The Dreamer, and Minimalism

The Dreamer is a one-word RPG by W. H. Arthur.

No, wait, let me back up. There needs to be some context here.

If I haven’t been explicit about this before, I should explain for the RPG tourists that most RPGs, especially those from the early generations of the hobby, are long. Rulebooks, supplements, worldbooks, magazines…you can fill bookshelves with the content from a single game, to say nothing of reprints and revised editions. Books upon books upon words upon words. It can be quite daunting, to say nothing of expensive. People who aren’t ready for it could be pushed away.

So, naturally, comes the antithesis; rules-light games. The 200 Word RPG Challenge is perhaps the cleanest example: creating a fully fledged RPG system in two-hundred words or less can be challenging, but it certainly hones your creative skills while forcing you to ask exactly what is necessary to make an RPG fun.

So what makes an RPG fun?

Well, I talked about that earlier, and while repeating some ideas would certainly do wonders for my word-count, I’d rather go further down the rabbit hole:

200 words is kind of a lot. We could cut that down quite a bit, couldn’t we?

1-page RPGs were perhaps made famous by Grant Howitt and his plethora of viral games like Crash Pandas and Honey Heist. An entire system placed on one side of a piece of notebook paper certainly strips away a lot of the dense rules and world-building that caused the death of so many trees for the sake of another World of Darkness splatbook.

An interesting thing happens as you strip away the rules. Rules — as I said before when talking about GM Fiat — limit what you can do. At the same time, they provide guide-rails to focus the infinite possibilities of your imagination.

Minimalist RPGs are, by necessity, system-first RPGs. When there are so few rules, you need to rely on them to help give shape to your play. In Honey Heist, you can do either Bear things, or Criminal things. Successes and failures make you better at being a Criminal or a Bear.

At the same time, because there are so few rules, the game-narrative relies mostly on the creative input of the players. The game is almost exclusively narrative, again, because the limited rules simply can’t support anything else.

Can we keep going?

Well, of course we can; I spoiled it in the opening. There are such things as 2-word RPGs, like Howl. Wait. and Fortune//Telling. With only two words, can you really call these RPGs?

Well, they call themselves RPGs, and that’s good enough for me.

Howl, wait. Speak, reply. Read, think. Two simple rules; commands, almost. A “thing to do.”

Then what?

In other minimalist RPGs, your let the story you create guide your actions. You provide context. You shape a narrative. You explain.

It’s important to note how these 2-word RPGs are dangerously close to LARPs. Engaging with the rules doesn’t require sitting around a table to imagine a situation, but to create a situation in the real world. Join. Follow. can see you crossing town with people you don’t know, while Howl. Wait. forces you to inject yourself into the space around you. You aren’t just playing the game alone anymore.

The Dreamer has only one rule: Imagine.

It has more words; to re-print the whole rule-page here: “The Dreamer is an RPG play with theatre of the mind. You get to visit strange alien landscapes, long forgotten civilizations, or bizarre Escher-esque geometries. Feel the grass underneath your feet, the touch of soft velvet, the smell of exotic spices and the sound of waves splashing against rocks. The possibilities are limitless.”

Looked at one way, it’s the same touchy-feely saccharine nonsense that leads to posters in libraries of kids sliding down rainbows towards the inevitable snap of a book’s closing jaws. “Imagine.” How poignant.

Looked at another way, it’s the entire point of RPGs. Experiencing another world is only possible through our imaginations, and there is an genre of RPG that believes rules are only there to facilitate these fantasies. We aren’t playing a game like chess, with rules and strategy — we’re playing a game like make-believe, just with a few more rules than “anything goes.”

So what actually is The Dreamer? Is it an RPG? A joke? An art-piece? Perhaps it’s all of them at once.

Imagine is an important rule in RPGs, one that oftentimes goes without saying. At worst, it’s merely suggested rather than encouraged or supported by the system. It’s too easy for us old jaded types to roll our eyes and scoff at The Dreamer like we might at a tacky key-chain at a souvenir shop. It’s embarrassingly hippy. Peace and love and all that. It’s not practical.

Well, no more practical than playing an RPG, at any rate.

I think, in some strange post-modernist way, The Dreamer has somehow managed to highlight what the purest form of RPG actually is. You follow the rules in an RPG, and this RPG’s rule is to “imagine,” unbound by rules. It is at once entirely freeing and wholly limited. It’s the perfect example of the impossible paradox of a perfect blend of game and narrative.

You may think there aren’t enough rules in The Dreamer, but we can imagine them if we want. We do imagine them, it’s not like RPG rules are found in nature. We make everything up. That’s all play is.

So, for the next few posts, I’d like to look at some different kinds of rules and how they interact with our play. Up first? The pervasive rule known as stats.