Yudhishthira’s Dice

Genres are mental models. Mental models let you know how to do something, and what to do with it when it goes wrong. I’ve been over this to the point that most of you want me to stop talking now and get to the point of this post.

Many “trad” games (whatever that means) have mental models that are not fully given to you by the book. They rely on you to come up with the mental model, or in most cases to already have a mental model that you use to structure play. This is why rule 0, as they don’t give you a mental model they need to give you a way to get things that don’t fit with your mental model. What works and supports you keep, what doesn’t you reject, and the rest is taken up by your mental model.

When a group does this well it can work beautifully, because they have built a joint mode of communication and developed gestalt ways of playing together that combine to form something personal to the group. Its drawbacks are that it can lead to naive views of what makes RPGs work and not work — like Ron’s “bucket seats” example where surface items are mistaken for being the substantive matters. It also pretty much keeps the fun from being easily portable, and doesn’t really let the game challenge the existing modes of play or introduce anything radically new and different at a structural level.

Many Indie games try to give a game that constructs a mental model, so that when you follow the rules in the book the model gets built and reinforced by exact play. This is reinforced by the common genres of GNS that many Forge style Indie games are built around. By combining the rules of the game and the mental model of the G the N and the S, you get games that give a complete and coherent set of mental models in a short time and portable format. The drawbacks of this are that it can lead to railroading by design, difficulties in playing for those who don’t already understand the model to some degree (why my first Sorcerer game blew), and the possibility that too tight of a construction can lead to something that will never be as personal to the group playing as if they had constructed it themselves. After all, if your model is portable, then it isn’t your model.

Those problems together can also cause some issues with assumption, and sometimes make it too easy to assume that because we’re all playing a tightly designed game, we don’t have further individualization to do. So if we’re all playing Dogs we’re all playing the same game, right, because it comes with its own genre? Wrong. We’re playing closer to the same game, but we’re still not playing the same. Because the post before showed that each group also has individual nuances that make up part of their individual play styles. So even highly modeled games will still vary from group to group, and this should not only be expected but encouraged. (Notably Sorcerer really doesn’t work well if you don’t do this with your group.)

I think its worth noting that this “indie” vs. “trad” division is also a bit bullshit. For example, various versions of D&D have given very strong mental models. Most of them were in the “game” aspect of D&D. We know how to play boardgames and many D&Ders knew how to play mini’s wargames, and those models mapped over. They were then supported by the strong implicit model of D&D (kill and take stuff) to make strong, functional play that was fairly intuitive to grasp. It was only when story got added into that, without obvious mental models of how to get to it, that things got confused. So even though D&D is the most “Trad” of “Trad” games it hasn’t always fallen into the “assumed pre-existing mental model” trend, and when it has the editions and supplements which did so often found cult popularity without ever becoming core settings.

So, what we need are ways to communicate our genres, not so they can be slavishly copied whole cloth (is my game Nar enough for Vincent?), but so that they can be used as basis for both further exploration, and also for mutual understanding of different genres and for ways for groups to learn to play together and with new people. For a good article on that, I’d recommend Cloisters of Gamers.