Impressions from TirCon 2021

Tir-na Nog'th Con 2021 took place over the last weekend, and I had quite a bit of fun attending a few game sessions and the closing ceremony - virtually, of course. It was my first opportunity to engage with this Amber Diceless-focused community in play. I had just finished reading through the system's core book, and have read the source material, Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, several times, though it has been a while.

I'll provide my initial impressions of the games. Only two of them were using the ADRPG system itself - of the other two, one used a unique system, while the other used an adaptation of Everway called Amberway.

While I'm going to be a bit critical of some games on a systemic level, I want to reiterate that it was a very enjoyable experience, and I do recommend trying all of these yourselves, if you have the chance. While I own copies of both of the non-ADRPG games I played, I have not had a chance to read them. I might do a more thorough review of them afterwards.

Alice Is Missing

Alice is Missing is a silent, text-message-based game played live. We played using a combination of Discord for the conversations and Roll20 for the more visual mechanics. The common premise to all sessions of the game is that a teenager in a small, decaying Northern California town has gone missing.  The player characters are closely associated with the missing Alice. Once they have found out about her disappearance, and as they try to find out what happened to her, the PCs are unable to meet in person, and this needs to be strictly enforced by whatever rationalizations needed until the end, to lend credence to the use of text messaging.

You, the players, get to choose from a few stock characters, with the facilitator playing as someone who's left town and is coming back for Christmas. I chose to play Dakota, Alice's best friend. Cards are drawn to decide certain initial details about Alice's disappearance, as well as prompts for the players to flesh out their PCs - this includes one secret each, that they should find a way to reveal to at least one other player by the end. There are then rounds of fleshing out relationships between the PCs and each other. Some stock non-player characters and locations are also given, and each player comes up with relations between those and the missing Alice. Having established this framework, each player is supposed to leave a voice message to Alice that would be found in her phone, based upon what's has been set up so far. Then the five location and five NPC cards, as well as other investigative cards, are shuffled and put aside.

The body of the game, which takes up 90 minutes of real time, is driven by an interesting card-based pacing mechanism. The players draw alternating cards which must be read only on the time written on them. The facilitator draws 90, and then the next player 80 and 40, the next 70 and 30, the next 60 and 20, and the last 50 and 10. Each of the cards indicates some other cards, usually a location, an NPC, or both, and a question that the player should answer, and then present to the rest of the players. Later cards will make use of the previous cards drawn, as well. The 90 minute card starts the timer ticking. Then the facilitator is supposed to start the group text, and texting, both private and public, can begin in earnest. Players are expected to talk as their PCs and describe what they are doing, and to incorporate the various clue cards that were drawn into their narrative - while making sure not to have any two PCs meet. The cards drawn determine how, and in one state, Alice is found. Finally, at the end of the 90 minutes, the voice messages are played, and the players can then talk about the game and decompress.

My experience of the game is very much like in an ongoing Vampire: the Masquerade live-action role-play I took part in for a few months, many years ago: the conversations, play-acting, and some of the narrative that evolved were pleasant enough, but I didn't really have a good sense of whether I was influencing anything that mattered. The mechanics felt both too tight - because they were on a timer and intervened significantly in the narrative - and also too loose - in that they did not to me seem to provide a good way of feeding back into the game meaningfully. I didn't feel that any of my decisions significantly affected how things were going, and Alice's end state was completely set by the cards rather than by anything we'd done.

Overall, I feel like I am far likelier to try and steal and/or adapt the pacing tool for my own purposes than to play this game again. If larping is more your style, this might be an interesting way of taking part in it without having to do so in person.

Amber Gothic

The first game I played with actual ADRPG mechanics, the premise was that I was one of several presumptive heirs to a mysterious distant cousin in a faraway land - specifically, Corwin, presumably the protagonist of the first five Amber novels, although my character wouldn't know that.

In mechanical terms, the players were expected to build characters with Human attributes, and a minor special power with a paired disadvantage. With a bit of thinking I made a pretty Lovecraftian protagonist: Elior Hayek, a Dartmouth junior studying architecture, who is running out of funds and could really use a windfall. He was able to accelerate his movement significantly for a few minutes at a time, at the expense of spending hours of real time too nauseated to move.

The game itself ran like a pretty reasonable mystery game, albeit without the usual expected skill rolls. The ancestral home was appropriately gothic and spooky, the locals and fellow players odd and interesting, with growing references to the source material. We ended on a typical Lovecraftian note, too, dying in the tentacles of an eldritch horror.

The concept was very nice, but ADRPG has a lot going against it as a medium for gothic investigative play. For starters, there's a reason that a typical campaign starts with an attribute auction in which players are encouraged to field points to position themselves at significant above-baseline-Amber rates that are strictly differentiated from each other - that's what makes adjudicating conflict both between PCs and between them and NPCs and environment challenges doable and exciting in play. Having everyone at Human level meant essentially doing freeform.

Another issue is the focus on private communications. A typical ADRPG campaign involves a lot of conflict and political jockeying between the player characters, starting with the player attribute auction, which cements some conflict, and then undergirded by the secret acquisition of advantage in secret, and conspiracies with the GM and the other players. This is death to an investigative convention game, where gathering up clues about the external mystery takes up so much effort already. I felt that even if we had wanted to play PCs who were suspicious of each other, and I think most of us did not, keeping the inter-player communications in the open would have made things much smoother.

I do feel like some Lovecraft-Amber mashup is possible, but it might be better to simply use a system like Call of Cthulhu, or one of the others that already incorporate investigation of the eldritch unknown, instead.

The Great Amber Bake-Off

Full disclosure: I'm almost certain that I entered this one by mistake. Due to how the conference was set up, it was decided that prospective players would vote for sessions they wanted to play in any individual slot, and then these votes will be taken into account when deciding how to allot them - and I think I voted wrong. I've never watched any of the Great British Bake-Off shows, and don't really know much about baking. However, when I found out that I'd been assigned to this game, I decided I'd give it my best.

Without giving too much away, the premise was that some of the best and unusual bakers in all of Shadow were brought together to compete in the style of the Great British Bake-Off, with a rising set of culinary challenges, some known in advance, others a surprise to all. Each player needed to come up with a character with baking as a side-attribute, rather than simply "someone good at baking". We were given a bit of an explanation of how Amberway works, and how it will be interpreted in the context of baking and cookery. Considering the red lentils I had soaking at the time, I came up with Jacob Samson, essentially a mashup of the Biblical Jacob and Samson, with Biblical verses inspiring his special cooking powers. I was especially thinking of Jacob using red lentil stew to buy off Esau's birthright, and Samson's riddle of the beehive in the lion's carcass. I rationalized that food was serious business in a Biblically-inspired Shadow, and a wise leader's culinary finesse needed would serve nicely in competing against the best bakers in all the realms. A Biblically-inspired character also meant I could make use of the one non-TV-American accent I feel comfortable using in English, the Israeli one. We ended up bonding in and out of character over the challenges we faced.

While the other players suggested existing baked goods based on their actual knowledge of the field, I either appropriated foods that wouldn't normally be served as cakes or cookies, or made things up from whole cloth. Since the rolls were based on how I approaches the situation rather than on actual cooking abilities, it went pretty well regardless - and honestly, I do want to try some of the things I imagined, they sound delicious. For this type of ultimately friendly conflict, whose purpose is to be judged better than another in front of NPCs, the Amberway system provided excellent flavor, with the playacting and not-quite-mechanically-based interactions with the NPCs serving as a wonderful substrate. I cannot recommend this game enough.

Excuse Me, Are We Related?

This game made the most use of ADRPG as a system and a setting. The premise of the core book is that the players will be playing the children of the princes and princesses of Amber, who were the main movers and shakers in the first five books. This scenario decides that these children of princes and princesses are mooching off Castle Amber and are generally underfoot, so the King sends some of them out to Shadow to find other fruits of royal indiscretion, bringing them in if they're useful, leaving them in place with some safety information if they like where they are, or possibly disposing of them if they're a threat. We were to use points to buy attributes in what was essentially a one-step auction, buy Pattern Imprint so that we could all travel Shadow, and otherwise buy most other things we would, within reason.

I chose to create Bella, daughter of Caine, with pretty even attribute points, no special items, familiars, or powers, Caine as a Family Friend, and some Good Stuff to spare. She had a bit of a love-hate relationship with her father but otherwise a cheerful demeanor to pretty much everyone.

Her cheerfulness lead her to bring the party of youngsters to their first lead to potential royal progeny, which turned out to be a dead end. I am bringing this up because this type of failure is important to provide a sense of realness and to the imaginary world. Subsequent attempts were more successful, although not without some close scrapes and even serious injuries. We got awarded points for each cousin brought back, two for whoever distinguished themselves. We put those into our attributes, but how much effect that had is not clear, due to the opacity of the ranking system.

Unlike with Amber Gothic, the measurable differences in ability among the PCs, as well as between them and the usual Shadow denizens, made every encounter interesting. How tired are we getting? Which of us is the most fitting to do this somewhat impossible thing we're attempting this time? How do we handle the limits of shape-shifting? How is a given level of Psyche combined with Pattern powers doing against this Logrus adept foe? The fact that we were spared an actual attribute auction, as well as the choice not to have secret communications, made cooperating very straightforward. An engaging, exciting and overall wholesome affair.

Conclusion

As I said, the convention was lovely, and I was extremely pleased to be able to participate in games that put some of what I'd read about diceless systems into practice. I do hope to write something more substantive about ADRPG and game design and practice without randomness, or at least actions adjudicated by dice, eventually, and I'm glad I won't only be leaning on text and theory for it.

System as theory addendum - prediction

I got serious pushback on the system as theory post, the thrust of which was that I failed to establish that tabletop role-playing games systems are like scientific theories, because I didn't show how they provide predictions. 

My immediate response was very defensive: that I should probably go and revise the post significantly if it could so easily be misconstrued to mean that I'm talking about scientific theories in the sense of being able to perform exact predictions to begin with. I only brought up physics to expound on my academically-fueled view of theory, in terms of utility rather than truth, and then to apply it to theory in media studies, which I saw mostly as a tool for comparisons. I didn't use the term "prediction" at all.

But with more thought came a realization that maybe it is fruitful to think of prediction in systems as theories of play. If my system is Dungeons & Dragons, then I can predict that the games that I play will involve hit points, experience points, weapons, magic, monsters, dungeons, and all of those artifacts that comprise the interactable building blocks of the game, and that I as player and/or dungeon master will use them or be used by them in certain ways. And if it is, indeed, a session of D&D, these predictions will likely come to pass, and I will be able to make some determinations as to the quality of the participants and the way the whole thing went.

If, on the other hand, I take these D&D-laden predictions to a game of Blades in the Dark, they will run counter to what I actually experience. The classes - sorry, playbooks - won't really correspond to anything I'm familiar with, nor will the ability scores and skills - sorry, Action Ratings. What's this Harm? Is that like HP? But that should increase with level! Where are levels, and what are these separate experience tracks? Are you really only getting a handful of points each session? Why do I have contacts on my sheet? Wait, we're rolling to figure out how an adventure starts? I want to plan! Flashbacks? You mean, whenever I run into a situation I don't like I just get to make things up so it's actually fine? Where are the combat rounds? Why is the DM - sorry, GM - not rolling attacks for the enemies? Why is the GM constantly asking me questions about the world that they're supposed to answer if they know what they're doing? This is not in the ballpark of what I was expecting, of what my theory of play predicts that a session will look like.

This experience, and the way it diverges from my predictions of how a game would play, could then lead me in several directions. The simplest reaction would be to withdraw to my existing theory, chalking it up to a bad group, or bad DM, or a bad set of circumstances for this particular session. On the other hand, it might push me to revise my theory, expanding it to include forms of play like D&D and Blades as special cases.

But if we take the prediction aspect seriously, it might not even come to that. Because if somebody tells me a little bit about how a Blades session goes, it's going to be so different from anything I would expect from a successful D&D session that I might just not ever try it at all. And I think that's at the heart of why the rising tide of D&D 5th Edition is not lifting all TTRPG boats.

In my case, I was lucky: my first exposure to TTRPGs was in the 1990s, when the local gaming magazine presented D&D (then Advanced D&D 2nd Edition, for the most part) as just one of many existing TTRPGs, ranging from Rolemaster to Shadowrun. Even though most of my experiences were with AD&D 2E, my theory of play didn't hold it as the end-all and be-all of that thing we did.

Unfortunately, as D&D 5E has been presented and marketed, at least in the anglophone West, it's very easy for newcomers to the hobby to not really be exposed to other systems as real alternatives in a wider context of play. This is made worse by the Open Gaming License, which allows a certain variety of other games which nevertheless point back to D&D as their baseline, the original game with the highest production values. I think that's a real barrier to a lot of alternative games, large and small. It's also cheating the people playing D&D 5E, especially DMs, out of a wider variety of experiences, and maybe "system as theory" helps explain why they don't see it that way. I do think there's more to it than that in the specifics of the system's mechanics and (lack of) DM support, but that's for a future post.

System as theory

My academic background is in physics, so I have certain preconceptions about the term "theory". However, according to a couple of years of non-academic reading and watching of videos about media studies and critical theory, at least one form of theory in media is as a framework for comparison. The idea is that any individual artistic creation is unique, and no two can be compared on their own terms. Some form of abstraction or simplification needs to be performed in order to compare them, highlighting some aspects while downplaying others. On some level this is close to the use of theories and models in experimental physics, if you substitute "experiment" for "artistic creation". A theory or model will allow you to interpret consistencies and inconsistencies between different runs of the same experiment, or several variations of an experiment.

Classical mechanics as a theory encourages you to build models relating to masses moving in Euclidean space and interacting through forces. You can then perform experiments to explore, for example, the relation between the period and length of a pendulum, or the gravitational acceleration of differently-massed objects in a vacuum. Sometimes you conduct series of experiments that classical mechanics can't make sense of, where comparisons both with other experiments and with subsequent runs of the same experiment no longer add up, and you might be pushed to replace the theory entirely. You then think of the old theory as a more limited special case of the new one, or possibly just a limited theory, useful for a smaller set of cases. When you study modern physics you will be confronted with several seminal experiments which eventually forced significant paradigm shifts - the now somewhat out-of-date term for changing to an entirely new theory. Recent reflections on the development of theories suggest that the change was usually more gradual and piecemeal, with old concepts repurposed for new agendas.

An attitude I take from my academic background about theories is that they're not so much true or false, but rather more or less useful, given a certain situation. Classical mechanics is still very useful in a wide variety of fields, such as civil and mechanical engineering. Highly advanced quantum theories of particle interactions which ignore gravity - otherwise a very dominant force, requiring intense theoretical work in its own right - are cutting edge when it comes to understanding the limits of behavior in the highest-energy accelerators. Arguing "you shouldn't use classical mechanics because it's wrong" isn't going to get you far, even with broader theories available.

On to the topic of this post: system as theory. I suggest that the singular unit for a theory of role-playing games isn't a set of books from a certain edition of the product as sold, or a specific list of house-rules built upon such a set. The singular unit is the specific role-playing campaign, or session of play, or possibly even the individual act of play. Dungeons & Dragons is a theory of play that connects these activities, and compares and contrasts them. Call of Cthulhu is another. GNS is another, broader one. "Tabletop role-playing game" is yet another, possibly overly-broad one.

People will play D&D at different tables and make statements such as "that other dungeon master didn't know how to make the battles work, they need to get better at calculating challenge ratings and picking monster rosters for them", or "this other DM has this really interesting house-rule that makes exhaustion levels finally useful". They will sit at the same table and say "this session leaned more on combat, while last session was more about exploration. I miss social role-play!" All statements that suggest a theory of play that is highly informed by the 5th edition of D&D.

Players who have been playing the game in previous iterations might say similar statements, but also "this DM is too lenient. I miss when D&D was deadlier" or "all these characters having darkvision really ruins the dungeon crawl for me". Their theory is a wider D&D, of which play informed by the 5E books and play culture is a subset. People who have played a variety of games might say about a session of D&D "you know, this one looks like it might have worked better in RuneQuest" or "the DM is using something that reminds me of clocks from Blades in the Dark, but it's not having the same effect, because they keep them secret and aren't consistent with them." D&D is then a model of a subset of play, rather than the entirety of the theory.

Returning to the analogy with scientific theories, having people "try another game" is not just a matter of pushing against a resistance to learning new sets of rules, buying different books, or getting familiar with new settings. Instead, it requires a paradigm shift in their theory of play. They need to start placing play, their play, the games they have played and might play in future, in a broader context. And that's a very large hurdle, both for people not as invested in the whole thing, who might not want to go through the difficult mental transition, as well as for those highly invested in it, who have dedicated so much of their mental effort to improving and creating content that reflects their existing theoretical framework, playing D&D 5E well.

I do think, however, that it's an important hurdle for people to overcome. Because nobody owns the general theory of that thing we do as a tabletop role-playing game, or many of the more specific theories we could come up with. But an individual company owns D&D. And if your theory of play is D&D, everything that you do in this framework is always going to feed back into it. And you will always have that company and its commercial interests looming large in your thinking about play, and in the thinking other people bring to the table when they play with you.

Offsetting the Blades clock - starting with downtime activities

Let's start with some background. The basic session-scale game loop of Blades in the Dark goes as follows: you start with Free Play, which is loosely structured, allowing your player characters to explore the city of Doskvol, talk to non-player characters, gather information, and, ideally, focus the goals of the party into a heist.

Once a heist seems to be forming, you get into a very structured process for preparing for the Score. You choose a target and a plan, and you choose a level of Load for each of the characters. Then you sum up the various factors that are relevant to a heist, including your crew's power differential with the target, whether they're using any special connections or information about it, how daring their approach is, etc. You roll the Engagement Roll, and use the result of that to determine the starting situation of the Score.

During the Score itself there is a rapid back-and-forth between the player characters and the game world, with intense confrontations that can sometimes be resolved directly through acting, sometimes through retroactively deciding that a character had a piece of equipment relevant to the situation (the number of times this can happen depends on the Load of each character), and sometimes through Flashbacks, which are a more extensive retroactive change of circumstances.

When the Score is settled, one way or another, there is Downtime. Here the consequences of the Score, both direct and indirect, are accounted for: how much Coin the crew and characters get; how their Reputation improves, vital for gaining access to better resources and having an easier time targeting more lucrative targets; how much Heat they've generated from the authorities; resulting Entanglements that might lead to additional trouble, the imprisonment of a character, or some good old-fashioned bribery to stay out of trouble; and Downtime Activities, long-term actions that include crafting new equipment, acquiring temporary tools, training to gain XP, indulging in a character's Vice to reduce Stress (or potentially get into more trouble as well), reducing Heat on the crew, and long-term projects.

Once Downtime is concluded, you are expected to go back to Free Play and start anew. The gamemaster is also expected to provide for actions by the other factions, although this isn't codified as clearly.

Since my last post on the subject, I ran three additional sessions in the same open table campaign. In what was initially a temporary adjustment to the fact that we had played a truncated score the previous time, we've come to start each subsequent session with Downtime Activities. Unlike the very cooperative Score framework, or the potentially sociable Free Play, or even the earlier, more mechanized and collectivized steps of Downtime, Downtime Activities are very individual. Each character chooses how they will spend the span of days or weeks of relative safety. However, they do also allow for a multi-character buildup. Aside from being able to assist another as normal, long-term projects involve the player deciding on what they want to do, the gamemaster determining how big of a clock is necessary for its conclusion, or maybe breaking it down to connected clocks, and then the player performing some downtime action to advance this clock. Other players can then perform their own relevant actions to also contribute to the same clock.

If at least one of the players can be coaxed into focusing on an idea for a heist, this iterative, serial process can allow for the slow building of a setup for some very good heists. In practice, I've found that in two out of these three sessions, there were enough people with some focus to use Downtime Activities to essentially skip over Free Play entirely. Unfortunately, if none of the players has this initiative, or they are all too new to the game, it might end up simply being a time-waster, after which Free Play must start as normal.

One interesting aspect of this structure is how it mirrors the session zero of a campaign. While there is a shared premise to start with, for the most part the players are siloed out as they build their characters. Then, in BitD itself, there is the common creation of the crew, but even in games that do not contain this aspect, there is some kind of inciting action that puts the group together, possibly a first scene or adventures.

One final caveat: I have not managed to mix this structure well with actual character creation for new players. If you are setting up an open table like me, be sure to prepare pregenerated characters for newbies, or possibly help them build their own before the session starts.

Score Zero for Blades in the Dark - Playing through character and crew creation

About a month ago I reported a specialized Blades in the Dark one-shot I ran, "Whose Score Is It Anyway?". It was an attempt to streamline the game to the minimal amount necessary to engage with its famous heist mechanic, the score. It went pretty well, but it felt a bit sparse without the connection to the whole cycle of the game - information gathering, engagement roll, score, consequences, downtime, back to information gathering - and how that feeds into the longer term character and crew incentives, as well as the developing relationships between the players` crew and other factions in Doskvol, the compressed, haunted industrial city in which the game is set.

For the session I ran this past weekend, I decided to start a more conventional game of Blades, including fully creating characters, choosing and customizing their crew, situating them in Doskvol, hopefully playing at least one score, and then using this setup for a sandbox open table with potentially rotating membership. It went pretty much as the book suggests, until we got to a significant step of crew creation: establishing hunting grounds. The premise is that Doskvol is lousy with gangs, and nowhere is entirely open for a new power to start out - so the crew is already stepping on somebody else's turf. This means that they have to decide what their relationship with the other crew will be, which mechanically translates to hostility if they pay nothing, neutrality if they pay half their starting fungible resources (Coin), and friendship if they pay in full, to show respect. Even once they've decided which faction in the chosen district would provide them with their initial hunting grounds, the players couldn't agree what they wanted the starting relationship to be. And then we realized that we could play through it. We could make all of the other decisions, and then just use the player and crew contacts to gather some information, and start a small score to establish the bad relationship with this faction, while hopefully having something over them.

That went well - neatly fitting within the timeframe remaining after the prolonged preparation phase - and it got me thinking. In the previous post, I complained about the difficulty of randomizing character creation in Blades, due to the awkward playbook and customization option counts. But maybe I had been looking at it wrong. Instead of randomizing these choices, maybe they can come out through play, just like the hunting grounds in our initial session zero? What if we had started the game with the aim of playing the story of the formation of the group? Each player would choose a character playbook, without filling out any of the mechanically significant details, or maybe even any of the details other than a name and alias. Similarly, they would choose a crew playbook, without specifying any of the details. Then, they would play through an establishment score or two. The gaps would be filled either by applying the usual progression rules, or through opportunistic decisions in play, much like the choice of flashbacks or specific items from loads in normal score play. Eventually, something approximating the orthodox starting crew would be formed, or rather, discovered.

This would be similar to the Dungeon Crawl Classics "funnel". In that old school Dungeons & Dragons-like game, each player generates three or four  zero-level characters - that is, what would in the original games would be extremely fragile non-player characters - and the group runs them all through a dungeon adventure or two, from which only a few of them are expected to come out alive. The idea is to maintain a sense of tension and lethality, while allowing players to continue play even when the ever-present potential for death and dismemberment becomes manifest. The players then choose the characters that have survived, and that they've liked the most, to gain their first level, and become viable player characters for future adventures.

Blades doesn't need the same immediate lethality of DCC, but the basic idea of discovering a character through play, having play suggest - or even dictate - character design options, and forming the group around a sense of camaraderie generated by overcoming challenges together, seems like it might lower the barrier to starting play, which I think is a problem with Blades and games similar to it.

This idea isn't entirely original, even in Blades: if you watch the very engaging actual play series, "Oxventure Presents: Blades in the Dark", you will see that their first session is closer to an establishment score as I've been suggesting, than what you would expect going strictly by the book. However, each of the players in the Oxventure cast has put much more energy into pre-game characterization than what I'm thinking of, and mechanically they clearly have full playbooks.

This vague sketch for a Score Zero, or series of establishment scores, needs more substance - it's easy to slip into more linear adventure design when thinking of how to make them happen, especially since Blades doesn't have the more freewheeling dungeon structure to fall back on - but I hope I'll get to try it out some day. Do let me know if you've managed to accomplish something similar in your game, or if this post inspires you to do so.

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.

Whose Score Is It Anyway - Blades in the Dark's heist structure in focus

Introduction

My last post was essentially a short series of complaints about Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, in light of a campaign I ran with it. As I promised in the prior post that lead to it, I intend to write a longer discussion of D&D 5E's character sheet game. But to do it justice, I want to compare it to at least two other systems that I am not only familiar with, but that I have at least played.

Thankfully, the creator of the Discord server where I helped playtest Bounty Hunter TTRPG, Pinkerton One-Shots Agency, hosts a variety of one-shots by several GMs, and is open to new people (like me!) setting up their own games. After having played the BHTTRPG playtest, and an unrelated Call of Cthulhu session, I pitched a one-shot, titled "Whose Score Is It Anyway?"

Premise

The idea was simple: since one of the most influential elements of Blades in the Dark is the heist structure, or the score, I would try to run a session with as little preliminary work as possible before getting to the starting point of this structure: the engagement roll. This would go the farthest into simulating the heist genre, putting the players and their characters in media res, and hopefully we could learn and gain experience with the rest of the necessary rules as we went along.

Normally, there would be some discussion of the crew sheet, choice of lair and starting district, and free-form in-character play and information gathering, before the score was settled upon. However, that is where my previous attempt at running BitD got stuck, so I decided to dispense with it. I would use the crew only as a starting point for choosing the specific score. I also ignored the score's district, treating Doskvol as a unit.

The written pitch was "zero prep", but I did have to make some preparation, if nothing else to build the pregenerated characters, as well as to refresh my memory of some of the mechanics, as it has been a while since I've finished reading the book, and a while longer since I've last attempted to run the game.

Session

After the players chose their characters from a list of pregens, in line with the idea of spending as little time as possible on thinking or making decisions before the score, I rolled a random crew type, and then I rolled randomly on the table for relevant scores, and asked the players to choose which of the three choices they liked the most. The crew rolled was Hawkers, purveyors of vice, and the chosen score involved dealing with a competing product on the market, which led us to conclude that the vice was illicit drugs.

Then I had them use the contacts in their character sheets (which I also generated randomly) to provide detail for the approach. One of the characters, a Slide, had a small-time drug dealer as an ally, and the player proactively claimed that they used to be supplied by the crew, but hasn't bought anything in some time, while nevertheless continuing to sell, suggesting they would make a good contact with the rival crew. Another player, a Hound, suggested that they could follow this contact on their next supply run. They decided that this is how they will sneak into the rivals` lair. That took care of the plan (stealth) and detail (point of entry).

Next I explained how the load-out system worked, and emphasized that specific items are chosen only during the score, rather than being predetermined. The characterization and details of the plan were enough to suggest how heavily they would be equipped for action, so this didn't take long.

Finally, we went over the engagement roll. One die for luck, and another die for using a weak spot of the target (a handoff point for the drugs). The roll went well, so I established that their Hound was well situated to watch over the contact entering what turned out to be the rival crew's manufacturing facility.

As for the rest of the session itself, suffice it to say that it started off sneaky enough, with slowly escalating levels of alarm, culminating in a gun fight and a blockbuster of an explosion, wrecking the warehouse and its surroundings. The characters came out wounded but alive, while their rivals were only able to keep half of their equipment and supplies. I then got some feedback from the players, and bid them farewell.

Things that worked

The session itself went well. Starting this way did save a lot of time before the action came in. The players took to the setting and to the properties of their characters. I was lenient in allowing them to retcon a few details when there was confusion, and I happily took advantage of immediate feedback and suggestions from one player, who has had a lot more experience with the game, to pull it off.

Despite the lack of mechanical team incentives, the shared challenge created a sense of camaraderie that I've seen when running D&D in a similar in media res situation. With time, the players got a hang of the main resolution mechanic, pushing oneself and accepting a devil's bargain, helping each other, the use of load and clocks, and so forth. The trappings of Doskvol also made themselves clear through play. 

Things I would do differently

I was hoping that we could learn more of the rules as we encountered them, but feedback suggests that I should have just had a very clear explanation of the main resolution mechanic, focusing on the fact that every character is able to try anything - even if they have zero "dots" in an action rating, they have a 25% chance to succeed with at most some complication, and as long as the player is aware of the amount of stress they're in, it's not that hard to push oneself or accept a devil's bargain to get up to 50%.

Less mechanically, It seems like I need to find a happier medium between freeform roleplaying and the strict laser focus on building on the engagement roll, because it did feel a bit jarring to some to just jump in this quickly.

An important aspect of Doskvol I forgot to mention, until someone had already committed to killing someone, is the Spirit Wardens and their swift response to death. It serves an important purpose in making the game less bloody. Fortunately, one of the players, whose character was a Whisper, stepped in and provided an excusable way to mitigate it, but it is a fundamental worldbuilding element whose ramifications I didn't pay enough attention to, not to mention explain to the players.

Another comment I got in feedback that I think is very poignant is that the possibility of flashbacks really needs to be brought up for new players in a more proactive fashion. It is one of the foundations of what allows the scores to run as they do when this game is played best.

I think districts add flavor to the scores and to the city at large, so I would roll a d12 to choose one.

Insights into the game

Since this was a one shot with no crew structure and no real ties to Experience Points, some of the incentives a full game would have were absent. For example, one incentive to attempt actions in a desperate position is that it leads to immediate XP gain. Similarly, some forms of characterization are encouraged by the means by which different playbooks gain XP, as well as how different crew sheets do.

The absence of an expected downtime period also meant that the Heat implications weren't visible, nor was there a significant mechanical connection with the vice as a tool for eliminating stress.

Mechanical shortcomings

The fact that the game is 1d6-based, but there are 7 playbooks, 4 starting builds for each playbook, 6 heritages, 7 backgrounds, 7 vices, 5 clever friends, and 8 starting special abilities, made quickly creating a few pregens more difficult than it should have been, and make for longer character creation in a normal game, as well. The text contradictorily suggests assigning the extra dots to attributes based on heritage and background, while also providing this in the quick build - if the backgrounds and vices were reduced to 6 each, and if there were a table for assigning attributes based on heritage and background, that would have improved things. There are 12 districts - if there were instead 11, and if it made sense for some of them to have more scores than others, then 2d6 would have made for a good way to roll for one.

Conclusion

I and the players had a good time with this concept. Some of the adjustments I will want to make to improve my next run of this nature are entirely on me, while others may require a bit of rules hacking to get right. I do recommend giving this type of experiment a shot if you've struggled to make sense of BitD. It will force you to reckon with the game's heist structure, which is a real breath of fresh air - at the expense of missing out on a lot of very interesting further structures. However, it might also make for a good start to a fully-fledged campaign, if you are willing to do some work to retroactively apply the results of your first score to the full system.