Yudhishthira’s Dice

Neel Krishnaswami said, once upon a time in a post I cannot now find, that an RPG is a game where the fiction is part of the rules. I thought it was a very smart statement indeed.

The thing this says to me is that when you’re playing an RPG (and thus when you’re thinking about designing play) options are not limited to (one might even suggest are not always primarily located) in the mechanics, rules, and dice. The positioning of a character in the fiction, control over elements of the fictional world, and how and when and where characters come on and off screen are all powerful tools not just for telling a story, but for playing tactically in a game.

Here’s an example from a recent discussion about a Dog’s game by John (jenskot):

Vincent and I played Dogs in the Vineyard. I played this pissed off kid who had daddy issues. My initiation conflict was, “Do I shoot my dad………. for a second time?” I had a chip on my shoulder for having a dead beat drunk of a father.

Later, some crazy kid is running around causing all forms of un-heavenly chaos. I flip out and confront the kid’s mom ready to beat her down in a conflict over me chastising her for raising such an awful boy. Vincent sees my raise with the mom saying, “I had to raise him all alone without a father.” Holy crap! He hit my buttons perfectly with narration and even though I was kicking ass mechanically I had to give on the conflict.

It also isn’t just about tactical play. Its about ongoing play and continuity and narrative authority and all the rest. As Ron (the Devil Himself) Edwards recently said about Sorcerer:

As I keep saying, and which people only really understand once they’ve been through a few games, Sorcerer resolution and narration is very contingent on things that were narrated or established earlier in play - often which were not presented with any intention of being so important later. That’s the key concept, I think, that keeps judgments about “is intensive care available” away from GM fiat. That question should not be answered by whether the GM suddenly invents a team of paramedics who dash in from off-screen; it should instead be answered by checking around all the details and circumstances of that particular location in the setting. Given all that, is intensive care available? That question can usually be answered without controversy.

Now, I don’t know if Ron would say that the fiction is the important part of the rules there. But when I read it, that certainly is what I think. The things that we’ve made together, the fiction, is the binding rule that keeps these things together, that positions them and determines what is going to happen. We do not, at that point in Sorcerer, go to dice to see who has the right to narrate about intensive care — because it is about the fiction we’ve all created together, and not narration rights determined by dice.

Furthermore this means that when you’re playing an RPG it isn’t always an issue of if fiction or mechanics lead or follow. Most of the time there is going to be a more subtle interplay, and I have a feeling we miss a lot of it. Big chunky conch-passing rules with stakes resolution often make it seem like what is going on is simple, but even in those games I don’t think it actually is.

Now, for me and my group a strong fictional statement has as much weight as something coming from the mechanics, even in games where mechanics lead the fiction. And in games where it doesn’t, I either have to change gears about what it is I’m doing (like I start thinking of the game as a board game without a board, and then can have a lot of fun), or I get bored and annoyed. Which, I think, is one of my growing discontents with games whose rules mostly revolve around who gets narration rights. I don’t find narrations rights and simple stakes resolution interesting — I want something that spins in and around the fiction, something that pushes fictional statements forward rather than relegating them to the role of “mere color.”

Now, this can all be tricky, especially as there often isn’t one fiction in an RPG. Instead there is a lot of stuff from a lot of different points of view, all of which lays in and around each other in different layers. As the brilliant Emily Care-Boss recently said:

“Continuity is short-hand for a large, un-manageable piece of shared, vaguely overlapping mass of experiences interpreted as a narrative.”

So you know what I like? Things that help us keep all those pieces together, that help us develop a narrative and agree about it in some part. The trick about that is that those things don’t have to be mechanics and dice. They can also be lists and guidelines. For example, In A Wicked Age doesn’t tell have the dice tell you when endgame is going to happen (in contrast to, say, My Life With Master), but it does have a list of things that will indicate to you that a chapter is over. And that list, shock and surprise, mostly says “when the fiction tells you its over, and here are how to recognize the signs.” Which is also the kind of thing I was doing with my “A Way To Structure a Narrative Game” post — things about watching the fiction without having to have it mechanically enforced.

And no, it doesn’t have to be dice free or mechanics free, it just has to have some cognizance of how it is that it is working with the fiction. Sorcerer and Trollbabe and In A Wicked Age all do this in different ways, as does Spirit of the Century (in a whole different paradigm) and Nobilis (in yet another paradigm). I don’t think its an accident that all of those games are hot in my brain right now.

P.S. Jonathan Walton just tipped me to Sweet Agatha by Kevin Allen jr. I’m not sure what I think about it yet, but I do have to say that I enjoy his exploration. In some ways I think he may be headed off in a direction almost the opposite of what I’m talking about here and at the same time opposite to what a lot of mechanically conditioned games are doing. Diversity is wicked cool.

So I’m going to start doing some game reviews. I’m going to start with Dogs.

I’m doing Dogs first for several reasons. First, I’ve now been playing the game for years and have played dozens of sessions with dozens of different people, and have talked with a lot more people about the game. I feel I have a good handle on what the game does, how it does it, and what the strengths and weaknesses of the game are. I feel that I can really review the game critically and honestly, and have a good chance of being accurate and possibly even insightful in what I say.

Second, its well known that I love Dogs. I’ve repeatedly gushed and raved about it, and so everyone knows about where I stand on it. I think it is a very strong game, and I want to talk about why that is in detailed terms — sort of creating a bar for discussion. However, I also don’t think it is a perfect game, and there are some issues with it that I will be talking about. This too is a bar for discussion.

Which leads to the third reason: there are many ways in which the future reviews are going to build off of the Dog’s review. I won’t just be reviewing games in isolation, I will be comparing them to each other and talking about how they reflect, progress, or assume upon conventions and paradigms of game design. This is because, in my not humble opinion, reviews should be more that “do/do not buy” guides or lists of one liners and snark designed to show how clever the reviewer is or how in with the crowd and down with the hotness they are. Good reviews should help form a community of discourse that can help consumers find the right material, but also to help push and spur the community and designers. They should also give enough material for consumers to decide on their own about a game, rather than looking to the numerical score so as to rely on the judgment of others as to the report card grade of a game.

I have to admit I’ve been spurred in this by several recent articles about book reviews and their import. From Salman Rushdie talking about the importance of book reviews with Stephen Colbert to my personal reflections about Walter Pater, to opinion pieces about what’s gone wrong with reviews, there has been much entering my mind of late about the way that reviews and criticism, when done right, are actually constructive and promoting of a community. I do not think that the majority of RPG reviews in the past have come up to that level. Some have, and there are a small handful of people whose work I will be using as inspiration, but looking back on my own work in reviews in the past I’m disappointed. I want to do something better. Maybe I fall on my face, maybe not.

So… first: Dogs. After that I’ll try to do one or two a month. Beast Hunters and Polaris will probably be the next couple, with TSOY and Trollbabe coming close after.

Recently in a thread on Knife Fight, I said:

As we move back and forth between games where you play a character, games where you tell a story through a character, games where you tell a story based around a character, and games where you tell a story, we’re going to have to work out more advanced methods of knowing not just where and when we can step in, but where and when we should. I think we’re still in the early stages of that, and there is a lot of work left to do there.

I think this is something worth considering at multiple stages of game.

If you are designing a game you need to let your audience know how to play it. We all know this, right? Okay, so if you are marketing a game that is about telling a story without focal characters to the existing market of RPG players who are used to playing a character, you need to have some specific guidance for them (system based as well as explanations) as to what that means. Some games already do this to greater and lesser degrees — for example, its hard to read Universalis and not know that a game of it is inherently going to be different than a traditional game of Vampire. The very way the game is set up, talks about character and focus, and shows examples of play all say “this is not about playing a character, it is about telling a story.”

If you are GMing a game with different assumptions than your group normally uses, you might want to talk to the other people about what to expect about the game play. I don’t mean long painful conversations, but a short “in this game you aren’t playing a character as much as you are telling a story through your character” talk is probably not out of order the first time you’re playing a new game or a new style of game. Forewarned is fore armed, after all.

I’ve actually had an AP experience on that note that was shockingly revealing to me. I have a friend that is an awesome RPer. He’s hardcore and deft in his portrayal of character, and has recently been making strides in thinking about story in RPGs with startling speed. But there were occasional bumps in the road. So one night we played My Life With Master, and I explained it as a story game about the fall of a master being dethroned by his servants, and oh by the way you play the servants. I didn’t even do this consciously, I was just thinking in those terms that night. But because I described it to this player as something other than “an RPG where you play a character” in a direct fashion, that night he came instantly and consistently to address of premise and worked harder at making the story work than making his character work. (The character still worked out awesomely well, btw.)

Now, to be honest, games on the far ends of the spectrum are probably the easiest to explain. If you are telling a story and don’t even have characters that you’re playing — or all share the same character (City of Birds?) — then it’s pretty easy to differentiate from an immersionist RPG in which the whole point is to be in one character and who cares about story. Its the games that do the lines in between, the ones that are in blurrier boundaries of telling a story through a character and telling a story based around a character, that you need to pay particularly sharp attention.

How is this game going to deal with it when the character is forced to do something the player of that character would not want to happen? If it is a physical action or failure? What if it is an emotional response, such as being forced by a dice roll to say that this character now loves someone that they hated five minutes ago in such a way that the player can’t even understand why it happened?

Its worth thinking about this kind of thing because for a lot of established players, play is something they do largely by instinct, precedent, and an many unexamined techniques and assumptions about “this is how you play an RPG.” (And no, I’m not talking about Forgites vs. non or any such thing. Everyone I’ve ever played with does this to some degree. I know I do it a lot.) So if you are doing something with a game that might require a different stance, it helps a lot in getting over the rough bumps if you set your game up to obviously follow a different stance. Let people know up front that they shouldn’t be trying to tell a story, or they shouldn’t be trying to control their characters emotions, or whatever specifics are needed to smooth the road for the kind of play you want your game to have.

And, of course, as a player in a game it behooves us to pay attention to what we are being told about the game and adjust our play as much as possible to fit with what is going on. Just because the game is asking something different of us doesn’t mean it is wrong, but it may mean that we need to change how we approach it. (Even if that change is not playing that game anymore.)

Of course, that requires that you know what kind of play you want your game to have, which is probably why its so damn hard.

Rereading the Simple Art of Murder, a piece that says very little I find useful about detective fiction but much I find useful about the criticism of detective fiction, I came upon this quote, which says quite a bit about roleplaying:

As for “literature of expression” and “literature of escape” — this is critics’ jargon, a use of abstract words as if they had absolute meanings. Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page: the quality of the the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings. It is one of the things that distinguishes them from the three-toed sloth: he apparently — one can never be quite sure — is perfectly content hanging upside down on a branch, not even reading Walter Lippmann. I hold no particular brief for the the detctive story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, of The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.

So now the question of what women would like to see on covers has spread. It’s started a meme. That meme has further spread to all sorts of places.

What I like is that many of the replies so far have been about videogames rather than TT RPGs. It reminds me there is a bigger world out there than the little corner I normally write in, and that there are ever so many more things under the sun than I think of in the course of a standard day.

There has also been a small explosion of other feminist writings about sex, gender representation, and selling with sex, that I’ve been happy to see. Even the ones that disagree with me. This is one of those things that only gets better with talking, thinking, trying, failing and succeeding, talking, thinking, and trying some more.

So far the result of just the last couple weeks of conversation has been a lot of internet noise, at least four new projects or games that I’ve heard about being inspired directly by the conversations, and maybe a renewed sense that the world isn’t just okay and done quite yet. (And no, I take no credit for this. The conversation was started before I joined. I’m just happy to have been a small part of it.)

I know I’ve often been tired, frustrated, and felt ignored and attacked in the course of things. But I’ve also made some strong reconciliations, new friends, and more respect for old friends. All of that is life, and in the end I’m leaving the month with a sense of optimism.

And there it is, post 28 in February. I think for March I’m going to try for one a week, with one post per month on an issue of social context in gaming land and the rest being other stuff. Maybe more AP reports. Maybe combining them to show how social issues can make gaming rock or suck.

P.S. Also check out the hot Nordic Scene blogs that are new in the Blogroll. I particularly like Telegram, and its current posts about Immersion are some fun.

So today I am sick as a dog. Rather than posting something new and exciting, I’m going to repost something that I wrote in Fang’s journal a few months ago. I want to have it in one place, and I think its worth saying in one chunk.

The topic of names, categories, and types of RPGs and if they are or are not games or RP or what and which is Story Game and what isn’t, has been getting a lot of talk recently, between here and Levi and John and Vincent (though on Vincent’s blog its about religion and category terms/labels) and I’ve been trying to stay more or less quiet about it because, well… because it’s a hobby horse of mine.

See, here’s the deal. Human beings think in groups, clusters, and packages. This is the reason the term “outside the box” is funny, because we all think in boxes, and outside of one box is usually just a different box. There is all sorts of argument and debate about why this is, from cognitive psychology to rhetorical studies — but most people seem to agree that one of the primary ways the human mind makes sense of the world is by fitting things into groups and attaching labels to those groups.

(Thus, incidentally, some of the reasons why things such as racism and sexism can be so hard to fight. But that’s a different argument.)

Similarly, we need language to communicate. But language never (rarely?) communicates exactly what we want it to. Instead we grope about talking about things close to what we mean, things that are linked to what we mean, and things that are the opposite of what we mean. When we say Dog, as Derrida tells us, we are saying “not cat” and when we say woman we are saying “not man.” The problem with existing words is that they come with loaded guns (sometimes thousands of years worth of them). The problem with new words is that they don’t yet mean anything, and so only have meaning in terms of what they are not.

There is a point at which this comes to start seeming hopeless. It’s like the Greek argument about the arrow only getting halfway there: if an arrow goes halfway to its target, and from there half the remaining distance, and from there half the distance remaining… it will never get to the target. When we’re all groping about for ways to put the formless into form, to make categories that are useful for forming cognitive models without being exclusive or limiting, and when we can only speak in terms of what we aren’t saying… it gets ugly.

However, Wittgenstein here comes to our rescue by reminding us that language is a game. I find it constantly hilarious that people in our community are always trying to define the word “game” into very specific focus, as that was one of Wittgenstien’s chief examples of how defining a word is an exercise in silly. See, any word that we define means that it is a word we already use — before the dictionary, the man, or history told us exactly what it meant. Wittgenstein’s point is not that it is impossible to define “game”, but that we don’t have a definition, and we don’t need one, because even without the definition, we use the word. Despite the fact that there are so many possible variations, everyone can spot correct and incorrect usage of the word. It’s only on the narrow points that we get disagreement.

Which brings us back towards where we started. See, old Witty also argued that words don’t mean anything on their own, they only mean something in terms of their social and cultural positions. Because in the game we play, words carry power — power to decide who will serve and who will eat, who will get laid and who will go home alone, who will be respected and who will be the crackpot in the corner. We fight over the definition of words so much because we’re playing the game of culture, and in that game the winners define the world and the losers become slaves.

So that brings up one answer to how you make a group that is willing to give some room around words and definitions - you need a group that is playing fair, not for keeps, and to really communicate rather than to dominate the communication. This is no easy thing to do, and is something that is actually trained heavily against in our culture. Being open minded, flexible, and really interested in what people do is not an easy thing to do for yourself, much less an easy thing to help others do.

The second part of the answer ties back into the stuff about boxes from uptop. See, one of the problems that we get into with boxes is that we get into logic chopping. Even when people are trying to be good, most of our Western world is trained in a method of discourse that emphasizes precision and exactness in a way that actually goes (to some degree) against the nature of language. They’ve made mistakes in understanding the vague and intuitive rules that language uses, and have thereby tied themselves up in Gordian knots. If people are willing to let language lie fallow, give it some time to develop, remember that words can mean more than one thing — even multiple things that contradict each other — then they can actually work at building vocabulary that is shared in the sense of real language.

That people can’t do that is one of the reasons for the jargon wars we get. Those who control the label on the box control the contents of the box. But even without the social dominance issues, people who are seeking to rationally understand something will be looking for precision and focus and will become upset when they can’t find it. How frustrating is it for a newcomer to have to struggle through the vague and shifting meanings of shit like “Lumpley principle?” Ironically, its when those meanings haven’t been socially or politically charged and controlled that they will be at their least stable. And so the frustration mounts, because to a real degree in learning the jargon one must learn the paradigm, and it is just like learning a whole new language.

So, in addition to people who are wanting to communicate rather than dominate communication, you also need people who have a degree of negative capability — the ability to take things as nebulous, shifting, and uncertain and yet still have enough interest, focus, and dedication to speak passionately about them. You need people willing to play the game not to win but for the joy of the game, who are willing to learn the rules as they play despite the fact it will often feel like they have no idea what they are doing, and who can then go from doing both of those things to making up new rules, but not using those rules to win.

Sound hard? Well, it is. And let me say that much as it is annoying in the RPG and RPG theory fields, it isn’t nothing on the similar wars that happen in other fields. Our stakes are too small for our games to be like those of comparative religion, global politics, or big bussiness — where these games are played for blood.

So how do you build a community that fosters those things?

I haven’t a clue.

Or, I don’t have any good clues. My current idea is that you must start with good people, probably a small number of them, and build the game from the ground up with them. Once they have their shit together, newbs can be brought into the game — with the understanding that they’re coming in to learn the rules first and change them second.

Of course this has all sorts of elitist baggage and potential for abuse. But at the moment I haven’t a better plan.

The other way I look at it is from Post-Positivism, which basically is a philosophy born out of positivism (the individual genius will discover the universe, which actually exists) and post-modernism (everyone is making up their own stuff as they go along) to say that there is a really real universe out there, and that the best way to find it is to have everyone (or at least everyone who is serious about it) discuss, argue, and share their different view points to see what common points and synthesis develops. The idea is that from years and years of this (generations and centuries, even) we’ll get closer and closer to the real truth of things in time.

The thing that drives me nuts is that under this philosophy it is possible to argue, and argue hard against each other and still come out with better knowledge on the other side. But that often fails in practice, because the assumption of the philosophy is that both sides are arguing with their first priority to come to a better focus on the truth — when in reality most people are arguing to be right, to impress someone, or to become the alpha dog.

So in that manner, as part of that “good people” thing is you have to ruthless eliminate those arguing to be right, and focus on those trying to understand. The issue with that, of course, is that it can be difficult to impossible to tell from the outside who is who.

So a few months ago there was this “my gaming history” meme that went around. I did it and so did lots of other folks. I found it fascinating to see what I’d played and when in my life (in a very rough sense) and to see what others had as well.

Then Mo did this meme about her gaming group’s census (also now on Storygames) and then another post about what it means to the way she games.

The thing is that taking these two memes together I see a whole different side of how my gaming has changed and evolved over the years. Back in my teen years I had a stable group of life-long friends, the kind you only get in highschool, who would play anything and everything as long as we could play and play and play. Our emphasis on 12 hour long mega-sessions back to back was something that our teenage constitutions allowed for, and that our ability to practically live at each others houses made possible.

Then in college I had a lot more scattered play and lots of different games. I had some central friends groups that played, but never with the velocity or deep need for endless quests that my teenage group needed. My brothers also filled out a lot of my play during that point, and as lab rats for my experiments got the best and worst of my GMing ideas. It was at this period that I got into WW games and similarly deep and GM driven gaming styles that got tied with my growing self-identity and my need to push my younger brothers about in order to get them to tell the stories I wanted in my early 20 years that they weren’t interested in while in their mid teen years.

The years of MUSHing, Metaplot games, epic sessions that happened once every year with the Wicked Ink group, then all filled up the next block of time where I had no local group, and didn’t feel a strong desire to make one because I didn’t feel in touch with what local gamers were doing and didn’t have the confidence to make lots of non gamers into gamers. This play was very decentralized, often plotless, and led to my constant frustration with MUSH play as I learned that different playstyles really, really don’t mix. I learned a lot about freeform and GMless play, because that’s what the people I was playing with supported.

Then, as I came to Toronto as a really real adult and started hanging out with other adults who had good ideas all their own, my gaming changed again. My story socket came into clear focus, and they all started figuring out their own shit too. A lot of the hippy game stuff I was able to do was specifically and directly because of the group of people I was able to play with, and a lot of the hippy ideas that never stuck were for exactly the same reason. One shot games never really took off, except as occasional larks, because our time, focus, and intimacy gave us other priorities.

Now, this means that I’m the giantest retard in the world, but its only now that I’m so clearly seeing how very much the groups we play with, the opportunities for play that we have (and don’t have), and the places where we are in our lives so very clearly determine which games we’re able to focus on and have fun with. I’d always sort of considered my gaming history a history of my play, but the truth is it is a history of the people I have played with.

Label me dumb, but learning.

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.

Consider the following situation, all my tabletoppy friends: if you’re playing an RPG and in response to something you just said someone at the table gets an erection, how do you feel about it? What if they have an orgasm, and then tell you about it?

Does the thought make you want to puke into your mouth just a little?

Consider this: in many online RPGs, and not just sex-based games, there will be segments of play in which that exact reaction is the point of play. Things that folks get nauseous about even hinting at in Breaking the Ice games played with people they know and respect are common place and boring in games where the people playing will probably never so much as see each others faces and don’t have any rules to mitigate the ejaculation.

How much online RP (not MMORPG based) is out of a context and background of internet sex chat? How much TT RPG is out of a context of awkward adolescents sitting about a table dreaming about banging the elf princess while pretending they aren’t? Not that one is better than the other, because screwed up social dynamics abound in both situations.

If it were just sex, I’m also sure that there would be much less to say about this. But romance, betrayal, PC vs PC conflict, and the endless cycles of freeform emotional play in which the roaming, questing nature of the play is to determine the response of the other partner without the ability to see their face or fall back on mechanics to help you, is also a feature of the medium. The irony of it is that I’ve seen a lot of online RPers who can read the moods and needs of people they’ve never met face to face better, faster, and more accurately than folks who’ve gamed together around a table for years can. Because, you know, they have to be able to in order to keep playing.

I’m not sure what this says about intimacy, friendship, the shame and anonymity of sex in and around games, and avatar play - but I’m sure it says something. When designing for different mediums and thinking about sex in game, it may be worth keeping in mind.

Troy recently started a Story Games thread about awesome-o-fying polytheism in RPGs, and its well worth checking out. One of the things this thread got me thinking was about the structuralistic model that RPGs usually use to model religions, and the way that makes RPG religions have very little resemblance to real life religions or belief structures.

To decode that: what I’m saying is that in most RPG religions we get these shell-like structures of belief that are very codified and specific, treating the religion, its gods and beliefs as a structural thing rather than a collection of doctrines, beliefs, cultural mores, and most importantly of all — individuals. There are ever so many reasons for this, from the Victorian and early modern structuralist and world religion models of religious studies, to the scientific and semi-rationalist viewpoint used to explain religion in most RPGs. However, I think the biggest reason for it in our field is that this structuralist view point makes it easy to understand the world in large-scale terms from a top-down, outside perspective. It’s easy to make a world where there are guys A and they believe 1, and guys B who believe 2. It’s easy to read about and see the overall structure of such a world as well. And since we often approach RPGs through a created setting (because even historical games have a created setting) we think of religion in the terms of that large-scale creation.

There are, however, a few games that have done things in a different way. HeroQuest/Glorantha leaps immediately to mind as a game in which, while there are “shell layers” on top, once you get into the setting all the rationalistic external structures turn out to be far more complex, contradictory, and relativistic than they do in most RPG settings. There are two clear reasons for this: one, that’s what Greg wanted the world to be, and two, lots of the world was created through play or the focus of a few characters rather than top down as one unified monolith of setting. Because of that Glorantha has a far murkier relationship to pantheons and polytheism — even a Lunar might have a spirit bracelet that isn’t part of the Lunar religion, and who knows whose gods are going to be on top of the spirit world today?

The problem that a lot of folks have with this kind of world is that it feels messy and hard to quantify. If people are believing this and that, when the other folks believe that and thus, and the gods are beings that you can go visit, but your perceptions of them may or may not be subjective — how the hell do you get a grip on what the world looks and feels like? Glorantha at least has its different worlds of magic to give some order to it, but if you’re trying to build a game based on the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, how the hell are you going to quantify and structuralize those beliefs without choking them? And if you don’t structuralize, how do you get the world across to players in a way usable in game?

The answer that came to mind today, and I’m sure its just one possible answer, is that you don’t really try to understand the whole world as one big monolith from an exterior POV. You approach it from inside, in terms of “what does this guy want and believe.” This guy can be your PC, an important NPC that you’re building a plot or R-Map around, or even the charismatic prophet of the religion. You take it as a world that no one knows the truth about, and in which the various agendas of cultural background, wealth and poverty, personal need and ambition, tradition and reverence, all influence each and every person on what they personally believe.

Thus rather than saying, “Zoroastrians believe in Ahura Mazda, and he is Zoroastrian therefore he worships Ahura Mazda and none other” you say, “This guy is a born Magi, and wants to get a place in court. His arch rival is a Babylonian priest, and so he wants to demonize other gods in order to secure his own position.” Give everyone else in the court reasons to believe one, both, or neither of the priests, and let the action start.

Even if you’re at a higher level, of really interacting with the gods, all you have to do is assume a little subjecitivism and you can still make this kind of thing work. Moses may have spoken to God directly, but every religion, group of belief, and many individuals all believe different things about Moses, have different recordings of his words, and so on. Hell, even Moses himself occasionally had problems figuring out exactly what God wanted. Through a glass darkly and all that. And thats in a paradigm with one God. Sometimes, except when it isn’t.

The short of it: focusing on what individuals in the game want rather than trying to make the world as a whole make sense from an external POV is a good way to build an awesome, personally relevant, and awesome polytheistic world. And that should work even when “this guys” happens to be one of the gods.