RPG Medium

Previously on Oddscrawl…

Two Truths and a Lycanthrope is a hastily thrown-together one-page system I made from a friend’s pun. I didn’t spend too much time on the system, not thinking it’d go anywhere.

Thing was, the idea stuck in my head.

Things do that, sometimes. It’s like getting musical earworms, but about thoughts instead of music. I turn ideas around and around in my head, sometimes repeating the same phrase over and over again. Cognition has its own rhythms, melodies, and syncopations. The system we had made came from a joke, but the /rest of the conversation…well…

We had talked about White Wolf a bit, my friend and I. We discussed how Vampires grab the spotlight in American culture, somehow, while werewolves are generally overlooked. I thought about Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and how there are a lot of Vampire games out there right now, but not a whole lot of werewolf games. I wondered if there was space for a game like Fanged, but for Werewolf instead of Vampire.

So I started working on one.

This is going to be a fluffy post, because my brain decided to ask a question that I needed to answer: Is it possible to do a different Powered by the Apocalypse die-roll system that has similar results?

The standard PbtA roll is 2d6 plus a bonus, such as a skill or stat. If the total of these dice and bonus is 7 to 9, you’ve rolled 1 hit. If the total is 10 or greater, you’ve rolled 2 hits. Moves have different results depending on how many hits you score, if any.

Ironsworn is a PbtA game that uses a different method of figuring out how many hits you score. Instead of having three “levels” of hits (2-6, 7-9, and 10+, for 0, 1, and 2 hits, respectively), you roll 2d10 and 1d6. You add your skill or stat bonus to the d6, and you gain 0, 1, or 2 hits depending on whether your result is greater than 0, 1, or 2 of the d10s.

Let me start by saying, I am not a “fan” of Warhammer 40k.

I know nothing about the different editions, which codexes worked and which ones didn’t, I don’t know the meta of the game, nor the many myriad social and political intricacies that go into being a devoted fan. I don’t want to come in here like “I spent a few months reading the comment section in Tabletop Tactics videos, so now let me tell you something about Warhammer.”

But I do want to comment on Warhammer 40k, because I have seen a few interesting aspects in “the discourse.” I can’t comment how important or significant any of this discourse is, but it does relate to RPGs — specifically the hobby aspect of it — so I’d like to discuss.

Specifically, I’d like to discuss the Space Marines.

I’ve been getting into miniature wargaming, recently.

Well, “getting into” might require some qualification. I haven’t been purchasing and painting miniatures or anything, but I am recognizing that my love of RPGs is bleeding into the wargaming sphere in a surprising manner. I decided to explore this phenomenon, and came up with several interesting points. After all, I’ve talked at length about the influence of Miniature Wargaming on the hobby, but there is a case to be made that I’ve ignored Miniature Wargaming as a kind of RPG.

As I’ve discussed before, it’s hard to separate the two completely; combat can be a story and story can inform combat both in some very real ways. Ignoring that fact, even just brushing past it, can leave our understanding of the RPG Medium underdeveloped.

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.