Monday, December 7, 2020

The character sheet game

Note: this is a revision of a post I made in an Israeli RPG theory group, incorporating some of the feedback and discussion there.

Let's perform the following thought exercise, using a role-playing game of your choice, which we'll just call "the RPG". Let's say it's a conventional enough RPG that it would normally feature a gamemaster-equivalent and 4 player-equivalents, which we'll call "the GM" and "the players", respectively.

We will attempt to convert it to a corresponding five-participant board game. In this game, which we'll call "the corresponding character sheet game", or "the character sheet game" for short, one player agrees to be the GM, while the other four are the players. Each player gets a character sheet taken from the RPG, and uses the RPG's rules to build a character. That's the main board, or boards - the four character sheets. They will contain names, attributes, skills, equipment, aspects, personality traits, statements of current health, weapons to fight with, spells to cast, bonds with other characters and NPCs, and so forth.

Now, during a session of the RPG, the character sheet would change in many ways: some resources would be depleted, new aspects taken up, old bonds severed, wounds accrued, experience points added, skills improved, and so forth. There are also a lot of things that would happen that would not change the character sheet directly: acting out "in-character", discussing strategy, asking questions about the environment, etc. 

To create the steps or actions of the character sheet game, we limit ourselves to "encounters": episodes of play that might create changes in the character sheet, while depending on features written in it. They might also change the world, and depend on other features of the world, but we are specifically ignoring that for this exercise. Events include battles, repartées (but only in games where this requires skill rolls or might allow for the use of spells, and where there's a specific writeable benefit), solving puzzles (again, only when this requires skills or might allow for a spell-based or other type of solution based on information in the character sheet, and will result in benefits), overcoming obstacles, finding treasure, even resting for a certain amount of time.

The GM's job is to create these encounters, and then manage their side of things; depending on the system, that might include rolling reactions, attacks, or treasures on a table. How the GM and the players negotiate about these encounters might depend on the GM and the RPG. If the RPG is a more collaborative game like Blades in the Dark or HeroQuest, it might be expected to be a bit more balanced; if it's D&D or games like it, perhaps the GM will decide unilaterally, consulting tables to make sure the encounter difficulties will allow for reasonable chances of survival.

The players, meanwhile, can decide on a variety of goals for themselves. Maybe it's to maximize treasure, or to improve the characters as much as possible within this system (using experience points to gain levels, or training and adventuring to increase skills), or just to survive as long as possible without reaching character death. Maybe there will be opposing goals: each player will want to be the last one standing. Character death might be treated in several ways: maybe the player is simply removed from the game, or maybe they just need to create a new character using the RPG's rules.

As the character sheet game is played, the players might find that there are character design strategies that prolong survival, or maximize the possibility of advancing, or the amount of treasure gained. And this lets us take a step to a different view: the RPG designers`.

The RPG designer can look at the character sheet game as a possible way people might engage with their original game. For example, it can be an easy view from which to look at how people design very specific, multi-level character builds, in some versions of D&D or Pathfinder, and try to deter it, by using ideas about the reduction of the strategic horizon. This is something you can see in AD&D 1st ed's treatment of magic users, which had to roll to randomly decide which spells they were able to learn, rather than simply being able to plan ahead all the way to 20th level how their career would look. On the contrary, a designer might want to encourage the engineering of character builds, play towards players who enjoy this aspect of the game. One way of looking at the infamous Traveller character generation rules (you could die before the game started!) is developing the character sheet game into a full-fledged experience before the player even encounters other participants.

I can only assume that this is not new, that designers look at their games like this. The character sheet is a common denominator between players with a variety of playstyles, and gaming groups with a variety of GM proclivities. Many players might spend a long time looking at character creation before they even get to play a "real" game. Solo games are also based on a similar idea - with the GM replaced with an oracle, a table on which the player rolls to get a prompt for the next encounter.

My personal bias is that I don't like spending time on the character sheet; I have most enjoyed playing games where the sheets are quick to generate and easy to enjoy playing with even without any kind of engineering, and where most of the interest lies in the space between the sheet's updates, in the exploration of the imaginary world; as a GM, I have a hard time focusing on the specifics of my players` sheets, instead consulting their history engaging with the imaginary world we've built together. 

It's a bias I need to overcome to help playtest other people's designs, and might hinder my ability to design a game of my own, should I ever choose to do so.

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