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.

On no longer running D&D 5e

Note: this translates and expands upon a clarification I made for a post on a Hebrew role-playing game Facebook group, where I asked about people's experiences with converting a campaign to a different system.

Let me explain why, if I do decide to add new arcs to the campaign which I finished in February, I would want to do so in a system that is not Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.

On the one hand, I don't feel that the things that are dominant in D&D 5E were meaningful for the campaign developments which interested me, and hopefully, the players as well. The character journey from slightly superhuman to very superhuman, which is apparent even in the range that we played, levels 1 to 5, simply wasn't very connected to them.

On the other hand, I felt the absence of tools that I have seen in other systems:

• The existence of multiple groups using different, mutually unintelligible languages, was very important, and D&D has very facile support for this aspect of play - as opposed to, say, RuneQuest Classic, which has a dedicated and yet seemingly well-integrated system for languages as skills, including acquisition, graded levels of proficiency, distinctions between speech and literacy, and tools for addressing communication between characters with different levels of fluency. I've previously written my early impressions of RQC, and a more detailed discussion of using languages in RPGs.
• Especially towards the end of the campaign, there was a lot of mass combat. While I was eventually able to run an experience that was reasonably engaging using the rules of D&D 5E, it would have been much nicer to work with a system that had better support for it. For example, I had an excellent time playtesting Ahadi, Basheer Ghouse's upcoming role-playing wargame, where you play officers of a certain rank in the Mughal Empire. It blends role-playing political power plays, managing interesting and sometimes risky travel and logistics, and conducting tactical mass warfare in a very entertaining and cohesive fashion. Such a breath of fresh air after attempting to do similar things in D&D.
• D&D 5E's method for handling social and diplomatic challenges is basically unusable, and I would much prefer to have a system with better social mechanisms, which also tie in better to character progression.
• This feeds into a bigger issue: the lack of ways of measuring character advancement by level of influence or political power, or by increase in knowledge, without them becoming superheroic in more personal, direct ways. The main numerical measure of progress in D&D 5E is the proficiency bonus, which gets added to the mundane and magical attack modifiers, to the target numbers when forcing enemies to roll saving throws, and to the use of skills and tools. It ends up flattening out progression into combat prowess, with everything else being subsidiary.

I was able to use a combination of reinterpretation, homebrew, and dungeon master fiat to work around these issues in the campaign to its conclusion. Furthermore, I am aware that there are homebrew rules, frequently cheap or even free, which address a few of them. But they would turn the game into something entirely different, and I would be spending more time fitting them all together than running and enjoying the campaign itself. And since I don't really like the core of this system anyway, I would much rather start somewhere else.

Mid-March 2021 Updates and work in progress

I've been working on a couple of potential articles for the blog. Unfortunately, none of them is ready to be posted yet. So I figured I'd give you all a rough idea of what's on my mind, and some general updates that you might be interested in. Can't promise all of these will be published, although if you find any of them interesting, do let me know - maybe that'll motivate me to finish them faster!

My first campaign is over

I concluded my first campaign last month. It started in spring 2019, so it ran for about a year and a half. The system was Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. I created my own setting, although the premise was to build it around several adventures from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. It was definitely a trip. I learned a lot about my proclivities, I experimented with a lot of methods and structures, and came to some interesting conclusions. There are several posts related to it in various states of writing:

Campaign summary

This being my first campaign, I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do, and I made significant changes to the material I adapted, some of which I am happy with, some not so much. It may well be useful to provide a summary as a record and a set of tips for people who might be interested in doing something similar in future. I also have at least one original campaign concept I might be able to extract from it into its own product, so I'll have to see how much exactly to share.

Why I don't want to continue it in D&D 5E

The campaign ended with the main pressing issue concluded, which made it a good stopping point. Nevertheless, we all feel like there's a lot more potential to this world and to the conflicts we established within it. Unfortunately, one of the things I learned while running it was that I don't want to run D&D 5E anymore. I have a post on the subject I formulated when asking an Israeli forum about the feasibility of moving a campaign to a different system, which I can translate to English. I think it'll be more than mere D&D-bashing. (Update: here's the post!)

The D&D 5E character sheet game

I've done a bit of analytical, theoretical, even design work with the character sheet game framework. However, one glaring gap is that I have yet to apply it at length to an existing role-playing game system. Since I've played 5E and have run a whole campaign in it, and since it's very well-known, it makes for a good candidate. Reading and taking notes is a bit of a slog so far, but I hope to finish it at some point. My conclusions will probably tie into why I don't want to continue running it.

Other works in progress

In addition to items related to my recently concluded campaign, here are other things in various stages of completion:

Diceless constructive alienation

I've been active in playtesting and examining an upcoming diceless RPG, Guy Sclanders` Bounty Hunter. This has gotten me thinking about how and whether it's possible to use constructive alienation when you don't have an outside source of randomness. How do you position yourself with the players to enjoy the structure you've built, when there are no points in which the decision depends on a result that none of you can predict? How do you, as a gamemaster, work against your own biases, when there is no way to replace your arbitrary decisions with samples from a predesigned distribution? I don't have an answer yet, so this remains a draft. I've consequently gotten in touch with a group that plays a more established diceless RPG, Amber Diceless, and have started reading its rulebook, so maybe that will lead me to some insights.

More virtual reality in media

I've previously discussed my talks about virtual reality as exists in our world and in fiction. Since those talks, I've had the opportunity to watch two TV series which have featured virtual reality as a central premise: The Prisoner and The Good Place. Without spoiling too much, the former involves an artificial world built and peopled around the protagonist to get him to divulge some information, while the latter has a world constructed to provide the very best people their perfectly tailored afterlife. I have fragments of thoughts about them both, but neither have crystalized into something publishable here, yet.

Historical immersion

I've been watching Peaky Blinders as a way of getting some genre concepts for Blades in the Dark. One thing I noticed is the use of a modern soundtrack for themes and leitmotif, to immerse the audience emotionally in what's going on, even though the tracks are anachronistic to early 20th Century Birmingham. There's something to be said about a contrast between realism and immersion, but I haven't quite figured it out yet.

And that's it! Hopefully I'll have a fully-fledge post for you soon.

Fooled by alignment

Let's talk about alignment charts. Not just that of characters in Dungeons & Dragons -  with evil vs. good on one axis, chaos vs. law on the other - but also the types of role-playing games according to Blacow - role-playing vs. wargaming over power-gaming vs. story-telling - and the political compass in politics - authoritarian vs. libertarian over left vs. right.

There's a sense of descriptive power to them, isn't there? You're free, even more free than you would have been had you been trying to line things up on a spectrum. You can fit a lot of personalities, games, and political positions on a flat piece of paper, and maybe even capture the relations between them. But that's not all that happens. Once people accept these alignment charts, they start becoming normative. People want to stand out, so they start defining themselves based on limited combinations of the extremes, and instead of having a whole flat surface, you end up with a discrete set of possibilities. For character alignment, there are at most nine; when the Blacow typology for role-playing games came out, people soon pigeonholed themselves, as well as the games they enjoyed or wanted to design, by the extremes on the two axes - so four types of games and gamers were born. The political compass, at least when it originally came out in the 1990s, was presented online by American libertarians, as a way of explaining and justifying their singular position. What happened to the freedom, the explanatory power of two whole space dimensions? Gone. Who is going to take the time to explain that their character is actually 60% Chaotic 40% Lawful, and 80% Bad 20% Good? What do those details even signify? The original breadth of ethics or games or politics is gone, and we're left with caricatures.

And that's before we start criticizing the frameworks themselves. Are role-playing and wargaming actually at odds, or, as I argued in a previous post (where roll-playing can easily be a stand-in for wargaming), independent player interests, that can be brought together with the proper design? What if a game is decidedly detrimental to both power-gaming and story-telling, say by enforcing strict inter-character balance using mechanics that deny the possibility of creating a consistent story? It could either fail to do these things out of bad design, or it could benefit a different agenda.

With D&D character alignments, we run into different problems: who is good to everyone, or bad to everyone? Is lying to protect a friend good or bad? It's probably a difficult moral question, not easily resolved by the alignment chart. Is a loyal underling of a crime syndicate lawful for keeping their word, or chaotic for undermining the rule of law? Is an informer who keeps ratting out members of their corrupt organization lawful for upholding the rule of law, or chaotic for undermining this organization? Why are these interesting questions? We already have the drama, the tension, the focus of difficult decision-making, in the description of the person's connections to the people and society around them, the conflict between the various values they hold. Since we're already going to be pushed into the extremes, let's just accept the combinatorial explosion and revel in it. 

Many games dispense with alignment. Fate has its aspect system; most Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games describe bonds and character weaknesses explicitly, rather than trying to throw them on a two-dimensional chart; even old-school RuneQuest has you align yourself with or against several cults and guilds, groups in the world that have complicated and dynamic relations with each other, and that are not always mutually exclusive.

Alignment in its many forms is very compelling - too compelling. It becomes the subject instead of helping understand it. I think it's long past time to let it go.

Game structure oracle

Text parser adventure games, usually called interactive fiction, are video games which present you with the state of the virtual world, and expect you to type in commands which change this state, usually actions of a character which you play. Zork (playable online here) was a famous series of completely text-based parser adventure games, where the state was also presented as text. The early Quest games from Sierra (King's Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory, etc), while providing information in both textual and graphic form, still required you to type commands in.

Eventually most of these series culminated in games with more graphical interfaces, resulting in the genre of point and click adventure games, but there is a small community of designers who still create fully textual parser games, often using the Inform language, which is ultimately based on the language used to design the old Zork games and other Infocom interactive fictions. One of the skills you had to develop as a seasoned text parser gamer was expressing what you wanted in a way the parser would understand: which nouns must be acted upon by which verbs, based on possibilities gleaned from the textual descriptions, or from knowledge of the system itself, such as its inventory and combat features.

As a thought experiment, suppose that instead of developing these skills yourself, you had a professional parser gamer working for you: someone who knew exactly how to navigate the game and understand its description, who might even be able to peek at the video game's code or assets directly, although they'd only do so to make sure they were answering your questions correctly, rather than to give you information you shouldn't have. This person would take your descriptions of what you wanted your character to do in the virtual world, and translate them into commands that the mundane parser would be able to use; they'd then describe the new state of the world to you, using the result provided by the parser game. This person is starting to sound a little bit like a gamemaster, in the role of judge or referee, except that they wouldn't be enforcing rules, so much as translating back and forth between you, the player, and the parser game, which does the actual enforcement.

This professional parser interpreter would be acting as an oracle for the text parser adventure game. An oracle in this sense is the term used in theoretical computer science for a kind of black box which can be asked questions to which it provides answers, in ways that the questioning algorithm's designer does not have to understand. In this case, the parser sends the description of the current state to the professional parser gamer, who will eventually come back with instructions the parser can understand and act upon.

When we look at role-playing game structures like the hexcrawl, or the node-based scenario, their systems, taken at face value, could be implemented in software. You could write an Inform program to provide the backing to a hexcrawl, once you've populated it; you could change it whenever you added or removed anything. And then your job as a GM while running the game could move towards being an oracle for the program, and something role-playing-like would occur between you and the player, even if you don't go beyond that to riffing or improvising at the edges. This is an extreme version of constructive alienation, an almost complete distillation of all creative thought into the process of designing and implementing the external structure and its procedures, and then supporting the player in engaging with it as a mere interpreter.

If you limit yourself to being a game structure oracle GM, there are several ways in which you can improve. First of all, the better programmed or designed your game structures are, the more variety the players will encounter as they engage with them, and the less you will be pressured to improvise. This will make you a better systems designer - or adapter, if you decide to use an existing adventure module in this way. In fact, it may well make it easier for you to create an adventure for someone else to use - you could honestly provide them with an interesting experience to run for their players, without forcing them to improvise to cover gaps you might've otherwise left.

Another thing you can get better at is translating player intent into rules usage. If you want to better support the implied character sheet game of the RPG your system runs on, this can be very beneficial. Alternatively, you might come into conflict with player knowledge of the CSG if you're trying to hide the details from the players to improve immersion. There's a balance that's worth striking.

Since the system is limited, and we're excluding the possibility of improvisation or ad-hoc rulings, another thing you might have to get used to doing is either diplomatically saying no, rationalizing why an unsupported action won't work, or preemptively guiding the players to consider choices that are supported by the system. The latter can be done by making sure to emphasize the systematically relevant features of the environment when you're describing its state. In extreme cases, you'd be making sure that even if the system itself effectively requires pixel hunting, the players aren't required to perform it.

As I said when I was discussing the CSG, this limit of GMing isn't in line with my natural inclinations. I am far likelier to improvise, to make rulings in the moment, to run with what the players give me directly. The purpose of this exercise is to challenge myself to improve in the aspects of GMing that do not come naturally to me; hopefully, this will lead me to be more well-rounded.