Behind the Scenes, part 2

Did you know that there are rock-paper-scissors tournaments?

I’m not joking. Yes, it sounds like a joke, but the WRPSA is a real institution, with games taken as seriously by its players as any other sport. There are championships, books on strategy, trainers…

Now, the easy¹ reaction is to laugh. It really sounds like a lost Monty Python sketch, doesn’t it? You could see it on The Simpsons; hushed reporters discussing with retired masters the strategies this particular player is using…Oh, Paper; that’s the same opening he used against Keriovick in Moscow last year. A risky gambit; will it pay off, John? And the camera pans to the retired seven-time world champion, who’s maybe 14 years old.

It’s easy to laugh, because RPS means something to most of us; it’s a “game” only in the loosest of terms. There is no strategy, no skill, it’s entirely random, right? It’s what you do when you need to roll-off or cut-high but don’t have any dice or cards handy.

But it’s not entirely random, because you choose. You decide whether you throw Scissors or Paper or Rock, and surely there is some strategy in the choice, right?

RPS is fascinating in its simplicity. It is, in many ways, the purest distillation of strategy. A lot of more complicated games use RPS as a basis for their own mechanics; any choice you make is “stronger” against one choice and “weaker” against another. It’s been compared to medieval army organization,² present in Pokémon’s Type mechanics,³ is used in boxing theorycraft,⁴ and been the foundation of strategic game strategy for years: fundamentally, every strategic choice you make is a cost-benefit analysis of what opponent-strategies you are “stronger” and “weaker” against.

It goes further than that; Poker is also a random game that includes choices, and there is certainly strategy. Some people are “better” or “worse” at the game, so why not the same for RPS? An often-said axiom about Poker is that you’re playing your opponent as much as the game. You’re learning their tells, how they think and play, and trying to guess whether or not they’re bluffing.

It’s the exact same thing in RPS. You’re trying to psych out your opponent with subtle flicks of the finger, positions of the hand, or you’re staring at their fingers in hopes that you can see what they’re throwing as they’re throwing and then choose the appropriate sign. There is strategy in RPS, and professional players who have developed skills to improve their chances at the game.

It’s pretty clear that “Casual” isn’t a type of game, but rather a type of mindset of the players. There aren’t “casual” games, you play a game “casually.”

Okay, but there is a group of people who disagree with my representation of Poker. They will tell me that it’s not about gaming the other players at the table, guessing their tells or psyching them out; it’s about math and statistics. This group is “professional Poker players.”

“Winning” at Poker is different than “Making Money” at Poker. See, if you play a lot of games, sometimes you’ll win and sometimes you’ll lose — its a card game, and random factors will always have an influence on the results. The way to make money is to make sure your losses are smaller than your wins, which can only happen if someone else’s wins are smaller than their losses. It’s a distillation of the capitalist business-owner’s mindset: reduce your liabilities while increasing your assets, and you increase profits for your quarterly earnings report.

How do you do that? Math.

Statistics is the number one tool in a professional player’s toolbox. My cousin has made a lot of money in professional poker tournaments, and his strategy is simple: crunch the numbers. He learned probabilities and played conservatively. Was there luck involved? Sure, but there was more planning.

It certainly seems like people who play poker casually and people who play professionally are playing two different games. One is focused on the math, while the other is focused on people.

Hm…That’s a parallel with RPGs, isn’t it?

I’ve talked at length about the story/system divide in RPGs, and how people play for different reasons…is this just the same thing, only with cards?

Well, not exactly. Getting better at poker is clearly connected to what kind of poker you’re playing. You can get better at the math, refining your formulae and fine-tuning your percentages; or get better at reading people.

Whereas with RPGs, playing seriously doesn’t have to mean getting better at the game. I’ve got significant social issues that I’m working through, and GMing RPGs is a method for doing so. While me and my friends are certainly playing RPGs “casually,” but I’m not being a “casual” GM, as I’m practicing social interaction and improving my social skills.

Okay, so what does getting “better” at a game mean?

Let’s talk about Speedrunning. At its core, Speedrunning is the essential art of gaming: completing the game as fast as possible. That is the goal of every game, right? To reach the end? To “win?” Speedrunning is just the distillation of that one goal down to its minimal components. It turns the organic and casual fumbling the first-time player — the person who has to explore and experiment to find the way forward — into a proscribed set of behaviors. A ritual. A performance.

This goes further than simply “playing” the game. A lot of Speedrunning also involves finding glitches, errors, and coding mistakes to “break” the game; after all, getting the three Spiritual Stones and the Song of Time to open the Door of Time as fast as possible is one thing, but it will never be as fast as skipping the door altogether.

Okay, but TTRPGs don’t have “code,” right? You can’t clip through a door when the GM is staring at you across the table. How can you “speedrun” a TTRPG?

Min-maxing is one of those terms⁵ used to describe RPG players who care more about the math than the story. Sometimes called “Munchkins,” these are players who play the statistics rather than the setting. Maybe having a Paladin who multi-classes in Rogue doesn’t make narrative sense, but have you considered how many damage dice will get rolled if they backstab and holy-smite at the same time? A half-ogre with a spiked chain may take several levels to set up, but once you’ve finished, the mechanics make your player unbeatable. It “breaks the game.”

Speedrunners and Min-maxers do the same thing. They aren’t here for the story, the setting, the trappings, the “magic of the theatre;” they’re here to tinker with cogs and mess around with mechanics.

The game Dominion is a deck-building game where you and your friends face off purchasing cards in the attempt to purchase the most victory point cards by the end of the game. There are cards that allow you to draw more cards from your deck, purchase more than one card a turn, and other fun little twists to the otherwise simple “play a card, buy a card” turn.

The trick is, it’s all an illusion.

“Serious” players learned the strategy really quick: for all the extra cards that made your turn an ever-expanding cycle of infinite card-purchases, the game is won by purchasing victory cards. If you don’t have enough money to purchase the victory cards, you might have enough to purchase more money, making it more likely you’d have enough for VP in a later turn.

This was the “Big Money” strategy, and was considered the low-bar for a strategy in the game. If it couldn’t beat the simple strategy of “purchase victory card if you can, purchase money if you can’t,” then it was a distraction. This is perhaps the simplest example of Speed-running a board game: The game tries to tell you it’s a game about buying cards and building a complex deck that will ultimately give you enough coins, draws, and power to purchase more VP than your opponents. What the mechanics are — what the game actually is — is a game about buying VP as fast as possible; the other cards are a distraction. An unnecessary addition. A temptation to play the game inefficiently.

Remember way back when I talked about how Game-narrative goals and Meta-narrative goals were at odds? This is exactly that. Min-maxers, speedrunners, Big-Money strategists, they’re all doing the same thing: stripping away the narrative fluff and focusing on the mechanical skeleton underneath. They want to know how the game works. They want a peak at what’s going on behind the scene.

Now, lest some people take umbrage with this framing, let me say that there certainly is a magic in understanding the mechanics. I don’t mean to say that speedrunners are all emotionless robots who don’t care about the packaging of a game, only in its barest essentials. They simply find the magic of the game elsewhere than the story. They want to play with builds and numbers, not emotional reunions or villainous backstabs.

Take a look here if you want one player’s definitions/experiences with min-maxing, and particularly the second-to-last section, “The Magic Disappears.”

That’s really been the core of this whole diatribe. What is “the magic?”

Remember when I told you to put a pin in “amateurs could make art?” There is something interesting in that sentiment when looked at through a “casual” lens. If RPGs are “art,” then is it possible to not play an RPG casually?

It certainly seems like the framework I’m building answers “no.” In the Story/System division, if you ignore the story entirely then you’re just playing a tactical wargame like Warhammer 40k.

Okay, sure, but take a look at this. In this video, Paul makes the case that…well, it’s a multi-layered case, so go ahead and watch it if you want, but the thing that grabbed my attention was he seemed to be dancing around/flirting with/barely missing my own framework of narrative vs. system division in play: the game-narrative and the meta-narrative.⁶

The other important thing he mentions? Narrative play can be “fixed” by adding a GM.

There is something amazing about watching someone else come to more-or-less the same conclusions that I’ve come to from a completely different angle: Tabletop Wargames are much more System/Meta-narrative focused than RPGs, and pulling a wargame in the directions of RPGs strengthens the Story/Game-narrative aspects. I figure if Paul and I were to ever have a long conversation and exchange notes, we’d come away with some really interesting ideas.⁷

Whoo…okay. That’s one long rambling diatribe…wrap it all up. What’s the point of all this garglemesh?

H.P. Lovecraft found a kind of security in the unknown. The more you learned about the universe, the more you realized the stories we tell ourselves are nonsense, designed to make us feel in control or perhaps even powerful.

We could say, perhaps, that “Casual” players stay with these stories. They don’t care about speedrunning, “proper” gameplay, or optimal procedures. They don’t care about what game they’re “actually playing,” they care more about winning the game “their” way than the “ideal” way. They care about the story they’re telling themselves.

Every game has a level of story-telling. Even Chess, with its cold rules and simple polished pieces, is a story of two armies clashing. These stories can guide players or misdirect them, depending on their goals.

It’s an interesting idea to consider: the more you learn or play a game, the less the magic works. You start to learn percentages, best-practices, and develop a strategy that pays more attention to the rules than the story. Eventually the story becomes background noise. Sure, you’re “curing a pandemic,” fine, but what you’re really doing is managing your four actions so you can get the right cards to the right players in time before Berlin pops off again!

What does this have to do with RPGs? Well, if you’ll pardon a momentary erasure of tactical RPGs, it means that RPGs are uniquely designed to be resistant to this deconstruction of the magic. The story, the majesty, the unknown is all part and parcel of the process. You can’t learn the system perfectly when half of the system’s function relies on the GM waiting expectantly, dice and pencils at the ready.

So…what, was this really two posts devoted to the idea that “Storytelling is Magic?” That RPGs are super-special-awesome? Is that all?

Perhaps. Perhaps this is really just another addendum to my RPG Treatise. Perhaps this is just a long-winded reaction to a couple of video’s I’ve seen recently that got me thinking. Perhaps I realized it had been a while since I wrote a personal-thoughts blog-post. Perhaps I just wanted to remind everyone that, yes, Storytelling is magic.

Perhaps that’s enough.