RPG Errata: Manyfold, and Supportive Rules and Practices

In the last couple posts, we explored some different terms for different kinds of fun people can have with RPGs, and the different mindsets they can engage with while playing.

So what?

Sure, we can have an interesting conversation using the same terminology, but the rubber has to meet the road sometime, right? Being a Better Socrates is all about using new frameworks to become better RPGers.¹

This is where the third section of Manyfold comes in. The Designed Support section goes through the first list of types-of-enjoyment and discusses different ways of supporting these types in games, and I’d like to take a look at them now.

I’ll do this in two parts. First off, I’ll list my thoughts about each bullet point, and then I’d like to look at supporting fun from a different direction.

Levi’s Design Support

Supporting ALEA

Levi makes an interesting point here, that people who crave the “gambler’s thrill” are probably going to gravitate more towards swingy one-die systems, where success and failure are more uncertain. As I’ve said before, the system of RPGs is framed around loading the roll, making a character’s actions more or less likely to succeed due to the situation. The chance-to-hit for a warrior is much higher than that of a wizard, after all.

So does that mean that high alea-players are going to play sword-swinging wizards, or spell-slinging warriors? Not at all. Levi also makes the point that critical hits in combat aren’t necessarily a high-alea situation, unless the combat was tense. This makes supporting alea not so much a system-based issue, but a GM issue. Alea is all about the creation and release of tension, and while a meta-narrative can include this, any random-die system can’t created it reliably.

GMs, on the other hand, can raise or lower the stakes accordingly. One die roll can either mean the difference between 6 or 7 damage, or the difference between life and death. How much alea to put in a game is largely a question for the table, as people who don’t love risks will easily chafe if your game includes sudden death traps and the like.

Supporting AGON and FIERO

This section reaffirmed for me that it was a good choice to combine the two types. Ultimately, supporting both agon and fiero boils down to “providing opposition as a GM.” I think these are muddy terms, and more can be done with my term of Achievement.

Agon is described with the example of Legolas and Gimli competing to kill orcs, while fiero is the payoff afterwards, having survived the combat. Framed this way, agon is something incidental to the game itself: player-imposed competitions only work if all involved players are interested, and character-imposed competitions are based in the narrative. We’ve talked about how competition built into role-playing systems is relatively new, with games like One Wrestling Ring to Rule them All and Blood Red Sands. Competitive role-play, on the other hand, has been around since it’s inception, which is a subject worth its own treatise.

Fiero, on the other hand, is a kind of catharsis, a release of tension from overcoming adversity, as opposed to alea, which is a release of tension from uncertain results. While both fiero and agon overlap, as Levi notes, I also can see places where they are underdeveloped. The suggestions for supporting both boil down to “as a GM, you should put obstacles in the players’ way, be the bad-guys in combat, and make sure to not go easy on them.”

Supporting KIAROSIS

I like this section, because it talks a bit about a bunch of things that I’ve mentioned before, such as railroading, GM Fiat, and the conflict between game and story. Levi acknowledges that seekers of kiarosis have differing opinions on these subjects, and while they don’t outright say a discussion with your players is necessary, they make it clear that there are lots of ways of supporting or subverting kiarosis.

Levi also touches on an interesting subject: creating systems that have arcs that mirror narrative arcs. They suggest Kickers and Clocks are examples of this, providing plot hooks and progression towards a climax. I would add Starlight Riders to the list, as a game system which is built around the players filling in the blanks on a pre-built narrative arc.

It’s this suggestion that I think leads in a very curious direction: can the meta-narrative provide kiarosis? Possibly, possibly not. I’ve touched on how players of system-heavy games often use narrative to explain the dice, saying natural-1s are people tripping over dropped backpacks or being distracted by earlier plot revelations.

Supporting HUMOR and PIADIA

Levi links these two, and I understand why. The light-hearted free-wheeling child-like fun of piadia naturally lends itself to laughter. At the same time, while people can enjoy the humor to be found in roleplaying, I still think the other emotions deserve attention as well. Piadia as well seems unnecessarily tied to humor, as the rules-light flexible method of play is easily adaptable to any kind of story — comedy, action, horror, or tragedy.

Supporting KENOSIS

I like this section too. No notes, really. Immersion is fragile, and little things can break it. Making sure you talk with your players about what is and isn’t the mental-background work vs the foreground is vital.

Supporting LUDUS

This one too. Solid.

Supporting DRAMATICS

Good note about if you’re going to have emotional moments in a game, you need to give the players time, space, and safety to act emotional.

Supporting ENDINGS

This is good advice, but I feel it’s better suited for campaign design, rather than a theory of RPGs.

Supporting SOCIABILITY, EXPRESSION, KINESIS, VENTING

All these thrown together in one big pile, and while again there isn’t anything wrong in this section, it glosses over quite a bit.

That said, if I did the same kind of section with my own list, it would look very similar. Like I said before, a lot of this is good stuff, well worth the read — it just doesn’t quite fit with what I’m doing.

So, I’d like to look at supporting enjoyment from another direction: rather than looking at different enjoyments and how to support them, I’d like to look at different aspects of playing RPGs and how they can be used to support the different types of fun.

My Design Support

Setup

An old axiom is “sex doesn’t start with undressing, it starts with dinner.” An RPG session isn’t just the dice and paper, it’s everything that happens from the moment the players arrive to the moment they leave. Insuring you have a comfortable and safe setting is important for a satisfying session.

Why is safety so important? I won’t reiterate everything there is to say about safety-tools — as worthy of repetition as they are — because I want to talk about how safety supports the types of fun I mentioned above.

Performance isn’t always easy. Improvisation can be harrowing. The social pressures of “being right” or “saying something good” can really hinder someone wanting to just jump in and play. If a player thinks their suggestions aren’t going to be welcomed, or might even be mocked, they’re going to avoid engaging in those stances. They’ll miss out on being able to perform or improvise, and not enjoy the game.

Supporting Emotion, Performance, Improvisation, and Sociability all happens before the game even starts. Encourage the players who seem interested in drawing characters, talk about backstories, get people not only invested in the social aspect, but in the game itself. Talk about the world, the system, the rules, answer questions, and be kind, respectful, and giving.

And use Safety-Tools!

Atmosphere

You could think of this as a kind of compilation of ektelesi, kenisis, and/or kenosis. With my list, it’s everything that supports Immersion, Tactile, Creation, Performance, and Emotion. There is a real culture of atmosphere in RPGs: faint background music over mystic chanting, the sound of arrows streaking through the air, a line of fire moving from your token to the enemy, doing the voices…anything that supports the imagination.

If there isn’t, there should be a whole body of work devoted to the “other-world;” the shared illusion that all players at the table create together. In this shared world, space-ships move faster than light, dragons fly through the sky, and dice decide what happens. There is a thick and rich space for philosophy, theories of gaming, and anthropology to flourish in. Too much for me, at any rate.

All I’ll say is this: creating the shared world is a communal process, and we all tell the stories we’ve been told. The more grains of sand offered in the form of music, feelies, and performances, the easier and smoother the act of creation becomes. Engrossing your players becomes a gift as the world unfolds almost naturally before your eyes. There is a magic in that experience, and even something as simple as doing-the-voices can help support.

Game Design

This should be a pretty obvious section. For players who want Achievement, make sure they’re up against difficult obstacles. For players who enjoy Risk, make sure the game is threatening. Discovery lovers will probably find a lot to enjoy about sandboxes and playing-to-find-out, and Creators will appreciate some GM responsibilities.

At the same time, something only touched on in Levi’s list is the idea that some people are adverse to some of these types of enjoyment. Lovers of Discovery might chafe at the idea that they’re expected to create the world; they want to find what’s there, not make up what isn’t. It should also go without saying that lovers of Challenge may have different ideal levels of difficulty, and some might not really want a challenge at all. They might prefer to tell a story about an indomitable superhero, whose challenges come from balancing life and duty, not taking on difficult foes.² People have different tolerances for risk, while others prefer to play a game instead of build a character or perform for others.

And do I really need to explain how some people don’t want Horror in their game, or Humor in their grimdark drama?

How to specifically support or avoid these different types of enjoyment in your game design is far too long a discussion to write out in one post, and a lot of it is dependent on personal taste. This is, again, a long way of saying Session Zero’s are vital to a smooth and enjoyable game for all involved.

That said, we can focus on a few big areas:

Table-talk

I am using this term to mean any conversation happening at the table, whether connected to the game or not. Yes, everything from asking for the chips to speaking in character. How players talk during the game is the simplest method of supporting atmosphere, the game, each other, and each other’s enjoyment. Making sure that there is agreement on the difference between player and character talk, what is and is not acceptable subject matter, and how to handle disagreements can go a long way to helping people feel engrossed.

Rules

This is also a big subject that needs agreement from the table: Rules are concrete things that can be learned and remembered, and for some systems can become quite complex. This might make rule-heavy games difficult for some people to get engrossed in, as they struggle to remember how to do what they want to do. This breaks immersion quite quickly, as can a player needing to come up with narrative justification for doing “the right game move.” Making sure everyone is comfortable and familiar with the rules will also go a long way to improving player experience.

On-the-fly adjustment

Achievement and Risk are subjective terms; people have different levels of tolerance and prefer different results. Some people want to feel challenged, but never have the outcome really be in doubt. Some want to feel like they’re risking something, but never actually lose anything. Knowing what your players actually want and being willing to adapt is incredibly helpful in supporting these types of enjoyment. Some players don’t want dice fudged, others might be okay with it if it means they get a good meta-narrative out of it.

Ending the Session

To bring in another concept from the kink community, “aftercare” is the time spent after an intense emotional or physical encounter devoted to each other’s well-being. This can be anything from just enjoying the afterglow to getting tea, gentle backrubs, and words of affirmation.

Now, you don’t have to give each other backrubs after a session, but giving your players time to process the game will help give them the safety to be engrossed. There are lots of ways to do this, both explicit and casual: Stars and Wishes, divvying up the XP, chatting about something other than the game, asking for basic feedback — letting the players know they’ll have some aftercare is a great way to ensure they feel safe. Encouraging feedback might also give them a measure of ownership over the game, reinforcing the idea that this is a collaborative process.

And this doesn’t have to just be at the close of the session: An interesting question to ask is, when does enjoyment happen? If a player loves Challenge, do they want to feel fear when a powerful troll steps into the room? Do they want to feel glee at having succeeded? Do they want the tension that comes from a steadily increasing dread? Can they feel one without the others?

After an evocative moment, there is the moment when — to use Levi’s terms — players actually experience the catharsis, closure, can bask in their fieroic victories and kairosistic arcs. Cutting these moments short can be anti-climactic, and leave some players feeling cheated.

Hacks

Levi’s stated intent was to use this Design Support section to offer suggestions to hackers for how to change their games to offer certain kinds of support. In that same vein, I’d like to do a quick-fire list of changes GMs might want to consider:

ACHIEVEMENT

If you want to increase the challenge of a game, the obvious answer is increasing monster levels and horde sizes — but be aware that this doesn’t necessarily support Achievement if the players all die! Also be aware that some players want to learn a system/skill to be good at it, so changing the system through hacking might irritate, rather than inspire. Something you might consider is adding “pressures;” the most common of which might be a ticking clock. Now the question isn’t if a team can hunt down and kill a vampire, but can they do it in time? Dwindling resources or limited resupplies also can test a player’s efficiency with the system. Another simple hack would be adding small side-challenges with simple rewards. Maybe a King wants you to clear out some bandits, but will give you a bonus if you only arrest and not kill them. Maybe a wizard will throw in a magic ring if you bring back the magic book and notes on the ritual his nemesis was attempting to cast. This is a good way of providing challenges and rewards without requiring success to progress the story.

CHARACTER

Hacks that support character development are largely methods of providing a systemic benefit for a narrative choice. FATE tokens and GURPS Character Points are perhaps the simplest examples of rewarding a player who role-plays their character, especially if their behavior would hinder their goals. Inspiration dice in D&D can be another example, depending on how they are used. Granting a free re-roll to anyone who does the voice or comes up with a solid backstory is easy enough to add into any system, but Levi has created a system that I think goes one step further. In their second set of Mechanisms For Tabletop Roleplaying, Levi describes “auras;” traits and qualities of a character that affect how others behave, rather than themselves. Reckless, for example, dictates how your character behaves, but Intimidating makes other people fear you. Every time a player plays into this trait, you can reward the player with a re-roll, or similar bonus. This is a great way to hack in player-supported character traits. If my character is intimidating, then the other players at the table have reason to be cautious around them. If they’re innocent, you can reward anyone who tries to shield you from the world. This also gives players’ agency in the re-roll bonus economy, rewarding players who support each other.

CREATING

The easiest way to do this is just give players opportunities to describe what they see, and letting them know their choices are cannon. Mechanically, however, there are two other ways of encouraging this, both using bonuses similar to supporting Character: A player creating some aspect of the word could be a trigger for a bonus, so every time your Elf player tells the table about Elf culture, for example, they get a re-roll point. Alternately, it could be a reward, similar to how FATE points can be spent to establish in-world facts. You can also use builder games as methods of creating towns, rulers, histories, countries, worlds/settings, spellbooks, or even orcs. You can even give solo-journaling games to your players and use their results as backstory for important NPCs. Perhaps most effective, however, is making sure established creations are made significant. If a player paints a vivid picture of how the haunted cathedral looks spooky, make sure you carry that spookiness forward as they explore. If your Elf comes up with a great festival tradition, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t come across the festival being celebrated in a later session. Even simple facts like dribbling candles can be knocked over in a scuffle to start a dramatic fire. When players create, making sure their creations matter will help inspire them to continue creating.

DISCOVERY

There are lots of ways to support this: Hex-crawls is the obvious one, and dungeons are built-in discovery machines. Giving bonuses of XP, treasure, or what-have-you are great ways to encourage exploration. You could even combine this with Creating support, so that if a player finds a hidden shrine to a dark god, they’re the ones who get to actually create the religion. A simpler method is to just use different settings than the familiar Tolkien Fantasy or Star Wars/Trek Sci-Fi setting. Hack monsters with special abilities until your players can’t be certain this goblin-looking monster won’t have terribly powerful magic or an infectious bite. Playing-to-find-out is also devoted to supporting discovery, though some people want to discover what others have created, not create things themselves. The best narrative way of supporting discovery is, again, to make discoveries matter. Finding a patch of magical crystal in a dungeon means miners can supply the local town with better magical items for purchase. Researching facts about monsters makes it easier to acquire resources or score critical hits. Research in general is a good place to hack in discovery. Libraries and wizard towers can be handled with mechanics more interesting than a simple die roll, and making sure the process of discovery is interesting and engaging is a sure-fire way to support it.

EMOTION

This is a difficult form of enjoyment to hack in. Emotional content, whether Comedy, Horror, or Romance, is largely a role-playing aspect. It’s hard to mechanically support emotional content beyond providing rewards to role-playing, similar to Character, above. That said, you can mechanically support systems that encourage emotional set-ups. Hacking in a critical-failure table that includes embarrassing mistakes or magic-failure tables with silly results can encourage people to engage comedically with the setting. Low-resource and high-danger play can encourage horror, and mechanics like Escalated or Mistrust can bring in soap-opera-like drama. Just make sure your players all agree on the tone these mechanics are going to support.

IMMERSION

You can’t “hack in” immersion, you can only support the atmosphere and types of enjoyment your players want. Get a group of players working together to support this play, and with luck they’ll be plenty engrossed.

IMPROVISATION

Again, this is hard to hack in. Your best option is probably to ensure a safe environment where players feel supported in their improvisations, similar to Creation, above.

PERFORMANCE

Much like Character and Creation, supporting a player’s performance with bonuses is largely your option here, as it’s hard to create mechanics that support performing, since it’s largely a narrative process

RISK

This is easiest to support through session/module design, as a risky game will include different challenges and resources than one designed to be safer. At the same time, since Risk is a largely subjective term, it’s important to discuss with your players exactly what kind of Risk they’re looking for. For some, supporting Risk isn’t just making death more common, it’s making consequences more significant. Hacking in scars or reducing HP levels are all ways to make consequences more impactful. Games like FATE urge players to consider death the easy way out when it comes to consequences: Using traps to strip players of important equipment or find methods of hurting a character outside of their hit-points are good ways to make players sweat when it comes time to roll the die. Other times, what players really want when it comes to risk is uncertainty. This could manifest through systems with swingy die-rolls, where dramatic victories and failures are equally common; or with a game-structure that permits the players to lose. Just make sure that the risks are telegraphed, and players have the opportunity to mitigate or adjust the risk as they see fit. Just because a player likes to gamble doesn’t mean they like having the last five weeks of play wiped away because their character rolled a 1.

RULES

Well, pretty much any hacking done to a game supports lovers of rules. Want long-travel? Add in rules for resources, scouting, and purchasing supplies. Want to fish? Put a tiny fishing mini-game in there. The more systems and mechanics you add it, the more the lovers of Rules will enjoy the game. That said, there is a thing as too much rules, and that happens when the system becomes too unwieldy to play smoothly. If you’re spending all your time explaining rules and checking edge-cases in the rulebook, then you’ve probably gone too far. Also, make sure that the effects of each hack influence the game. It may seem obvious to mention, but if your players spend time to engage with the rules for fishing, they’ll want the consequences to be more significant than “you have a fish dinner.”

SOCIABILITY

Again, not really hackable. This is incidental to the system, so as long as you provide opportunities for conversation and downtime, you’re probably good.

TACTILE

There’s the obvious difference between systems that ask you to rarely roll a single die, and those that want ten or more dice rolled regularly; but the best method for supporting tactile enjoyment is feelies. All those letters, maps, and pictures to pass around really support the tactile presence of the world, and therefore the atmosphere. You can use miniatures with 3d terrain, or special-effects on your VTT program. Granted, these cost money, so if you want to go the cheaper route, consider using cheap tokens for play money. The other direction to go in is the ARRPG route. You could, if your table was into it, add tactile enjoyment by mandating a certain kind of behavior when doing a certain kind of action. Give your wizard a wand, and tell them they have to wave it and say the spell name before rolling a die. Tell the thief they have to solve a simple match-the-shape game to pick a lock. Have the archer thread a (large) needle to get a critical hit. You can add the physical world to the game in a lot of interesting ways.

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Whew! That was a lot. Next time, I’d like to tackle Levi’s last section, and the one that I think is the most practical: Playstyle Clusters.