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.

This is a rough, only partly tested system that I whipped up for a game of Afraid that I ran last Halloween. I found the notes recently, and figured I’d toss it out to the world.

The Eldritch Arcane is magic for Afraid. It could probably work for Dogs or a Dogs homebrew too. Its basic principle is that magic lets you go beyond the limits of normal human effort, but that it can exact a terrible price for doing so.

At character creation characters who have Eldritch abilities mark them as such. For now lets just say they come out of your normal dice, but get marked special when you declare them Eldritch. GMs who want to limit magic might say you can only use 1 or 2 dice at character creation as an eldritch ability. If you want to be fancy you could make a new background that grants access to Eldritch powers, and say you have to take it if you want any dice.

Eldritch abilities can be traits (Blood of the Dark 2d8), relationships (Slave of Kali 3d4), or gear (faerie cloak 2d8). In general eldritch gear can be temporarily lost as part of stakes or as part of gaining a condition, but losing it permanently requires a burnout consequence from magical backlash. (I’ll explain that below.) We also experimented with letting some of the dice for a Stat be eldritch, so that you could have Heart 3 (1) with that (1) being an eldritch dice. Results generally indicated yes.

In play, Eldritch abilities work just like others in terms of how and when they get rolled. You use relationships at the start, for those involved or at stake, for example. However, eldritch abilities work a bit differently when they are in play, and for that reason I recommend having dice of a different color or style than all the others in play to roll for your Eldritch abilities, as it will keep things easier once dice start hitting the table. If you don’t have enough dice of different colors you can just keep the eldritch dice in a separate area from your normal dice.

In play Eldritch abilities have the following special rules:

1. When you use one, you can make raise and sees that are clearly beyond the norm. In other words, it lets you do magic. Fly, crush people’s throats by squeezing your fingers together across the room, and so forth.
2. They give you access to the magical world, which allows you to use magical sites or ritual implements as improvised objects. (”Jeepers Scooby, its midnight on Halloween and we’re in Stonehenge? My Druid Blood gives me a 2d8 for this big, excellent ritual space.”)
3. You can use a dice from a magical ability to do something beyond the pale. An action that is beyond the pale risks backlash, a supernatural repercussion, in addition to other fallout. The benefit of going beyond the pale is that it lets you add one dice from a magical ability (and it must be a magical ability dice, the reason for the different color) to any raise, see, or taking the blow. If you raise or see you can do so with three dice total. If you take the blow you take one dice less fallout than you would normally take.

Note: You can use your eldritch abilities for the first two items without risking backlash. In that case they act just like normal dice, save that they let you do kewl raises. It is only if you add a magical dice as a third dice (or fourth for taking the blow) that you risk backlash.

Backlash

When you use an eldritch ability to go beyond the pale, you risk backlash as the inhuman forces rebound upon you. All eldritch dice used to go beyond the pale (add an extra dice to an action) are set aside after they are played (played, not rolled) and after the conflict all of them are rolled after normal fallout has been rolled. They are read just like fallout dice, but use the following tables to determine their outcome.

Backlash Roll
Any 1’s — Backlash experience
2 - 7 — Minor Backlash
8 - 11 — Major Backlash
12+ — Devastating Backlash

Backlash Experience

Note: Eldritch abilities cannot be raised with normal fallout, though they can be lowered. So you can make your Druid Blood go down as a result of fallout, but you cannot increase it. The only way to increase an eldritch ability is through backlash experience.

• Add or subtract 1 dice from an existing eldritch ability
• Take an new eldritch ability at 1d6
• Change the dice size for one magical ability by one step
• Pick from the normal experience list

Minor Backlash

• One condition becomes true
• Seen (an evil occult force knows where you are and gains your highest backlash dice against you in the next conflict you have with it).
• Lose access to one eldritch ability for the next conflict

Major Backlash

• Two conditions become true
• Marked (an evil occult force now can track you and gains a relationship with you with a dice size equal to the biggest backlash dice you rolled.)
• Lose 1 eldrtich ability for the rest of the story
• Lose all eldritch abilities for the next scene
• Lose 2 dice from a Stat
• Change an eldritch ability to d4s

Devastating Backlash

• All conditions become true
• Tainted (as marked, plus against the being you are always considered to be either Alone or Unprepared)
• Lose all eldritch abilities for the rest of the story
• Lose 1 eldritch ability permanently
• Lose 3 dice from a Stat
• Require Real Medical Care

And that, as they say, is that.

Credit Where It is Due: Landon Darkwood had a big impact on this, as should be obvious if you read his article. Vincent Baker, of course, had some impact as well.