Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan - a review

Greg Costikyan's name came up often in Jon Peterson's The Elusive Shift. He was a prominent figure in the zine scene that formed around Dungeons & Dragons and the fledgling tabletop role-playing game community in the 1970s. A typical contribution of his to the discourse back then was Lord of the Dice, a satire on the role of randomness and rules in TTRPGs.

I was, therefore, very excited when @laurenmakegames on Twitter posted some books she was giving away, and I spotted Costikyan's name on one of them, Uncertainty in Games. I hadn't heard of this book before, but considering the name and the topic, which is dear to my heart - see my discussion of the Monty Hall problem, or the post where I formulated constructive alienation - asking for it was a no-brainer. Lauren was kind enough to send it to me, and it did make for great reading.

The book mostly focuses on video and board games, which he called "closed systems" in his early theoretical work. When tabletop role-playing games are mentioned, it's just Dungeons & Dragons, and only as an early example of potentially limitless games, and as an inspiration for massively multiplayer online games, like World of Warcraft. However, I think the framework he provides can be useful for TTRPGs, although that will have to wait for a future post.

His main argument, some caveats aside, is that the goal of games in culture is to be a safe space for confronting uncertainty, in a world where we usually attempt to reduce it as much as possible. What draws us to continue playing games is the existence of this uncertainty, and our ability to get better at addressing it. Once we accept this framework, a big question in the analysis and design of games is where their uncertainty comes from.

He goes on to analyze several games through their uncertainty, among them Super Mario Bros., The Curse of Monkey Island, Rock/Paper/Scissors, Chess, Poker, CityVille, and Civilization V. Using these games, he comes up with a list of sources of uncertainty, of which every game he cites makes use of one or two, sometimes more. I will try and formulate each as a question:

1. Performative uncertainty - can you use the controller to have Mario make that jump?
2. Solver's uncertainty - have you gathered enough witty retorts to defeat the sword master?
3. Player unpredictability - will this player put up scissors next after having done paper twice?
4. Randomness - will my phalanx defeat the enemy's chariot?
5. Analytic complexity - what is a good way to respond to the Queens' Gambit opening?
6. Hidden information - what hand did the player on my left draw?
7. Narrative anticipation - what is going to happen in the Governor's mansion?
8. Development anticipation - what new features are going to come in the next update?
9. Schedule uncertainty - can I return to the game in time to harvest my crops?
10. Uncertainty of perception - can I notice the hammer coming at me quickly enough to react?
11. Semiotic contingency - what meaning will the game have when I conclude this segment?

I think some of these are a bit of a stretch. "Narrative anticipation" seems more like a study of what kind of prior information the player has before some hidden information about the rest of the game is revealed, or maybe the results of resolving uncertainty from other sources, in the context of furthering a story. I'm also not sure that performative and perception uncertainty are really significantly separate. Semiotic contingency, which Costikyan gets from work by Thomas Malaby, doesn't really feature in any of the prior long-form analyses presented in this book, perhaps because of how few examples there are of games that actually make use of it.

The book ends with an insightful piece of advice: one way of creating a new game, or improving an existing one, is by focus on its sources of uncertainty: tuning the ones you have, adding or removing some, until the mix works for the experience or audience you're aiming for.

But I would like to jump back to an even more insightful comment made before the bulk of the book: that you should be careful using lessons from interface design in game design, and vice versa. The problem is that there are opposing goals at play: with interfaces to word processors, web browsers, spreadsheets, and other products, you want users to be certain of what happens, not uncertain. This constrains how well you can "gamify" productivity. It also goes in the opposite direction, in constraining how usable game interfaces can be made, without affecting the very uncertainty that you expect would draw people into your game and retain their interest.

An example from my experience is the existence of automaps in dungeon crawlers. Last year I spent a few months streaming playthroughs of the first two Eye of the Beholder games, first person dungeon crawlers based on the ruleset of AD&D 2nd Edition. I started by attempting to do so without automapping, as they were originally designed to be played, before getting extremely frustrated at a certain confusing point. I then restarted my gameplay using All-Seeing Eye, an extension which provides a few quality of life and outright game-editing capabilities, including automapping, which is all I used.

This did, in fact, make things easier, and I was able to beat both games. However, several of the puzzles in these games, and indeed, in the genre generally, hinge on the player's need to map by themselves, and on the uncertainty that comes from only being able to see what's right around the party of characters when making any individual decision. They become trivial to someone who can simply look at what's going on in the map and where the party is at all times. In retrospect, I'm certain that I've missed out on a lot of the experience, although on the other hand, perhaps I would have just given up due to this uncertainty and the difficulty involved in overcoming it, and never gotten any exposure to much of the content.

In total, I would recommend having a look at this short monograph, as uncertainty is a very interesting lens through which to analyze games. It's definitely staying on my shelf.

Watercrawling to find out - charting through play

My introductory sketch of watercrawling, and the subsequent attempt to apply it to Ghosts of Saltmarsh, assumed a certain traditional form of information generation about the imaginary world, and its flow: the GM builds the setting, structures the information about it, and populates that structure, and then it flows to the players through play. The players act on it through their characters, but they are ultimately discovering something pre-existing. Meanwhile, many modern, narrative games go by variations of the motto "play to find out" - the fiction, that is, the imaginary world, is created by all participants, through the players` character` actions, as well as a combination of in-world rationale and interpretations of the results of dice rolls. While the GM has certain privileges, they do not have exclusive or even predominant authorial power. Any information that was not generated through play is known in advance by everyone. Is a structure like watercrawling relevant in that scenario? Let's post to find out!

I'll use Blades in the Dark as my model for a modern narrative game in which participants play to find out, mostly because it's the one whose rulebook I read through, and which I've playtested a tiny bit. It does, however, have a few interesting features for this project: the game's setting, the city of Doskvol, is mapped, which is a good start; it also has a sea that ships go into to hunt leviathans and extract their blood, which powers this haunted steampunky electrified nightmare city; the region in which it is set also has a map. Additionally, the system's character sheet game is elaborated by also having a crew sheet, for the team of scoundrels that holds the characters together - this sheet, in turn, has a somewhat abstracted board of turf nodes, locations which the crew can gradually conquer during play.

So our starting chart can just be copied from the book, without adding more details than the various starting cities, such as Duskwall. The GM will either fill this in before game start, or it will be filled in later, as we will see below.

Next we sketch out a crew sheet that will be fitting for this type of adventure: Pirates of the Void Sea. The abstract pirate turf could contain elements such as secluded bays to hide treasure in, a smuggler's bar in which booty can be more easily sold for coin, a temple to a forgotten sea god which provides the pirates with some luck if the proper sacrifices are made, and so forth. These can all be eventually be placed on the chart above.

The main loop of Blades in the Dark usually involves a somewhat freeform information-gathering phase, where a target is found and chosen for a heist. Then, to avoid analysis paralysis, once the players have settled on a target, they decide on a general approach to the heist, how heavily they will be armed - balancing preparedness with inconspicuousness - and then, using a variety of parameters, an engagement roll is rolled - its result determines how well or poorly the heist begins. And so it starts, in media res - afterwards, if circumstances are encountered that would have benefitted from planning, flashbacks can be used to attempt and establish contingencies retroactively. After a few challenges the heist ends one way or another, and then some housekeeping is performed, including potential for increasing attention from the authorities, characters landing in prison, and the changes in the relations to various existing factions in the city. Then comes downtime, when characters can work on long-term projects, indulge their vices, create or procure specialized equipment and otherwise while away the hours until the preparation for the next heist.

The way this loop can fit into a watercrawl essentially comes down to two factors: the types of heists, and the way they fit into the map. For a heist in Doskvol, the city map is used to choose the location, which in turn has information keyed to it about the populace, the environment, the kinds of things that are easy or hard to do there, and available NPCs. The party has headquarters and local turf that are also in specified locations. In the sea this could be different, as a pirate ship would normally be on the move, although a hidden cove can act as a more traditional, static base of operations.

As for heists - a treasure island, a lost leviathan hunter, or a trade convoy ripe for the picking - their placement will be determined in one of two ways. The first way is if the GM decides to chart the sea in general terms beforehand: where the currents are, what the weather is everywhere, indeed, a structure very close to how it would be done in a traditional RPG, except that this will all be openly known to the players. Then, when a heist happens, the GM can actively choose to tune its difficulty by putting it closer or farther away from the current location of the pirate ship, in nicer or less pleasant waters, near or far from the pirate crew's existing turf. The crew can draw a course between their current position and the heist target, and this choice will change how the engagement roll is performed - but once that is done, the crew can be said to have made it to the start of the heist in a state depending on that roll, and it can go on as it would in Doskvol, with more aquatic shenanigans available. Afterwards, the rolls in the post-heist state determine where the pirate ship manages to go, either some other random point on the map, or to one of the existing turfs.

But we can take this whole thing further. We can roll to find out not just what will happen in the heist, but to generate the very details of the sea chart. So the ship starts somewhere on the mostly blank canvas. A heist is decided upon - if its details suggest proximity to a known landmark, the GM can just pick a point near there, otherwise, it can either be selected randomly now, or after the engagement roll. Then, an engagement roll is performed - and the difficulty of the journey between the pirates and their target is determined by the result of this roll. If the roll was good, then perhaps there is a usable current in that direction - then that current is marked on the map as part of the nature of the sea. If the roll was poor, then perhaps there is an area of turbulent waters, or even reefs, in the middle, that can be marked on the map. As the map is filled in, the location of the next heist can be more and more constrained by the known aspects of the charted sea, rather than randomly picked. If that becomes too constraining, a feature can always be changed - especially in the Void Sea of this post-apocalyptic nightmare world, it is entirely possible for currents to change, difficult archipelagos to be pushed out of the seabed or swallowed up entirely, and changing seasons can also be made culprits. The point is that you are playing to find out what the sea is like, and having a narrative experience consistent with the structure of the game in the process. You have painted this canvas with your actions as players and GM.

New experience or new game - putting the CSG to work

Suppose you're a role-player. You've been playing the same game with the same gamemaster for a while, or maybe even with different GMs, and it's starting to bore you. You want to experience something new. What are your options?

Let's be more specific about your current position. Since you've been playing whatever ruleset your GM is running for you for a while, you're already familiar with its character sheet game (CSG). You've either spent a lot of time mastering it, or at the very least you know how to use it and tolerate it to a degree, depending on your proclivities. So the path of least resistance moving forward is to either ask your GM, or find another GM, willing to change things up in the rest of the RPG. 

If, until now, your GM has been satisfied implementing combat with theater of the mind, maybe they can start using miniatures on a map, and add constraints outside of your character sheet into combat - for example, drawing battlefields with interesting geometry, and having foes use that geometry for some clever tactics. Maybe wilderness travel has been dull, so they can run your given character, or a new character, through a sea-faring watercrawl. Maybe they can structure challenges using your skills in ways that have more depth, like building an investigation with node-based design. Moving beyond structure and information management, maybe your GM can spend more time on in-character play-acting of the non-player characters, and encourage you to do the same with your character.

There is a whole space of changes they can make here - a resourceful GM can take the same CSG and create a whole variety of experiences for the player. The player, in turn, simply has to play along. A GM struggling to develop ways to do this themselves can find many helpful guides: blogs, books on GMing, videos, even innovative adventure modules already adapted to their familiar ruleset.

A more arduous path is finding a GM who will run an entirely new game for you. For example, instead of them building structure around the Dungeons & Dragons 5E CSG to create a heist game, or running a module that does that for them, they can use a ruleset that is built from the character sheet up to support and encourage heists, like Blades in the Dark. But that requires not just a GM willing and able to run it, but for you to learn a new CSG. This could be daunting, either because just getting comfortable with the old CSG was enough of a hassle, or because you've already spent an inordinate amount of time optimizing your CSG builds for the current system, and find starting again from scratch unappealing; alternately, the design possibilities in the new CSG are uninspiring.

To give examples from my own limited experience, there are many ways that I've run wilderness adventures in my ongoing D&D 5E campaign, from very abstract theater of the mind, to point-crawl, to hex-crawl; NPC interactions have gone from somewhat loose playacting to a more structured attitude table framework and back; I've even had an individual battlefield, most of which ran as a zone-based theater of the mind, while the focal region of combat was grid-based. On a larger scale, the challenges my players` characters were faced with ranged from investigating a haunted house to mediating an alliance between initially very hostile factions. My players took to this variety with little problem and much aplomb. Which is to their credit, but also, I believe, because we were still playing with the same CSG.

Whether I would be able to convince this group to move to a different rule system like RuneQuest Classic is another matter entirely. It would depend on how easily I can become familiar with the ruleset, how easy it is to teach, how it runs at the table, and whether all of this can truly provide a sufficiently novel and enticing form of play. My more mechanically-inclined players would have to abandon an impressive list of interesting builds for the existing system. My not entirely comparable experience with playtesting Blood & Bronze with another player group suggests a serious challenge for all involved.

What is the operative conclusion of all this? I think that if I were trying to encourage people to play a new role-playing game ruleset that I have designed, I would spend some time making its character sheet game more accessible. Not just an easy way of generating new starting characters, not just a series of examples for each section of the character sheet, but an easy way to feel out how the strictly mechanical player-facing aspects of it work. Perhaps learning from solo games, I would use an oracle to generate encounters or challenges, and walk the reader through a few examples, before letting them loose on my system. I would make learning how to be a player into an engaging gameplay experience, as, for example, various versions of D&D's Basic Set did for dungeon masters.

From my novice point of view, there is still room to grow in the pedagogy of role-playing games, and focusing on making accessible solo variations of their character sheet games may be one path forward.

Language in role-playing games

In the real world, language connects us, and yet keeps us apart. It does the same for characters in role-playing games. But the participants, the players and the gamemaster, usually speak the same language. What can in-game language do for you?

It can frustrate. If you use the rules as written for most versions of Dungeons & Dragons, the party's player characters won't be able to communicate with most fantastical creatures. If the default engagement you're expecting from your players with any sufficiently different entity is hack and slash, with some sneaking and running away when appropriate, then maybe that's just fine. But you could also harness this frustration into a challenge for both you and your players. If the NPCs can't speak to PCs, you have to express their physical reactions, which can help immerse both you and the players in the imaginary world. The players, in turn, have to come up with novel ways of overcoming the language barrier, adding non-verbal detail to their characters.

This can go beyond the possibility of occasionally parleying in a random encounter. Generally, it can be difficult to explain why the party of PCs has to swoop in and solve a problem that several existing, well developed societies cannot resolve; however, if two factions are separated by a language barrier, that only the party can bridge, this immediately creates a credible rationale. This happened early in the campaign I'm currently running: one PC spoke one faction's language, while another PC shared a language with one bilingual member of the second faction, leading to a big game of telephone, which in turn was a good way to add subterfuge, so that the players felt involved and hoodwinked at the same time. Paradoxically, this also cemented ties of friendship and trust that are holding the campaign together to this day.

Even when the party is not necessary for translation, multiple factions attempting to work together without sharing a common language makes any attempt at coordination an elaborate affair, potentially public, with serial translation as representatives speak. It's not necessary for you as the GM to repeat the same thing several times, but this process is a good place to have specific NPCs react to specific items of data as they are brought up in their language, and any PC who can understand more than one of the languages spoken has a distinct advantage in that regard. Again, this came up multiple times in my campaign.

Moving forward, the frustration that comes from having limited direct communication can result in a unique form of character growth. A player can try to use the time their character has spent with a society in order to have it learn the language. A system like RuneQuest allows that to happen directly; you can fudge with Dungeons & Dragons to get a similar result, especially if, like me, you dispensed with racial languages to the point where a character had a few extra "language slots" that have remained unused.

So language adds possibilities and interesting challenges, enables novel types of adventures, and can even guide you in directions to advance your character. So have at it!

Constructive alienation in RPGs

Note: This is a translation and revision of a comment I made on an Israeli RPG theory group, asking about what rolling dice was for.

When discussing the character sheet game, I said that my personal bias was against elaborate character sheets and mechanics, in favor of exploring the imaginary world. On the other hand, when sketching out systems for watercrawling, I said that I do seek frameworks that capture parts of the world mechanically, even allowing for some procedural content generation. So which is it? Do or don't I like mechanics? Am I looking for more or fewer rules?

What I want is for mechanics and rules to do certain things for me. As a player, I want to immerse myself in the imaginary world, and have what mechanics I do use answer questions that I can't just think my way around, like whether my character can climb that wall or pilot this spaceship, or whether my character was able to keep its cover under the scrutiny of a counter-intelligence agent. As a gamemaster, I want the system to adjudicate situations fairly, and to allow me to fairly present parts of the world to the players.

By "fairness" I mean filtering some of the bias from my decision-making. If I don't have mechanics or rules to fall back on, all I have for rulings is what makes sense to me in the moment. Do I really, in the moment, feel like adding another run-in with the law, or do I just want the party to make it to the safehouse, for the next step in the adventure, which I just know will be really cool? Do I think this non-player character that the party is interrogating is going to budge under threat of death, or is she all in with the criminal underground? What gender is the captain of the freighter the party is meeting?

If I use an encounter table, then yes, maybe sometimes the party runs into more trouble than it had been expecting. If I allow the interrogating player to convert the death threat into a roll against the NPC's mental fortitude, then maybe this lets them drive a wedge into the criminal underground when my judgment said that it was premature. If I roll the gender of the captain on a table, then maybe it leads to romantic opportunities I wasn't considering, and that in the moment aren't all that important to me. But so what? This system allows the players to surprise me, and rewards all of us for improvising with a new situation that even I, the GM, did not have full control over in the moment. It is hubris of me to think that the judgment I have at the table, directly adjudicating decisions as they come up, is better than combining the will of the players with the sometimes unpredictable results of dice rolls engaging with a system representing the richer world that I have spent time synthesizing from my ideas and past player actions.

Aside from non-specific biases about how it would be interesting for me personally for any individual session to continue, some of my biases could have to do with what I feel about the different players. While they may be implicit, the players will pick up on them with time, and may not feel comfortable confronting me about them. This can have dire long-term consequences.

The fact that I have relinquished some control over the world to a known random distribution due to player action, inasmuch as it allows me to examine some of my biases about the world, as well as to avoid implicit bias between the players leaking into decisions about the world, leads to more trust from the players, which, as I argued in my discussion of the Monty Hall problem, is vital for allowing them to feel confident in engaging rationally with the imaginary challenges I am putting in front of them.

This is what I call constructive alienation: having done the work to build systems for generating content for the world, and for adjudicating some of the actions performed upon it, I put it at a remove, and we transition from a state of "the players don't know what will happen next because they can't read my mind and my biases" to "the players don't know what will happen next in a context that they have gotten some information about, because I don't know either - it depends on a dice roll that hasn't been made yet". It's a step I take towards the players in order to create a shared experience of a world I created with them.

There is still a lot of in-the-moment improvisation involved on my end, of course. The system can't, and shouldn't, capture all that happens - a lot of the fun in tabletop RPGs is in the open-endness. But falling back to system rather than to arbitrary decision makes for a more textured and collaborative imaginary world, and for deeper experiences therein.

Watercrawling in RPGS - a sketch

Premise

A party of players tells you "we've decided we're going to travel down the river instead of taking the King's road; we think we can make it through the rapids." Or they ask you "how long will it take us to cross the Atlantic?" Or they say "we've found Blackbeard's treasure map - how do we get to the island he's describing?" You want not only to have a specific answer prepared, or improvised on the spot - you want the answer to fit in with the rest of what the players know about the world, you want to support additional decisions they might make either on their way to their goal, or figure out what achieving their goal might lead to next, and you want to prepare for sessions in a way that will help you do this without overworking yourself. You need a watercrawl game structure.

The Alexandrian blog talks a lot about game structures, and why they're important for knowing what you need to prepare to make interesting sessions, and then how to apply what you prepared in-session in the best way. I can't say I've put a lot of it into practice, although I've tried. I've found some of his discussion of hexcrawling useful for creating interesting content as my players did some overland travel, but I did not use it to the furthest extent, and really didn't need to - this was a short trip to a very specific goal, it's not going to be a West Marches-type game with extensive recurring exploration. It was nice to generate random content that challenged me as a gamemaster while corresponding in general terms to how I felt the area they were traveling through would be like.

Earlier in my campaign, there was some water-based travel, and I didn't feel like I had good structure for it. I didn't know exactly how to deal with the players` choices, or even how to present them with options, so it ended up being very rail-roaded, in the sense that they were stuck on a ship that was traveling however it liked, and just happened to go where they (that is, me, my preparation) needed to go; or they essentially had to swim to specified areas. At best I could have been said to have provided them with a point-crawl, a network of specified places they could go with set paths between them, some of which involved going through water.

Here's a sketch for a structure that would help me do a better job in future campaigns. It will be geared more towards traditional, or even old-school play, where most of the information is generated and managed by the gamemaster, then discovered by the players as they engage with the world through their characters. I do hope more collaboratively-generated games would benefit, too.

Types of waterways

"Waterways" are areas mostly made up of water for traveling through. I am assuming that characters are not naturally aquatic, so they are starting and ending on dry land, and usually will want to remain dry, and therefore afloat, for most of their travel time. Here are some types of waterays in ascending complexity:

Rivers

Rivers are easy - they are essentially roads made of water. The simplest river is a wide waterway that you can go up and down, with banks that are easy for a row-boat to stop on. You can make it more complex by having a fast stream, add rapids or narrows for tricky or dangerous passage, connect them into a network of tributaries and splits, have them push into a marshy delta, or have the river end in an estuary in the sea, but your focus when planning can be as if you are looking at a graph of roadways which happen to be watery, and to which the price of entry is either excellent swimming or a vessel to ride or pilot. Rivers can interface with more complicated regions like marshes, lakes, and shores.

Lakes and marshes

Lakes and marshes are a bit more involved, but should still be easy to navigate. The periphery is visible (so we are not considering something like the Great Lakes), and you're unlikely to be lost on a clear day. Inclement weather can be avoided by just landing your vessel near the shore until it's cleared up. But if you do want to go somewhere in the lake when it's raining, or snowing, or very windy, a navigator and crew's skills can be tested to the limit. Nevertheless, in terms of planning, you would be focusing on points of interest, maybe deciding that some parts of the map are shallower or deeper, but mostly when deciding on approaches or paths.

Shores, estuaries, archipelagoes

Here we still expect landmarks to aid in navigation, but the open sea starts calling to us. Sudden streams and waves can lead us astray, and if the ship is shorebound, not meant for navigating out of sight of land, that can mean death. You can key hexes that contain the parts of the shore you're interested in, or the archipelago - it essentially becomes either the periphery of your land hexcrawl, or a hexcrawl over some range of the ocean.

The open sea or ocean

Here the characters, or whoever is in control of their vessel, need to use actual navigation, of the historical modern era, or of a magical sort. Sampling the soil and comparing it to your knowledge of the area can help in shallow waters, but for the most part you want a combination of compasses, astrolabes, and divination spells. You'll also want to use whatever methods of meteorological predictions you have, because weather can make or break your voyage, especially if you are sailing.

The open sea is not necessarily featureless; trade routes involve following big currents or consistent wind patterns, although, as in shorebound travel, inclement weather can lead you astray, and these features are not as dependable as dry land. There may also be known islands and lighthouses to show you that you have arrived near your goal, or to ward you off dangerous shoals.

You might also know of a destination, but little else, say from a pirate's journal: combining known coordinates and stellar navigation, you may know where you need to go at any point in time; but using known routes for part of the way can help you travel speedily and safely, while uncharted waters might lead to unexpected dangers and opportunities along the way.

Charting itself can be an important challenge, or even the goal of an adventure. This requires very good navigational skills on the part of the character, but also potentially the gamemaster and players.

Indeed, I don't know that I would be able to hone down open sea adventuring without actually looking into real navigation and charting. I have a few books on the topic, and will have to spend time on them to get a sense of how much of a task it would be. Hopefully it's possible to have a map with general coordinates and points of interest, and for you to easily keep the position point of the vessel on the map and how it relates to them. A kind of multiscale map, keying trade routes, trade winds, notable regions, then notable smaller areas, islands, and lighthouses, might be the way to go. The ship's coordinates might need to be calculated exactly, even if not all of the models require such precision to decide their effects.

The map also points to something else: open sea navigation pretty much requires that you decide the overall shape of your world. Is it a deformed oblate spheroid, like Earth? Is it a flat lozenge, like Greg Stafford's Glorantha? You have to decide, because much will be determined by it, not the least of which the coordinates you will use, and what potential edge cases they might lead you to.

Weather

Trips on water are significantly affected by the weather. Even rivers can overflow or dry up based on precipitation; and a storm can turn an easily navigable lake into a deathtrap. Winds and waves can lead you from a simpler area to a more complicated one, for which you might not be prepared. Some climates can turn the very water into solid hazards: frozen lakes and regions of the sea, and icebergs. You need to think about seasons, and how they affect weather in your world; the different climates and what they entail. How far you want to go - do you just want to have a random generation of daily weather, or correlated patterns requiring meticulous journals to account for?

Inclement weather can impede navigation, and unlike getting lost on land, water moves. You may find yourself in a place you weren't expecting even if you attempt to be still until the storm passes.

Conclusion

Adventuring by water, whether taking a barge down the river, exploring a lake where a secret treasure is rumored to be buried, or looking for a pirates` hoard in unchartered waters, is an interesting aspect of genre fiction, and something that role-players may be interested in exploring. Some day I would like to have a good framework for allowing them to do that. Until then, I have this sketch, and now you do, too.

RPG craft - radio

A few months ago I was reading and watching sources about old school roleplaying, wargaming as it evolved into tabletop roleplaying, and the Old School Renaissance/Revival, and came to the conclusion that one way I could improve in being a gamemaster was to get better at presenting the imagined reality to the players so that they could make system-agnostic decisions about the world as their characters.

In miniature wargaming, historical battlefields were recreated in miniature, so players and referees had real-world terrain or effects to negotiate a mechanical model from. Sometimes they could get into arguments based on historical or physical texts describing the region or the battle in question.

Subsequently, in many of the original tabletop campaigns, the referee, gamemaster, or dungeon master, wasn't expected to hand out maps to the players, or have the players look at their character sheet and work on the world from there - instead, the GM would describe the world to the players, and they would be expected to sketch maps, critical to do well when exploring dungeons. Some early computer RPGs, such as Pool of Radiance and Eye of the Beholder, required similar tasks of the player.

So how do you perform your part in this, and how do you improve these performances? I knew about theater of the mind in vague terms (mostly, in D&D, as an alternative to grid-based combat), but I was looking for specifics. I asked in an Israeli role-playing game theory Facebook group and was pointed to a discussion in Patrick Stuart's Silent Titans, and indeed, there are four masterful pages there, 8-11 (14-17 in the PDF), about exactly that. But there had to be more.

Then, suddenly, it hit me: radio! Radio drama, radio writing, those have to provide the listening audience with a world to engage with, based on verbal descriptions alone! Surely that is where I should seek answers. I am not going to pretend that this is an entirely original thought, as I soon after learned that tabletop role-playing games have been referred to as improvised radio theater in the past, but to me that was a revelation.

So I started reading and amassing sources about radio drama and writing, which lead me to Writing for Radio, a book by Vincent McInerney. The first chapter (which is as far as I've read) provided me with a breakthrough insight as to how what I am trying to grasp relates to philosophy, specifically to epistemology, which is about how we gain knowledge. One of the points raised, taken from Locke, is that it's possible to think of the process of imagining new things by building them up from basic blocks of things we have encountered in the past. Relating this to fantasy, a lot of ancient mythical creatures were described as amalgamations of known things. What is a minotaur? A man with the head of an ox. What is a gorgon? A woman with snakes for hair.

I got "stuck" in this chapter because it had a few exercises that require you to record yourself reading aloud texts and compare their appeal as radio, how well they conjure images into your mind as you read them. I felt I wouldn't get the most out of the book by simply reading ahead. Now that I have some vacation time, I plan to engage with it in depth. Maybe I'll even get used to the sound of my own voice!

Role-playing Monty Hall

The Monty Hall problem

The Monty Hall problem is a well-known mathematical brain-teaser: The player has survived to the end of some gameshow. The host now points to three doors. One of these is hiding a brand new car, the other two are hiding goats. Let's pretend that goats aren't a better long-term investment than a car, and that the player does want the latter. The player chooses a door. The host then opens one of the other doors, which reveals a goat. They then give you a choice: you can stick with the door you've already chosen, or you can switch. Which should you do?

The answer may depend on a lot of factors. In the framing of the problem that leads to the standard solution, more information is given: you are guaranteed that the host will open one of the doors that you have not chosen, one with a goat in it, regardless of whether you chose the one with the car or not. If you did choose the car, the host will choose the other door to open at random. You will always then be given a chance to switch.

Under these conditions, the solution is pretty clear: to start out with, you have no reason to favor any of the doors, so you can just roll a six-sided die (a d6), and take the first door on 1 or 2, the second on 3 or 4, and the third on 5 or 6. The probability of your first choice being the right one is one third. Then, the host opens one of the other doors to show a goat. Now you have more information: you know that the host had to have not opened the door with the car. So if you chose the one with the car, which was with probability one third, then he randomly opened one, and the other also has a goat - and you shouldn't switch. If you chose one of the ones with a goat behind it, which was with probability two thirds, then he already showed you the other one with the goat, so the other one must have the car. Not knowing which case you are in, you can nevertheless determine that you are two thirds likely to be in a situation where switching is the right move. So you should switch.

There's a lot to dig into as to why this is counter-intuitive to most people, and many variations that can be made on the conditions, but I want to focus on something else: how does the player know that this is how the game is played? Let's look at a more genre-ish scenario to illustrate what I mean.

Dracula's Hall

Your intrepid player character has made their way past many of Dracula's insidious traps and into his inner sanctum. The gamemaster describes the Count himself sitting smugly on his throne at the other end of an elongated hall, black curtains covering the high windows, sipping a red, viscous fluid from a chalice. "You have done well for yourself, brave one; but surely you cannot defeat me. Let us play a game." He points to three doors to your left. "Behind two of these doors there are my thralls, who will enjoy toying with you until your untimely demise. Behind another are the villagers you seek. If you choose the right one, you and they may leave unscathed. Choose poorly..." he tapers the sentence off melodramatically.

You mull it over, pray for guidance from whatever gods could allow for this creature to terrorize a poor village, and choose the middle door.

"Ah, an interesting choice", Dracula responds. "But are you quite sure? Here, let me make it easier for you." With a wave of his hand he opens the door closest to you. The maddened thrall inside starts stepping out, but Dracula stills them with another gesture. "Are you still certain about that door?" What should you do?

The answer depends on many factors. What was the framing of Dracula as a character? Has the gamemaster provided you with rumors about his fairness? Is he instead known for being a lying cheat? Have the various traps so far been set up as logic puzzles, or on the contrary, as deadly bundles of misdirection? In the first case, maybe you can assume that the situation corresponds to the honest gameshow above. In the second case, maybe he only chose to show you one of the other doors because he knows you chose well the first time. Or maybe all three doors contain thralls, and it's less of a gameshow than a shell game.

Since this is a role-playing game, with lateral thinking allowed or even encouraged, you didn't even need to get to this point. You could have had your character yell out "enough of your games" and come at Dracula, hoping to surprise him. Depending on how his capability was framed, maybe you have a chance of defeating him that way. You could also have your character literally pray to the gods, or cast a spell that will guide you to the right decision. Or you could have them try and look at Dracula closely to see whether he's lying, or is nervous about your choice.

And then the gamemaster may react in many ways to these attempts at working around the problem. They may choose to go with your choices and see where they lead through the known mechanics of the game. But maybe they telegraph Dracula's power through rumors or having him dispatch a known strong monster as you enter. Or maybe your gamemaster just plain tells you "if you fight Dracula you will die." Maybe the gods aren't listening right now, or your character is in an anti-magic field. Maybe Dracula is preternaturally unreadable.

This might erode your trust in the gamemaster. If they won't let you engage with or fight Dracula on your own terms, how else will they, or have they already, interfered with your agency? Is your choice of room significant at all, or does the gamemaster have some narrative beat to get you to, so whatever you choose, the pre-ordained encounter is what's going to happen?

So far I've assumed a somewhat traditional role-playing game, with in-character mechanics. But let's say this was a game with narrative mechanics, where the player can make choices that relate to engaging with and advancing the narrative. Your character could have some kind of skill or ability that allows them a good chance at succeeding at negotiating with creatures of the night. Then you can say "I want to make the right choice." You roll for that. And then the probability distribution is entirely different, and the results are defined differently.

Say you had a range of success, partial failure, and total failure. The system makes it so that you have a success with probability 80%, partial failure with 15%, and total failure with 5%. That's removed entirely from the problem as posed, but could hone in on creating a more interesting story. On a total success, you could realize that Dracula is trying to fool you, stick to what you chose, and then see that the villagers are there. A defeated Dracula then allows you to leave. On a partial success, you could choose to switch, then have Dracula laugh at you, open the door you had chosen before the switch to show you the villagers, chained and terrorized, then close it and let the already exposed thrall leap to the attack. Yes, you have failed, but the villagers are still there, so it's just a matter of going through a battle to release them. On a total failure you switch, then Dracula opens the door you've switched to in order to reveal the villagers - which he had turned into vampires the night before. Not only did you fail to free the villagers, the story will now be about how you survive this failure and live to tell their families.

In the case of a game with narrative-focused mechanics, you could ask another question: why bother with a Monty Hall-type situation in the first place? Maybe just as a reference to this well-known problem, as some kind of indicator of Dracula's sense of humor, rather than any specific probabilistic features of the problem, or a test of the player's reasoning or skill.

Back to Monty Hall

You are back at the gameshow. The host has shown you the doors, you made your initial choice, the host has opened one of the doors and shows a goat in it. What do you do?

The same thing you would have done before reading the alternate situation with Dracula. Because you have made the decision to play this gameshow, which is why you accept the premise - it's also frowned upon to fight gameshow hosts for the prizes. Because you know for a fact how the host makes decisions, why they went through revealing the door with the goat and giving you the choice - this gameshow is regulated, and has been running for several years, so you know that there is always a reveal and the ability to switch, so you may have done some game theory analysis about strategies and came down to always switching. Because the game doesn't care about narrative considerations, so you can't reframe it as about plotting out the story of you as a person and what the car means to you.