RPG Errata: Manyfold, and Different Playstyles and Clusters

You may have noticed, either while reading Manyfold or my posts, that it starts to get a little clumsy talking about these individual types of fun and distinct methods of support. It’s hard to separate Improvisation from Performance; they seem to fit quite well together. Rules, Achievement, and Risk are all of a kind too, as they all relate to the game itself, rather than the narrative.

Levi realized that talking about agon or kenosis is all well and good in an academic theory kind of way, but it’s not that helpful when trying to figure out what your friends want to actually play. So, they created Playstyle Clusters, a “body of mechanics and techniques a group uses to pursue a particular bundle of good things.” Does your table constantly do the voices? Do they spend hours talking over strategy and character builds? Do they love coming up with plot twists and dramatic arcs? That’s their playstyle.

Levi notes that playstyles are unique to each group, can change over time, and can even by dysfunctional, if trying to serve multiple and contradictory types of fun. This is the moment when the player who really wanted to win the game gets dirty looks from their fellow players because “your character wouldn’t do that.”

Clusters are common styles of play that are easily categorizable. We’ve used terms like “fiction-forward,” “OSR,” and “rules-heavy,” and these are all playstyle clusters of a sort. Levi doesn’t use these terms, but they do remind us that deciding on a playstyle for a game is incredibly important. A table can re-align to a new playstyle if a system turns out to not actually support what they hoped it would, but that takes time and energy that would be better spent playing.

Levi lists seven Playstyle Clusters:

NARRATIVE

A common term that we can all pretty easily understand. This is the game that is devoted to kairosis, Author-stance, expression, and the story over the system. No complaints, this is a perfectly useful Playstyle Cluster.

TACTICAL

Opposing Narrative is Tactical, which focuses on ludus, agon, fiero, and the Player-stance. Again, no notes. I used Story- and System-focused, but swapping words is simple enough.

IMMERSIVE

These are the games that focus on Character-stance and kenosis, and pulling players into the world. I’m not sure I agree that this is a separate cluster, but I’ll talk more about that it a bit.

CLASSICAL

This is the playstyle that most closely connects with OSR. It has high alea, risk catharsis, and low ludos in favor of creative problem-solving. I agree with its inclusion, though it needs a little bit of refining with my new lists.

TRADITIONAL

A playstyle devoted to adapting to different kinds of play by taking from a lot of different clusters. I’ll be honest, I have no idea what Levi means here. It feels like a catch-all “misc” category, for games that aren’t focused enough to really be a playstyle cluster. Maybe people who’ve spent more time on RPG forums know what he means, but I wouldn’t have kept this one.

AFFECTIVE

Driven by indie feelings and index card games, this is the playstyle focusing on eliciting emotional reactions from the players, usually through solid character and story. I don’t know what Levi means by “feelings and index card games,” but I do agree that this is a viable playstyle.

PERFORMANCE

This is for games focusing on letting players perform, with a lot of padia, dramatics, and expression. Levi doesn’t mention the audience-stance here, but I think it’s worth mentioning that the Performing-stance requires an audience, so this type of play encourages players to swap between both.

This is a fine list, but it accidentally touches on something interesting: There are types of fun and stances that aren’t referenced. Does that mean they’re not catered to in our current RPG climate? Or are there more clusters to find? Is there anything that says a game can’t be both Narrative and Affective? What about Narrative and Tactical? Can a game be Immersive and not Affective?

So, how can I advance the conversation here? Well, we could try and go more granular; both Levi and I have acknowledged that even if someone is drawn to a kind of enjoyment, they may still prefer different levels or flavors of that enjoyment. I could try and codify, for example, the difference between someone who wants a moderately difficult challenge with no-take-backsies perma-death, versus someone who wants a really difficult challenge but no death unless narratively convenient.

But the problem with that is that all these kinds of enjoyment and stances are variable. Someone who likes Romance-Emotive play won’t necessarily like Comedy-Emotive play, and the horror of ever-deepening lovecraftian madness isn’t the same as the horror of the dwindling ammo supply in face of the zombie hoard, even if they’re both kinds of horror.

I believe that Performance is in every RPG to some extent, again because all the players are also audience members from time to time. How do we quantify that?

While I definitely see value in defining these clusters, I also see the same problems I had with OSR as a term. Whenever we define, we limit. When we streamline, we shave off. When we smooth over, we get rid of all the fiddly little outliers that are still worth attention.

I mean, look at what I did a few posts ago — I streamlined emotive enjoyment down to a single word, when Levi had used four. There’s a good case to be made that it would have been better for me to add words, not condense. After all, supporting humor is a lot different than supporting fear.

This isn’t to say that calling a game a “narrative RPG” is a bad idea, it’s not. The problem only comes when we stop the conversation there. Taxonomies and classifications are not substitutes for a human conversation at the table.

So I’m not going to build my own list of Playstyle Clusters. Not because the idea doesn’t have merit, but because I already have, really.

Every post about story versus system, discussions about Session Zero, dice systems, competition and collaboration, fiction-forward, play-to-find-out…its all really just a long-winded Manyfold; I’m just taking more than 20 pages to say it.

Postscript

Levi’s postscript is…well, it’s wordy. Frankly, while I respect the instinct to use academic phraseology in these sorts of projects,¹ the postscript is pretty obtuse. What I can glean from the postscript is Levi’s explanation of Manyfold’s theoretical heritage, and describing the differences between it and other theoretical models of RPGs. That’s great, I’m not slagging that, but Levi’s audience is clearly the more academically minded who know what GNS, the Threefold model, and rec.games.frp.advocacy are. Me, I’m a bit more of a dum-dum.

so that’s that, that’s my contribution to the conversation.

But wait, I said I’d bring up the Immersive playstyle cluster again, didn’t I?

Because Immersion is a bit of an odd duck with the other types of enjoyment. You can’t go into a game looking for “immersion,” because the immediate question is then “immersion in what?” It’s really only one step removed from saying people enjoy “fun.”

Next time, I’d like to tackle the idea of Immersion and see what gnarled little ideas I can unroot.