RPG Medium

I’ve avoided writing this post for some time. Ever since my first post on the X-card.

Immersion, as I said in my last few posts, is fragile. I blew past several opportunities to discuss how immersion is affected by safety tools, but I always thought it was too big a subject to just slot in. The few times I even tried, it always came across like I was suggesting Safety Tools weren’t mandatory, and should be weighed against the corresponding loss in immersion.

That’s nonsense. You should always feel safe.

But I can’t avoid it any longer; safety tools are necessary, but they’re not inert. Adding safety tools to your game affects it, and we need to explore how. Much like Patriarchy and Toxic Masculinity, we only make our job harder if we do not understand precisely what we are asking others to sacrifice, even if it appears ridiculous to us.

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.”

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.

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.

The second section of Manyfold is geared towards providing a glossary of terms players can use to describe “how they play.” It does this through “Stances,” a term first formulated by Kevin Hardwick and Sarah Kahn on the rec.games.frp.advocacy group on USEnet, around 1996. Levi then builds off their work to come up with five different stances that a player might change between during a single RPG session.

What exactly is a “stance?” Manyfold defines it as “The attitude of the player towards play at any given moment.” The easiest shorthand to consider might be combat: at any given time in your average combat focused RPG, one player is taking their turn, one player is GMing, and the other players are watching. These are three different stances, as the player whose turn it is engages with the game differently than the player who’s waiting for their turn, and both engage differently than the GM, who is playing the monsters.

What is “fun?”

Remember when I asked that question? Oh what fun we had!

Now I’d like to talk about a kind of answer to that question. I’ve talked about Levi Kornelsen’s Manyfold theory several times through both this long-form treatise and its errata, but I suspect that some of you haven’t taken the extra step to actually go read the PDF. That’s fine, we’re all busy with something or another these days. Nevertheless, I still think its important, information, worthy of discussion.

At the same time, I can’t just reprint the whole thing here; that’s borderline plagerism, and taking attention away from an interesting piece of work.

So rather than plagerize, I will “join the conversation.”

“This is a game that is fun.”

When I wrote my original post on Into the Woods, I mentioned the original box-set rules for Basic D&D, also known as “The Red Box.” The first line of this rule book: This is a game that is fun.

Let’s ignore both the clumsy childish sentence structure and the somewhat cringy “I have to tell you it’s fun or else you might not realize it” sentiment, and focus on the content. “This,” meaning the original Basic D&D RPG, “is a game,” meaning not a sport or tool but something to enjoy in your leisure hours, “that is fun.”

I’ve talked a lot about this amorphous concept, both in passing and as a nebulous “good” that we should all be aiming for in our RPG games. I’ve talked about how competition is a kind of fun that RPGs tend to eschew, opting for a co-op play-style. I’ve talked about how different kinds of practices both support and weaken the “fun” of the medium. I’ve talked about how the “Tyranny of Fun” can limit the medium, and how “fun” might not even be the be-all-end-all of our games.

I think it’s time to stop beating around the bush, be a Better Socrates, and explore this core concept of our hobby.

Iron Valley, by M. Kirin, is a solo RPG powered by Ironsworn and based on Stardew Valley. You play a recent transplant to Iron Valley, a quiet little community where an old family farm sits waiting for you to build it back up to its proud industrial roots. Or, maybe you’ll make friends and get married, or spend your time exploring and charting the spooky forest, or any number of other adventures that await your attention.

Iron Valley is one of any number of RPGs that have come out in recent years that are, for lack of a better word, cozy. The goal of the game isn’t to amass loot or slay dragons, it’s not to save the galaxy or avert planetary destruction, it’s to spend time with community, find new friends and nurture the world. That’s not to say you couldn’t be a monster-slaying defender of the town — you can do anything in an RPG — but the focus of the game isn’t violence, it’s humility.

Tactiquest is a Tactical RPG still currently (at time of writing) in the beta playtesting stage. Written by level2janitor, (who you may remember also wrote Iron Halberd) Tactiquest is a half-diceless sandbox RPG designed for fast fights, diverse play-styles, and fantastical stories. Each creature-type you chose grants you bonuses, each class has multiple perks to shape your strategy, and there is the requisite extensive list of spells.

What’s half-diceless mean? I’m glad you asked.

Okay, let me first take a step back and say this unequivocally: I don’t think Errant Challenger is a bad game. This is a rhetorical device, yeah? Just go with it for a second.

Errant Challenger, by Fauix, is still in its Beta at time of writing. It’s a fairly straightforward system, easily graspable by most anyone familiar with RPGs.

It’s a bad RPG.

I mean, look at it! It’s not so much a rule-book as it is a word document exported to PDF. The cover is poorly structured AI mush. There’s no real setting, just a chunk of fantasy pablum. The system itself doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done twenty time over in different systems.

Against the Apocalypse, designed by Oleander Garden, is a game about war, last stands, isolation, and death. It is a game where the players are soldiers in a war against the Demiurge, who sends their hollowmen every Sunday in an attempt to kill the players. They have little in the way of supplies or hope, and the game will end the way all wars must, in death.

The game is, in a single (compound) word, Anti-narrative.

Divided into two parts — the fighting and the downtime — the game encourages the players to unfold their character’s lives in the manner things would happen, not should or could. The book asks players to be honest with both themselves and their imagined world: the goal is not to tell a story, but to simulate life.