primordials, he’s a place as well as a person. The Exalted, and everyone in Creation, earn the right to magically summon demons! Which sounds like a great plan! What do you mean they will obviously be enacting revenge as agents of the Yozi? Nahhhhh.

The dead Primordials become the Neverborn, and the Underworld comes into existence as an edgy Shadow-the-Hedgehog-style reflection of Creation. Instead of the screen for gaming, it’s centered around the Void, a big pit of oblivion that kills things. It’s where the Neverborn were gonna go, but, they invented being ghosts, so they also invented what defines a ghost here – their fetters. What they were attached to in life. They will stay ghosts, and cannot pass on, until Creation is un-Creationed.

Oopsie!

I’m sure everything will be fine now

The Primordials are definitely out of the way for sure and not a problem anymore. The Incarnae are finally getting to find out what this “mined craft” all the cool kids are talking about is. Humanity has gone from the bottom of the food chain to 700 perfect idiots, some very large Terrestrial families, and the rest, who kind of still are the bottom of the food chain. Everything’s perfect! Time to party!

So, the bad news, which nobody actually knows about, is that everything is already screwed. (I mean, you coulda guessed that, but, still.) When the Neverborn died, their big thing was Creation still being there, but they were specifically pissed at, like… hey, what the fuck, are those humans? Those losers? Fuck you, you don’t get to kill me! So they placed a death curse on the Celestial Exalted. The Great Curse. (Not to be confused with the Great Geas, which you don’t need to know about. But, the Great Geas probably happened because of the Great Curse, so, hey. Maybe the confusingly-similar names can be useful.)

Essentially, the Great Curse turns Exalted into assholes over time. It amplifies their shittiest traits, the narcissism, the hubris, etcetera. For Sidereals, it makes them convinced they’re right about everything and can’t trust anyone. For Solars, it makes them convinced they’re shining golden gods that can do no wrong and the world is their playground to fuck about in. For Lunars, each one is bound to one Solar, and essentially the Great Curse traps them in an abusive relationship. As in, the Great Curse on Lunars specifically both makes them trapped in the relationship and makes it bad.

…Yeah. It’s, uh… I won’t mince words, it’s fucking gross. And I wish it was not in my fun stressed out magic superheroes game. Magically enforced abusive relationships are a fucking terrible worldbuilding concept unless you want to write specifically a game about how shitty that is, and White Wolf did not have the tact to do that. Randomly scrolling through Solar charms (that’s what the superpowers are called) and seeing ones that are about controlling and manipulating their paired Lunar (called their “mate”, too, which, ewww) is Fun^TM, too.

But anyway. The Lunars also get kinda hubris-y, so, let’s focus on that, yeah?

The Exalted essentially split up the world and start running bits of it. Mostly the Sidereals stay in Yu-Shan, but the Solars and Lunars pop the fuck off. They invent the internet, they make it sentient, it names itself “I Am” after its first words (like “Hello World” but self-centered), they make a flying airship that has a gun that deals an infinite number of damage with a hit, a group of Solar nerds called the Cauldronists propose to demolish Creation and rebuild a new one just because they reckon they can do a better job, it’s like everyone is going “oh, you think that’s hubris? Here, watch this!” It’s fucking great.

During this time, Gaia leaves to go wander fairyland. Since, y’know, that’s what she wants to do. Autochthon leaves a bit later, when the Exalted start breaking his toys (with the Great Geas, remember that? No you don’t, I didn’t explain anything about it), and becomes his own realm like Gaia and Malfeas are. Then he goes into a coma because his depression and self-loathing are physically manifesting as a terminal illness, since, that’s how Primordial bodies work, they’re also their minds, and he’s the only one who isn’t completely self-assured. Inside of him is a cool sci-fi setting with lightsabers and robot spiders and his own kind of Exalted, Alchemicals, who are physically made of a magical metal and grown in a tub with the gem containing a human soul.

That doesn’t matter, though. It’s golden age time for Creation! Life for humans is way better except when an Exalted decides to kill all of them for giggles, and the tech is improving massively. They’ve got mechs made of magic supergold, shit’s wild.

But, you know how this story goes. Can’t have a lost ancient super-powerful civilization with a lot of scattered relics without losing that civilization and scattering the relics.

So the Sidereals are tired of the Solars’ shit. They’re getting too hubristic, they’re mangling fate by sinking parts of reality into fairyland just to practice fighting it (which is so dumb, they can just walk outside and fairyland’s right there), and they’re right dicks to be around. They all get a prophecy that they need to do something about the Solars, and, it is about time. So, they hatch a plan. During a big feast where everyone shows up (it’s enforced, because it’s also the one week you can summon the most powerful demons, strong enough that only Solars can call them, and you know if they weren’t demanded here they would do the stupidest shit imaginable with them), they recruit the Terrestrials, murder every single Solar, and trap their reincarnating Exaltation in a box so no new ones come about. And also murder the Lunars by association. They don’t get trapped, though.

The plan works! And we enter…

The finding out step

Turns out, bad news, people in power can be shitty even if they’re not magically compelled to do so. The gods, now not having to deal with the oversight of Primordials, Incarnae, or even most of the Exalted, get to pop off and be corrupt as hell. The Sidereals are busy trying to do all of the Solar’s jobs, fighting against the straggler Lunars that survived (and that, since they’re not trapped, they regularly reincarnate), and trying to set up a Terrestrial government they can control. They spread a religion that basically teaches all the hot shit the Celestial Exalted said about themselves, they’re chosen ones and super smart and deserve to rule everything, but about the Terrestrials. They teach that other Exalted are bad and should be murdered – but mostly they just describe Lunars and (just in case) Solars.

The Sidereals have star magic. (If you know what “sidereal” means, you probably guessed that!) When they did the whole murder plot, they knew, if they got caught for it, they were screwed. So, they did a thing! There was a constellation called the Mask, which they broke, making it the Broken Mask. (Duh.) This made it physically impossible to prove in a court of law that the Sidereals did it. Like, as a law of physics for the world. I love this dumb mess where you can do things like that. But it also kinda broke all their identities? Sidereals now swap between lives and histories like masks, and people will forget who they were and that they were there once they left. Which is real handy for hiding within Terrestrials and none of them noticing! Terrestrial hunting parties for magical stuff, usually Exalted, are kind of screwed even with their magic supertech left over, so, Sidereals will often be tagging along in the guise of one of the members to even the odds. (Well, more to uneven, the deck is super stacked and they make it even moreso.)

All that, and they still can’t run the world on their own. Huh! I was so sure a hundred politics-minded backstabbing schemers could do the job. Wild.

So, anyway. It’s time for you to meet a Deathlord.

That’s the name for the ghost of a Solar that died at the big betrayal. There’s 13 of ’em. They’re edgy and whiny and goth, and they work for the Neverborn. Sorta. They hate each other, but, they’re both groups of ghosts and they’re both working to destroy Creation, so, they collaborate in that “I’m gonna kill you/you’ll die trying” sort of way.

They engineer a super-plague that murders a fuckton of people, including Exalted. Who aren’t supposed to be able to get sick.

Strong start. But let’s see if the fairies can’t do one better.

Yeah, remember them? So they’ve been a regular menace, taking bites out of Creation and eating people for stories. Consistent jerks. But, see, they kind of want Creation gone, not just munched a bit. And Creation has lost a lot of its protections lately. Plus, the Exalted that are left are worrying about a super-plague! And, above all else, the fairies are creatures of drama. What’s more dramatic than an army cutting right through to Creation’s heart to destroy it?

Well, there isn’t actually much resistance Creation can mount. So, like, they get through Creation. Shit’s fucked. That’s it. Everyone’s doomed. And then we find out the answer – a grand betrayal, of course! Having fun, Sidereals in the audience? The leader’s second-in-command dramatically stabs him, everyone gets to ham it up, and, bam, invasion over, they got their melodrama and that’s all they were really after. But, with so few powerful anythings left to defend Creation… you know they could, now.

So, the Sidereals redouble their efforts.

They set up, like, a real Terrestrial hegemony. Throughout Creation. Ruled by a Terrestrial called the Scarlet Empress, who the guy who originally thought of the big betrayal is confident he has under his thumb. They preach the religion hard, crack down on shit a lot, and get some semblance of control back. It’s recovery, it’s a vulnerable state for the world, seizing power works. Whatever. Politics is boring, you don’t care.

The Ebon Dragon cares, though. You remember, Snidely Whiplash? He’s here to treason things up and cause problems. But, see, he’s not dead. He’s not a Neverborn, he’s not a Yozi. He doesn’t want Creation destroyed, he wants it back. Xx_tied2traintra_xX has gotta get another win under his belt, baby.

So, long story shot, he convinces the Scarlet Empress to work with him, and, like, when I say “work with him”, I mean “they legally get married and she makes a demonic pact for power”. Which… relationship goals? I think? But bad news for Creation, for sure. And the Sidereals just don’t notice.

Time for phase 2 of his plan – diplomacy! With the Neverborn. Specifically, hey, how’d they like some Exalted? Remember the Solars, from back in the bad old days? So, Autochthon is a genius inventor. Everything he makes is perfect, and he made the Exalted extra perfect. There is no way to smash the Exaltations, nor to infect them.

But you can just put stuff on top of them. Autochthon didn’t plan for that.

So Snidely (that’s his official name now) designs magic hats for them – ones made of demons for the Yozis, and ones made of ghost stuff for the Neverborn. If the Neverborn cooperate in snagging the Solar Exaltations, they can keep a hundred of them.

And they do! But, Snidely wasn’t super smart. They only caught half the Exaltations – so instead of the Yozis having 200 to the Neverborn’s 100, they instead only have 50. And there are 150 actual Solars floating about again.

Odds are, that’s you! Welcome back to reality.

Whoop there goes gravity

Hope you had fun in your party time, ’cause shit is disorienting around here now. For one, the cops want you dead. “The cops” being Terrestrials, who may or may not have a Sidereal mixed in to make sure they kill you, and definitely have pew pew laser guns that you’re pretty sure you may have made last life. Whenever you start doing your magic and get the cool glowy aura, a bunch of people scream and call you a demon. Obviously, you also had a human life here, so you know some of what’s going on with that, but, like… the hell happened?

No time for that, though. The Lunars, which have had a rough time of it and had to hang out near fairyland (which, fun fact, is bad to you in extended periods of exposure), are mixed about the whole “hey remember the magically enforced abusive relationships thing”, and may very well maul you on principle. The Sidereals are too committed to stop murdering you now, and they’ve got a lot of gods in line with that (and not much else, the gods are running wild and corrupt). The local government sucks and the Terrestrials suck more. Half of the Solars aren’t coming back as Solars, but are appearing as edgy ghostly asshole ones called Abyssals (the ones the Neverborn got) or real gross demony ones called Infernals (Yozi flavor). If you follow the metaplot (which you shouldn’t), the Yozis utilize the gamer wedding with the Scarlet Empress to invade Creation in like 40 years, win, and take it back over.

Shit’s fucked.

And, as much as I’ve laid all the history out – this is where the game starts! The beginning note! “Hi, welcome to being a Solar Exalted! You are a hero chosen for your determination and vision, made a perfect being in flesh, and burdened with glorious purpose. The world is a complete fucking mess and everyone with any power hates you personally, and it was your job to make sure nothing like this ever happens. It’s currently your job to fix it. Plus, you’ve got people from this life you care about, and the government being corrupt and the world being on the brink of apocalypse isn’t doing them any favors, either. Good fucking luck.”

Honestly, this is what I like about Exalted. White Wolf’s fare has a very constant trend of “the people who are more powerful than you decide everything that happens, and they decide that it’s bad, fuck you, sit around and mope”, and, I’ll confess, it doesn’t do it for me. I think that’s a lame fantasy. Exalted has a fair bit of that, and it’s clearly them trying to shoehorn their house special ethos into a setup where it really doesn’t quite fit. But, the end result isn’t that! Exalted stares you in the eye, drops the power level and complete mistakes of the past on your lap, and tells you that at your height, you could’ve killed any of the strongest assholes in this clusterfuck. You’re not at your height. The world is against you. Everything’s falling apart, and you’ve got a whole confusing world to take care of, and people to try to connect to. This is an impossible task, that you’re guaranteed to fail.

But you’re a Solar. An Exalted of the Unconquered Sun. The Sun doesn’t fail. Neither do you.

So what are you gonna do about it?