Paris Gondo - the Life-saving Magic of Inventorying, and Equipment

Paris Gondo - The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying is tongue-in-cheek to be sure. Designed as a storytelling game with no prep and only a few dice, the game is a gentle jab at an aspect of RPGs that has gone by the wayside in recent years; the inventory.

Now, that’s not entirely true. Almost every RPG acknowledges that characters can carry things, keeping them in their pockets or backpacks. Many don’t bother keeping careful track, however, opting for the adventure-game route of hammerspace or bottomless pockets. Your inventory is not supposed to be “realistic,” its supposed to be full of single-use assets that get you past the next obstacle so you can continue the game.

What makes Paris Gondo interesting for me is its clear attempt to push equipment and items — a purely game-focused mechanic — into a story framework. To create the dungeon, the players take turns talking about it, shaping it narratively. After picking their character’s classes, they introduce themselves and their backstories. Every aspect of the game starts with a die roll, a prompt, a suggestion…and then is embellished through the players own linguistic verve.

That is not what equipment is for.

Equipment as a concept has been an erratic aspect of RPGs. More often than not, Equipment usually only exists in game-focused systems like D&D, while story-focused systems like FATE allow equipment to be an ephemeral suggestion. After all, how often does equipment matter in movies or books? Sure, Neo and Trinity can’t shoot up a lobby without guns, but do we need to mark each gun on their equipment sheet along with ammo counts and magazine weights? It’s easier to put a single line on their character sheets, quote: “Guns. Lots of Guns.”

And yes, there is always a need for items like pens and wallets, but how many are so important as to make narrative difference? Most of the time, having characters track where they left their car-keys is just a waste of time that could be better spent on the car chase.

On the other hand, in a more game-focused RPG, you can’t open a locked door without the key, and locked doors can look like many different things: they can look like a scalable wall, or a broad sea. They can look like an ogre with a club, or a kindly old wise-woman. Part of the joy of RPGs is that a key can be shaped like almost anything: blades, conversation, magic, rope, coin, boats, horses, oaths, and many more things besides.

So the question becomes: do you have a key in your backpack, or do you need to go find it?

Inventories are, for lack of a better way of putting it, a kind of “build.” What you wield, what you wear, and what you slip into your pockets are all means by which you define what methods your character can and cannot use to bypass certain obstacles. Encumbrance and inventory space provide limits on these choices; if you load up on healing potions and food, you aren’t carrying lightning wands or battle-axes. Every choice about what you carry becomes a trade-off, a cost-benefit analysis of whether its better to have more of one option or another. Do you take one of everything or stock up on a specific item? You don’t really need a hypoderm patch when your teammate is a psydoc and that same space could hold a nanoflux agitator, but what if your psydoc gets incapacitated? This key for this kind of door, or that key for that kind?

Now, some people might love this kind of gameplay, but others — especially these days — might see this as an exercise in torture.

Why? Because the player has to use those items, otherwise, why have them in the first place? Ideally, every item is used at the right time to turn failure into success. Every healing potion keeps the players alive, every grenade turns a tight battle into an easy victory, every challenge is made easier by judicious and effective use of what’s in the backpack.

But the ideal is never achieved, is it? There’s always going to be a situation where an item is called for but not at hand. Perhaps its absence means lost money or a lost ally. Maybe the players return with a bag full of unused potions or healing items. Perhaps they die because there was no easily available source of fire-resistance. Or worst of all, perhaps they could use the item but they might need it more, later.

This causes, in a word, anxiety. If every item you chose or use could mean the difference between success and failure, how can you not agonize over the choice? Sophie from Mars describes the enjoyment one can get from this anxiety in their three-part treatise on Resident Evil, a series of (at first) inventory-based survival-horror games. That’s what inventories are good for: keeping your character alive; not healthy exactly, or alive in the mortal sense, but in the game sense. “Active,” perhaps. “Still in the game.”

You can have fun with this minigame, especially if the broader game is itself about survival, but does it “spark joy?”

Yes, if the name wasn’t obvious, Paris Gondo is a parody of the Marie Kondo school of organization. Items in the game have a weight, a usefulness number, and an “emotion” number, to represent how much the item sparks joy in your character.

It’s a fascinating experience, juggling numbers to make sure your emotion is high, your encumbrance is low, and your items’ usefulness is good enough to survive the trip home, all while building a flowery narrative of heroic acts. Every successful roll must be followed by a tale of how this collection of numbers resulted in a glorious victory. At the end of the game, if you roll under your items’ total emotion number, you are allowed to tell the tale of how your character lived forever in perfect happiness and satisfaction. Even if your character died on the adventure, you may find your subsequent satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the afterlife. It’s silly, awkward, delightful, and it makes an interesting point about items.

We can all name them, the tools with stories as big as a hero’s: Mjolnir, Frostmorne, Excaliber, Sting, Pasha, Taming Sari…they are all as important as the beings who wielded them.

None of them are called the Sword of Sharpness +3.

One of the important aspects of game-focused RPGs is getting more powerful; we need to see our characters get stronger. At high levels in RPGs, characters can become positively laden with powerful items, where even their underwear is +2 Protection from Cold. This can make equipment just another system that you need to keep raising the numbers of.

As time has gone by, more and more players have decided that keeping track of inventories isn’t fun anymore.

One solution is to make items unnecessary. Superfluous. In early D&D editions, characters didn’t have “abilities” the same way they do now. Sure, there were some, but the best means of gaining new and exotic keys for the more dangerous doors was through magical items. Nowadays, characters have enough abilities and reusable magics that items aren’t as important as they used to be.

For narrative games, the inventory is only important when it its narratively significant. The potion of resisting fire-breath is important because it’s the only way the party survives the dragon’s breath. You don’t have your car-keys if that added drama is significant to the scene. The only time we’ll pay attention to your equipment is if its important.

The extreme version of this is “narrative necessity.” As players build the story around their characters, only the things they discuss are significant. Players are never responsible for planning ahead, and there is never an occasion when the players need to retcon their actions. If the characters don’t have it, they don’t need it, otherwise they’d have it.

The down-side of this is obvious: it removes a whole aspect of gameplay — planning and preparation. If characters have the story built around them then they never need to actively prepare for future challenges; they can simply charge ahead, confident in the knowledge that they’ll never “be without.”

The down-side of the alternative is also obvious. If characters find themselves in an impossible situation, with dragon fire melting allies left and right and no potion of dragon-breath resistance at hand, how do they fix the problem? Retreat, heal, find the necessary potion, and come back? How long will that take? How many steps backwards before they can move forward again?

And is this fun? Does it tell a good story?

But there’s one more question that I’ve danced around for several posts now; a question that has caused consternation in any number of game-designer’s hearts:

Is it realistic?