what’s the book for? - part 3

originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/750580...

Here we go, the next part of the investigation.

First up a comment! @zendoe writes…

One thing I’ve only seen in Jenna Moran’s books, though I’m sure exists elsewhere, is that the book itself is a piece of art that is entertaining or interesting or moving in its own right. Chuubo is very funny, I read Glitch basically cover to cover and cried when I got to the end, and Wisher Theurge Fatalist is arguably meant to be read much more than it is to be played.

You might even include games that are basically proofs-of-concept, hacks to prove you can put x setting into y system, etc. I’m sure a lot of games made in the heyday of /tg/ have never actually been played, and were basically just made on a lark

Tangentially, this is something that often gets to me when people moralize against strong “you must/cannot do x” language in a given rulebook. I would never deny that many designers have a gross “saving the players from themselves” mentality, but at the end of the day, the only part of play a designer actually has power over is the book itself. So (assuming they’re not ABA freaks) why shouldn’t they use strong language if that makes the book a more interesting product?

Love this comment. You’re absolutely right, one of the purposes of an RPG-book can be to just be an objet d’art in itself (I say with maximum pretentiousness), using the format of ‘RPG book’ to guide you to imagine a game that might exist even if it’s not practical to play.

For example @xrafstar and @ramheadedgirl made a great little zine-sized book called Blood Sugar: Sweet Ambition. I doubt I’ll ever actually get to play this (but never say never…), and as written it’s kind of a nebulous state where it suggests stats for a D&D-like game but leaves the details vague… but it’s using the format of an RPG book with its stat blocks and illustrations to tell a compelling story and provide a frame for Alco’s gorgeous illustrations.

A similar example (which @lapinaraofperdition told me about) exists in Vermis I, an OSR-milieu artbook which assumes the format of a manual for an old CRPG. There is no such CRPG but it’s all about the vibes. The book’s on to its eighth printing now so people are well into this kinda thing.

This leads me on to one other function of RPG books worth discussing. This tends to be less of an explicitly advertised thing, but I think it’s a huge part of things - amateur-anthropologist hat on…

1. An excuse to make up a story together - RPG book as seal of permission
2. A way to unify the subculture - RPG book as common reference
3. So what do we do with all this?
4. Prose goes

An excuse to make up a story together - RPG book as seal of permission

Suppose I got a group of people together who had never played a TTRPG, and asked them to come to my house every week to make up stories about vikings. I think most people would find this a rather strange idea, and it would be quite a hard sell.

Suppose I got a group of people together who have at least heard of the TTRPG subculture. I have a book which says Sagas of the Icelanders on it, which looks like someone has put a lot of effort into putting it together, and costs some money. I tell them it’s a cool new indie game I heard about that I want to try. Even easier if it’s a game they’ve heard about like D&D.

This sort of overlaps with the ‘auteur experience’ category in the previous post, but it’s sort of aimed on a different level.

When I was a child, I would make up stories on every long car journey - before that, my parents would do the same. It’s normal to tell stories to children, and for children to play and make up stories through that. Now, adult life still revolves around fictional storytelling to a huge degree: in just about every society on Earth, we put tremendous resources into making and displaying films, distributing books, putting on plays.

But in modern adult life in the countries I know about, making up a fictional story is a very individual activity, and very much tied to the dynamics of publishing. If you’re writing a novel, it’s expected that you might think of trying to sell it one day. It is something that you specialise in. If you’re good enough, it can be your job.

Playing games also gets codified and locked down: you go and join a basketball club, say, in which you are expected to learn the rules of basketball. Or play a computer game, where the rules are set by the game binary, which packages it up with other elements like music and images.

Only a few contexts give you permission to just tell a story. For example, if you’re sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories. Or if the story is framed as something that really happened (whether or not it did). A joke is the major one, relying on the promise of a punchline.

If you want to tell a longer, collaborative story… well, it’s lucky that someone invented a hobby called ‘tabletop roleplaying’, with its attendant books, magazines, forums and other subcultural trappings. You can point to that and say, hey don’t worry guys! It’s a done thing!

I mentioned earlier the ‘conceptual inertia’ of D&D. All these trappings are part of that inertia, continually performing and reinforcing the idea that ’D&D is real’.

In this case, the function of the RPG book with its glossy cover and brand name and slightly corny introduction to roleplaying at the front - and notably, its price tag - is mostly a tool to unlock this special social context where you’re allowed to pretend to be an elf without it being, like, weird.

You don’t need a book for that, not remotely - roleplaying has taken place on forums, in chatrooms, in MUDs, in MMOs, etc. etc. for nearly as long as we’ve had TTRPGs - but it is a useful tool to help you unlock the door, as it were.

In this it seems (thanks @play-now-my-lord!) that I am following in the footsteps of Roger Callilois, who offered the following definition of ‘play’:

• it is free, or not obligatory
• it is separate from the routine of life, occupying its own time and space
• it is uncertain, so that the results of play cannot be pre-determined and the player’s initiative is involved
• it is unproductive in that it creates no wealth, and ends as it begins economically speaking
• it is governed by rules that suspend ordinary laws and behaviours and that must be followed by players
• it involves imagined realities that may be set against ‘real life’.

Nothing about that implies that it needs a book to define its special ‘circle’, but elements like a subculture and book do help to bring it into existence.

On that front, let’s also mention…

A way to unify the subculture - RPG book as common reference

Let’s go back to reproducibility. It’s not just about having something to sell.

A friend mentions playing in ‘a Curse of Strahd campaign’. Curse of Strahd is an official ‘adventure’ for first AD&D 2e and later D&D 5e. Like most ‘adventures’, the book acts as a reference for a series of places and characters, and instructions for how to use them, advice on how to create a horror atmosphere, and so on. Some areas are mapped in detail, others have brief prose descriptions.

If your group has played Curse of Strahd, it probably hasn’t had the exact same experience as another group. Much of the book is open to interpretation in all the ways we discussed. But, there’s a good chance that you have had some experiences in common. Much like you can talk about the different areas you encounter in a computer game, or the memorable scenes in a film, you can talk to someone else who played the same adventure. ‘How did your group handle the mimic door?’ ‘Oh it ate the rogue and we all had to form a chain and pull her out.’ (This didn’t happen, I’ve never played this adventure.)

The same also goes for more general setting elements and the game itself. An RPG lore book is something you can become an expert in. RPG rules are something you can get skilled in manipulating. And even if two D&D games take place in totally different settings, you have enough shared context to be able to know what it means for a Beholder to show up.

This is just as true of story games as it is for trad games and OSR, just with different emphases. Wanna be an expert in something? Perhaps you know the Apocalypse World principles like the back of your hand so you can give advice on how to MC it, or always know the perfect indie game for anyone’s taste. And since indie games are often quite specific, two people who played the same indie game are likely to have something to talk about. Or maybe you just like to have long theoretical discussions about game design principles (sheepishly raises hand).

You don’t remotely have to strictly follow what’s in the book to take advantage of this feature. Players will constantly be recommending house rules, arguing about balance, criticising and modifying the game. That’s part of the fun.

As the first post discussed, the process of defining the subculture takes place outside of the books too. In conversations, blogs, webcomics, forums, we continually hash out what this hobby that brings us together actually is. But, given that everyone’s group is different, ‘we probably looked at the same book’ is one of the few guarantees you can make when you meet someone and learn they’re into a TTRPG. Small as it is, it’s a powerful starting point.

So what do we do with all this?

Well, it kinda depends which hat we’re wearing, right?

For a designer, the important point to bear in mind is that an RPG book is only a prompt. You’re not a computer game dev - you can’t really be an engineer of a precisely tuned system where all the moving parts work together in precise harmony. You’re writing a message to someone else through a noisy channel, and to my mind, they get the larger creative role anyway.

And it’s not just that they’ll take what they like and discard what they don’t - they’ll probably forget things that you put in the book, or read things in a way you didn’t intend, or get caught up in the moment and fall back on familiar habits. For their part, though, they’re probably not even looking for you to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it, in detail.

I tend to find many of the best moments in RPGs don’t involve any looking at rulebooks. You’re caught up in the story you’re telling! You’re feeling that feedback loop of mutual inspiration! That’s what I’m personally looking for - the thing in the book is just a runway to get us towards that point.

So what are they looking for?

One view is that your job is to give them what they can’t easily provide themselves ‘in the moment’. There’s a good article from 2016 on an OSR blog Against The Wicked City that describes it this way: if you improvise, you will likely come up with something that is either painfully generic or overly wacky. An RPG book, by contrast, ought to give you something novel, which someone has taken the time to flesh out properly. For this reason, it must avoid cliché, because it’s easy to spin clichés and you don’t need a book for that.

In Vi Huntsman’s video, they criticise Root: The RPG for acting rather like a dictionary, attempting to clarify the trigger condition for each ‘move’ (a rules-construct from Apocalypse World, more on that soon) with exhaustive, repetitive elaborations. This is a fascinating corruption to me, since it seems rather opposite the ethos of earlier story games, which would much rather give you something vague and cryptic and refuse to explain. (…OK, I’m having trouble finding really good examples of that, but I definitely recall one-page games that consisted mostly of lists of evocative names and phrases). The players can be relied on to provide interpretations of whatever a Frost Shepherd might be.

The challenge to me here is to create something that gives your player enough that it’s there when you need it, but still doesn’t feel closed-off and is amenable to putting their own spin on it. This is rather a matter of taste.

Prose goes

On another, more abstract level, the aim of an RPG book is the same as any art: to make people feel shit and see things in a new way. This is getting back to the territory of Zendoe’s comment above.

So let’s get into it: why is Apocalypse World memorable, when so many derivative games borrow most of its mechanics and yet end up forgettable? Why would I love to play Chuubo’s Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine even though I don’t really understand how it works at all? Why do I still think about what Unknown Armies has to say about fighting? Why do I find most of Avery Alder’s games offputting even if the design is novel and interesting? (y'know, beyond personal reasons that she was a cunt to my friends.)

If a TTRPG book is a device to conjure up a usable idea of ‘the game’ in your mind, the experience of reading it becomes really important. A huge part of what makes those games come alive in your head is that their authors can really write.

But it’s not enough to just make a book that reads well, is it? The player needs the confidence to extemporise in the vein indicated by the book.

Jenna Moran’s games fascinate me - but they’re also rather intimidating. Her books are full of quirky asides and little jokes and stylistic flourishes. How do you play a game in a Jenna Moran way? I think if I got a suitable on-ramp like an existing group I could get up to speed, but it’s definitely the kind of game which really highlights the complicated relationship between book and game to me. Which is to say I have the book but I don’t feel like I could run this thing, and while I could closely read it cover to cover and rotate its ideas in my head, it would be way more helpful to join someone else’s game and see how they do it.

On the other hand, Apocalypse World adopts a very conversational style of prose. It asks you to ‘barf forth apocalyptica’, it titles chapters things like ‘advanced fuckery’ and suggests you motivate NPCs with their ‘clits and dicks’. It rather obtusely introduces the idea of ‘moves’ with ‘to do it, do it’ - meaning that you invoke the rules text iff a condition is met in the fiction of the game. It’s stupid but in a really fun way. Apocalypse World the book has the feeling of someone sitting down with you and enthusiastically explaining the game.

Nobody taught me to play Apocalypse World - I read about it online (on the story games forums maybe?), which instilled an idea of ‘what Apocalypse World looks like’, got the book, liked what I saw; I ran it based on my interpretation of the book and what I’d seen online. On some level the whole process ‘worked’: a game was, perhaps imperfectly, reproduced in another group of people.

Something about Apocalypse World, then, got me feeling ‘yeah I could do this!’. But did that have to be a game with a name and such? Could Vincent and Meguey had written the MC chapter of Apocalypse World as a series of blog posts giving system-agnostic GM advice? Perhaps, but I doubt it would have led to a whole breakout movement in the same way. It’s useful to have a name to anchor things to. (Of course, there’s more to Apocalypse World than that, like the whole ‘moves’ system which dovetails with its specified approach to GMing.)

I once ran a different PbtA game called Night Witches, about a real all-female unit of Soviet aeroplane pilots who fought in the second world war. It was a great premise for a game and was solidly designed as PbtA games go. Where I stumbled was the ability to improvise - usually something I enjoy a lot, but here I felt an urge to try and achieve historical fidelity on questions like ‘what does a Soviet airwoman eat’ and ‘what’s a plausible name for a nearby airfield’ (I fucking looked at maps! such a fool). I don’t speak Russian, so I would draw a blank when coming up with a name.

Clearly I should have dispensed with being historical here - it’s not expected, not like my players knew better. But equally, this is where a longer list of concrete bits of random ‘life in the USSR air force’ flavour info would have been quite useful. The game gives you a reasonable amount of historical info, but I still felt out of my depth. Fantasy is much easier!

Running a game requires you to project a lot of confidence. You don’t have to say you know all the answers, indeed I quite like to make my reasoning at least a little explicit - ‘oh! what if we have this happen..?’ - but you are setting the tone for the game. Confidence and enthusiasm will vary with each player to encounter the book and the experiences they bring, and it’s often beyond the designer’s control, but you can definitely frame your game in a way that’s more or less amenable to picking up and running with it.

In the next post… a few options, hmm. We could examine the idea of ‘moves’ in Apocalypse World more closely - they’re a bundle of a few different things, and perhaps we should evaluate how well that works, and what makes for a good move-based system. Or maybe we could revisit some of my previous game design efforts, like the RPG duels post - did I go astray?

[2025 note: I never did write that next post. Maybe I will this year.]