Through Sorcerer's eyes - Oct 2, in which we meet a cat, and hear rumors of an owl and a snake

Part of a series analyzing Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October through Sorcerer.

Starts here.

October 2

Today Snuff starts by telling us of some preceding action: Jack taking particular care to collect an ingredient under specific circumstances, and immediately returning home with it, then bantering with the Thing in the Circle, which means that it can talk to Jack, not just to Snuff. He comments that ingredients and timing are important for his master's work.

He then detects an interloper: Graymalk, "Crazy" Jill's pet. He was able to note her peering in from the inside, which further lends credence to his overall enhanced senses. She does like sneaking and lurking, so if a demon, she may have Cloak. They are able to communicate, which could be either demonic or just a setting feature, as I've discussed. They are suspicious of each other, but willing to share information - Graymalk tells him that Nightwind, an owl working with Morris and McNab, has left him a feather with mummy's dust, which is supposed to hurt him, or maybe him and Jack - "you" being a bit ambiguous in English. This could either be an attack from Nightwind as demon, in which case it might be Special Damage (if we interpret combat very loosely), or some kind of indirect use of Banish or Punish by Morris and McNab. Snuff pays her back by telling her that Quicklime, a black snake who lives in the belly (Parasite) of the "mad monk" Rastov, has come by her house and rubbed some of his scales into it. This might be some kind of Special Damage, or possibly a Mark. Since this is from a presumed demon, it doesn't seem likely to be Banish or Punish. He makes it clear that the dealing is between the two of them rather than their masters.

This chapter is thick with characters but light on details. We learn of four potential new sorcerers, and three new potential demons. "Crazy" Jill has bound the cat-like Graymalk. We don't know much about the latter, so could be a passer like Snuff. Morris and McNab have bound the owl-like Nightwind. Again, we don't know much, so another passer, possibly. They're a pair, so either Nightwind is bound to just one of them, with the other helping, or perhaps they should be viewed as a single sorcerer entity, although that doesn't seem like a baseline game option. "Mad monk" Rastov has bound the snake-like Quicklime. The latter lives in the former's belly, so might be a Parasite. We also learn that Jack banters jovially with the Thing in the Circle, so that it communicates with at least one sorcerer, not just with Snuff, and that Jack is able to best it in wits, so its Will isn't overwhelming to him.

As far as sorcery and setting are concerned, we are told Jack needing to gather ingredients by their type and context, and that timing is critical for his work. We see a dog and a cat conversing intelligently and amicably - it's not clear yet whether this is because they are both demons, or whether it's a standard setting conceit, but neither of them is surprised by this communication, and we already have seen that Snuff can speak to regular dogs, so I'm leaning towards it. 

Jack and Snuff were able to walk far and reach a field with a particular root in it with no special incident, suggesting a rural area, or bordering such. No modern technology mentioned yet. Usage of mummy's dust might indicate the 19th Century and its Egyptomania in the Anglophone world, in which this takes place because it's been established that they are outside London, but that could be a strictly sorcerous detail.

Sorcerers and Demons

• Jack - Binder of Snuff, a wand, and a big knife, as well as a Container of several Things. Described as cursed and having to do much of his work at night - perhaps his Price has to do with insomnia?
• "Crazy" Jill - Binder of Graymalk
• Morris and McNab - A pair of sorcerers or possibly effectively a single one, one or both Binders of Nightwind
• "Mad monk" Rastov - Binder of Quicklime
• Snuff - a Passer whose Cover is a watchdog. High Will. Possible abilities: Command: dogs, Hold, Perception: heightened senses, Special Damage: claws and fangs.
• Thing in the Circle - a Passer of high Will, although not as high as either Jack or Snuff, communicative. Possible abilities: Shapeshift: general or numerous
• Graymalk - a Passer whose Cover is a cat. Possible abilities: Cloak
• Nightwind - a Passer whose Cover is an owl. Possible abilities: Special Damage.
• Quicklime - a Parasite living in the gut. Possible abilities: Cover: Snake, Mark, Special Damage.

Sorcery and Setting

• Sorcery seems to involve material ingredients taken in specific contexts. Timing is of the essence. Parts of mummies, demons, and animals - or, possibly, of demons in animal form - are also important.
• Setting is near London, somewhat rural, possibly 19th Century. Animals able to talk to each other.

Through Sorcerer's eyes - Oct 1, in which we meet the Things

Part of a series analyzing Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October through Sorcerer.

Starts here.

October 1

Today we follow Snuff on the rounds he alluded to in the previous chapter. We find that the Thing in the Circle can change shapes, although it doesn't have the scent right to fool Snuff - so we would add Perception: heightened smell, or possibly just generally heightened mundane senses to his repertoire to supersede sight from the Introduction. It verbally expresses its frustration. The Things in the Mirror actually seem to be spread through a few mirrors, and have some "space" to move in, away from Snuff when he shows his teeth. The Thing in the Steamer Trunk pounds on the sides, is aware when Snuff comes around, and takes a bit of growling on Snuff's part to quiet down. Finally, the Thing in the Wardrobe is scratching the sides, and tries to bargain with Snuff. It, like the Thing in the Circle, wants to be free, and offers to bring Snuff big, juicy bones with meat on them. We could surmise that its Need or Desire have to do with killing living beings, but it's not entirely clear.

Overall, Snuff's intimidation might come down to high Will rather than any particular power. In the Introduction he says he's able to handle each of them separately, but doesn't know what he'd do if they came together - maybe he simply has enouch Will that he's confident of success against each one's opposing Will separately, but not if they joined forces.

The annotated game book suggests that Contain can have a lot of variations, and it is automatic in the way it works - keeping a demon in place and preventing it from dissipating on account of unmet Need - until the demon attempts to break it. The ritual table suggests that it's the demon's Power that tests it directly, but we see demons attempting subterfuge, persuasion, and bargaining, which suggest Will, and physical prowess, which suggests Stamina. The Will seems to be getting an outside entity to breach the Contain rather than working against it directly, but the Stamina is a bit more puzzling, although perhaps it's inherently fruitless, and the demons psyching themselves up to use their Power.

As for the Things: the Thing in the Circle might be a Passer by default. The fact that it changes into several shapes suggests either many instances of the Shapeshift ability, or a more generalized version. It doesn't get the smell right, suggesting sensory imperfection might be its Telltale. It does communicate with Snuff. Since it is trying to negotiate, it might have high Will. We don't learn much about the Things in the Mirror or Mirrors, other than that they gibber and slither around in "there". It might be too early to decide what type they are. Nor do we learn much about the Thing in the Steamer Trunk other than that it has some physical presence, so potentially high Stamina. Similarly for the Thing in the Wardrobe, although it describes a lock and a key, which might be the actual form of the containment. It does try its limits physically by scratching. High Will, again, might be indicated. Since the containment is also physical, high Stamina is also possible.

Sorcerers and Demons

• Snuff - a Passer whose Cover is a watchdog. High Will. Possible abilities: Command: dogs, Hold, Perception: heightened senses, Special Damage: claws and fangs.
• Thing in the Circle - a Passer of high Will, communicative. Possible abilities: Shapeshift: general or numerous
• Things in the Mirror - Unknown. Not communicating so far.
• Thing in the Steamer Trunk - High Stamina. Not communicating so far.
• Thing in the Wardrobe - High Stamina and Will, communicative.

Sorcery and Setting

• Details of containment depend on the demon. Breaking out of a Contain focus might be a combination of Stamina and Power, unlike with the default expectations in the game book. Containments can involve symbols, objects, and physical restraint.

Through Sorcerer's eyes - A Night in the Lonesome October

I've run into writer's block trying to summarize my experience writing and running a Sorcerer one-shot set in Troy, New York, loosely inspired by Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October. And wouldn't you know it, it's October already, which is time for me to spend about the whole month reading the book chapter by chapter, as, except for the introduction, they are all numbered by the days in the month.

So instead of continuing to procrastinate on my previous assignment, I'm going to try and analyze the story through a Sorcerer lens. This should explain why I thought this would be a good system in which to create a scenario inspired by the story. Hopefully I can do this once a day from October 1st to November 1st, but singly or in batches, I will go chapter by chapter, applying the structure and details of Sorcerer to the various entities and situations introduced. Doing so piecemeal should make for easier going. Spoilers abound!

Introduction

Strictly speaking, "A Night in the Lonesome October" is the title here, but it is the only chapter not associated with a day of the month, and acts to introduce us to the first-person protagonist, Snuff.

Snuff is an intelligent watchdog who works for Jack, who is cursed, and has to do bad things at night to avert worse things. Snuff keeps watch when Jack's on his business, and fetches him his wand and a knife with old writing on it when necessary - he knows when that is. Snuff used to be something else, but was summoned into watchdog form, which he likes. He and Jack keep certain "Things": one in a circle, one in a wardrobe, one in a steamer trunk, and an assortment in a mirror. Snuff can help block them from escaping, and intimidates mundane dogs, but can converse with the latter when he wants to.

In Sorcerer terms, Jack is a sorcerer, and his sorcery involves abhorrent actions performed in secret, which is the game's baseline. In this chapter we explicitly see him going into a graveyard and digging for some necessary ingredients, while Snuff makes sure the old guard dog doesn't raise the alarm. Since Jack is using his powers to avert great evil, he might have a reasonable amount of Humanity, even though he has Bound at least three demons: Snuff himself, a Passer; and the wand and dagger, presumably Objects. The Things that they keep suggest Contained demons - that would not require a Humanity check, and is a way of allowing a demon to remain manifest without having its Need supplied. However, that does mean that Jack does not have any control over them beyond keeping them in their containers, nor does he benefit from their powers.

That Snuff knows when to fetch Jack his Objects could be rationalized as an implementation of the game text's insistence that Object demons can move and communicate with their Binder - Jack unconsciously communicates to the wand or knife that they are needed, they communicate this to Snuff, and Snuff physically brings them to him.

Snuff talking to mundane dogs might just be a setting conceit. There are no abilities that correspond to this. Being able to boss them around may be an ability, though, possibly Command: dogs, as is whatever allows him to keep the Contained demons in check if they manage to break through their containers, possibly Psychic Force. Since he is a dog, he can probably bite and scratch, and he keeps talking about watching, so Perception: heightened sight is likely. It is too early to speak of his Need or Desire, although he clearly takes his job of watching and knowing very seriously.

Sorcerers and Demons

• Jack - Binder of Snuff, a wand, and a big knife, as well as a Container of several Things. Described as cursed and having to do much of his work at night - perhaps his Price has to do with insomnia?
• Snuff - a Passer whose Cover is a watchdog. Possible powers: Command: dogs, Hold, Perception: heightened sight, Psychic Force, Special Damage: claws and fangs.
• Wand - an Object demon
• Big Knife with Old Writing on the Side - an Object demon
• Demons Contained by Jack, none of which we know much about at this point
• Thing in the Circle
• Thing in the Wardrobe
• Thing in the Steamer Trunk
• Things in the Mirror

Sorcery and Setting

• Sorcery here seems to involve cadaver-sourced ingredients, magical and physical containment, and demons as foul creatures, with Snuff as an exception, although he is the narrator, so he might be unreliable. It is kept secret from society at large.
• The setting is near London, in the fog. The graveyard in this chapter is guarded by a dog, so it can't be too modern, what with no electronic surveillance. Dogs being able to talk to each other might be part of the setting as well.

Problems with Blades in the Dark

I've written quite a few play-fueled posts about Blades in the Dark, indexed here. I enjoyed the experience of running a one-shot, followed by an open table campaign lasting several weeks, but also felt extremely worn out after each session, and found myself dreading the next. At first I thought it was just down to general nerves, but this segment from a video of a conversation with Ron Edwards (of The Forge fame/infamy), titled "Constraints for consequential play" (link should start at 7:49), diagnosed a shortcoming of the system that really corresponded with my experience. I don't necessarily agree with the entirety of his views or characterization, but the main thrust feels right.

A good metaphor to extract from the video is an imagined situation where you are playing a ballgame, like soccer or basketball, and are thrown the ball, only to have it immediately empty out, so you have to fill it up again before you can continue. A lot is made of the explicit negotiation process whenever players want their characters to do anything challenging in Blades, but even once Position and Effect have been agreed upon, and an Action Rating roll is made, I've felt the same thing that Pawel bring up in the video, that I have to exercise my mind to improvise something that will implement the expected outcomes, both good and bad. Even if I have enough to work with from what has already been established, there is such a variety, from Heat, going through starting clocks, ending clocks, to actual Harm, that the game doesn't really force you to contend with what's happening now in a way that just flows into the next step without a lot of work by the gamemaster. And that's before you bring in Resistance rolls, which can downright eliminate Consequences, or mitigate them significantly.

One way I can see to fix this could be to agree in advance on certain constraints on the possible Consequences. For example, require that adversarial clocks are all introduced on Score start, and then the Consequences have to include Harm when using physical Action Ratings, in addition to potential contributions to clocks. There's discussion in the Blades book about the level of lethality that results from this kind of status quo establishing itself naturally through play, but I think setting it up in advance is a better way to address this issue. This is especially true in the context of an open table, where there isn't a consistent group to crystalize into any particular style. Contrast this with other aspects of the game which don't require this - the out-of-Score state of the PCs, Crew, NPCs, Factions, and relations between them in the world is easy to represent mechanically, as well as reassess at start of play, even with no consistent game group.

Moving beyond the context Edwards brought up, while keeping his metaphor, as I noted in my previous Blades post, another place where I felt a lack of constraints or structure is Free Play. The game book suggests that it should naturally lead towards a Score plan and an engagement roll, but in my experience, again, it requires that type of reinflation of the ball. It might be better to insist that if the players do not come up with a Score for their characters, hostile factions will act against them and they will have to react to this. Which to me suggests that a structure missing from the game is the reverse Score, namely, having the PCs have to deal with NPCs coming to cause them trouble, steal things from them, or what have you, with an appropriate adjustment to the subsequent Downtime phase.

Finally, the overabundance of variety also shows itself in the setting of Doskvol and the Shattered Isles, that the game mechanics are strongly tied to. For me, at least, it's too busy. Post-apocalypse, ghosts, crime, corruption, cults, all tied to action ratings. I understand that the fact that killing is such a big, supernatural, immediate deal (because each death is signaled by a gong, resulting in a crow coming to the scene of the crime with scary Spirit Wardens in tow) is important for forcing certain constraints on character actions, a vital counterweight to the baseline almost super-powerful things they can pull off in the fiction, but the way it's done is just too contrived for me. This is an aspect I'm not sure can be fixed without hacking things significantly, or starting from a different Forged in the Dark game entirely.

None of this is insurmountable - but I have so many other, different systems to learn, and my own adventure ideas to develop, that I will probably not be pursuing this further in the near future. Do get in touch if you have come up with solutions to these problems, or if you're inspired to test something I've suggested.

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.