Liche's Libram

There are a lot of rules systems, debates over the extent to which system matters, and groupings of rules into groups. Based on advanced paleontology, historico-linguistic comparative analysis, and the latest genetic evidence, I have cloned the most basic systems to display them in this post, my personal Jurassic Park. 

Primordial Sim

Players describe what their characters do, and the GM decides what the likely outcomes will be. If it's not obvious whether it would succeed or fail, she flips a coin.

FKR isn't about the amount of rules, but one can read a lot of FKR-style play as essentially this, with optional bells and whistles. Indeed, I think the core claim of FKR is that all other rules in a game can be considered a sort of midrash which advises the execution of Primordial Sim. 

Hadean Narrativism

A storyteller tells a story.

You might say that this isn't a game; that's quite true, in fact ludochemists have reconstructed it from processes they believe to have begun during the Hadean Eon, before there were games proper, but as certain molecules were beginning to behave in a game-like way.

Archean Narrativism

Players describe what their characters do, and the GM decides what would make for the best story. If it's not obvious, she flips a coin.

During the Archean Eon, the primordial soup began to bubble, and Hadean Narrativism evolved into a game-form. It is most well-known for two descendants.

Primordial Narrativism

Players take turns telling a story.

Primordial Illusionism

Play Archean Narrativism, but say you're playing Primordial Sim.

Thus we have three basic primordial body plans - PS, PN, and PI - that describe the rules of all roleplaying games. 

IMO, species-level system differences do not matter that much, especially within PS/PI, but phylum-level differences do.

(See also: mechanics for resource management, ICI doctrine, impact, attack the character sheet.)

Some crude steotypes you hear sometimes:

1. "OSR play is all bean-counting rations and torches and encumbrance"
2. "PbtA games are great if everyone is bringing the energy to make it sing, but if just one person is out of gas it falls flat"
3. "Modern D&D is just rolling dice until one is high enough that the DM shows you the next scene"
   

Some stereotypes are the opposite of true, but these all hint at something useful. And I think this has to do with the variety of consequences that the different styles work to make relevant. Failing forward and success at a cost are at the core of PbtA, and they lead to the "partial success" range being very fun if the player facing them has the creative energy to make them relevant. No resources is worth tracking in modern D&D other than spell slots and hit points, and you probably won't run out of hit points either.

For old-school play in the sense I care about, you don’t need death around every corner, or bean-counting encumbrance and gold, or strictly-kept time records (although I like some of those too.) But things like these allow the referee to attach costs to actions in a way that presents players with meaningful tradeoffs. Schematically, the conversational loop that undergirds play operates something like:

1. The referee describes a situation.
2. The player consider a response.
3. The referee communicates whether there is significant danger in this response, and if there is not, how long it would take and what other resources it might consume. ("Yeah, it looks like it would take about a dungeon round to hack your way through this wooden door") If there is no danger and no relevant time or resources to consume, they simply do the action.
   
4. If there is significant danger, then the referee either communicates that danger ("so you'll all be scaling this cliff in the storm, I'll have you roll a check at DC 20 each; for each failure you'll have to drop a backpack, and if everybody fails you fall to your doooooms") or notes where mysterious danger at least might be relevant ("okay, so to be clear, you're reading aloud from the tome, even though you don't know what it means, right?")
5. Players decide to go through with the action or consider another.
6. If they go through, referee describes consequences and hence the new situation.

Something (for instance, time) can't be a cost if it doesn't matter. The same applies to every other type of consequence:

• injury and risk of death
• encumbrance
• money
  
• rations 
• stress and mental health
  
• relationship with your patron deity
• relationship with various factions
• "are we the baddies?"
  

These don't necessarily need to be tracked quantitatively, and indeed many suffer from this. If PCs' moral status is supposed to matter, I don't think it requires a Humanity track like in Vampire and may often suffer for it (though I think in that particular game it works for it, in that it simply forces you to make a note of it when you hurt people, and the threshold for making that note of it gets more extreme as you descend further into being a monster.) But it does require that characters care about being good, and that they're thrown into situations that demand either compromise or lateral thinking. "Task: punch one million Nazis" might be an interesting challenge in any number of ways, but it's not morally interesting. 

People sometimes associate aspects of WotC-era D&D they don't like with streaming, but while to be fair tracking gold and encumbrance makes for extremely bad radio, I can think of at least one game that makes for great radio because of how obvious the risks and tradeoffs are when players face a decision: Delta Green. In DG agents have to worry about

• time (bad shit is going to keep happening or get worse without your solving it, otherwise you wouldn't have been called in)
• injury and death
• mental stress, especially how exposure to certain kinds of otherwise useful information
• the affect of all this on their relationships
• whether any particular pretty fucked-up action is morally justified by the harms they're trying to prevent

is Delta Green old-school? Whatever, it's dramatic because of (when played right) tough decision density.

Advice I'd consider generalizable: 

1. have a couple of different things you can reliably count on as a relevant cost, and keep track of it at the level of granularity and using the tools that make sense
   
2. vary up a bit what costs are relevant for any given session; give play variety by putting players in situations where time is suddenly rich where they're used to it being tight, or where rations suddenly matter even if they weren't worth tracking before
3. get your players primed to point out costs; this can align with their moment-to-moment interests if they know that you'll sometimes let them succeed at something they otherwise failed at if they propose a cost that makes sense.
   

First, some terminology.

Open rolls are what we already call them. Someone makes a roll and the result is announced.

Veiled rolls are rolled, but not announced. However, anybody who wishes to do so could choose to inspect the roll.This is very easy to implement over Discord - just dedicate a channel to it, and maybe sblock the results - but can also be done in analog games.

Secret rolls are not announced and cannot be inspected. This is the classic "roll behind the GM's screen." However, everyone else knows that a roll of some kind is being made. This allows for the tacky possibility of the faux roll, where the GM conspicuously makes a mysterious roll that does nothing.

Personal rolls are made without anyone knowing they are rolled. Rolls made on random tables on prep for inspiration are a classic example.

Generalizing this to the broader class of procedures is left as an exercise for the reader. 

Here's a bit of theory, or manifesto, or something. It's short and probably thought of by others, because I'm not all that smart, but I think it articulates the kind of roleplay I find most interesting. 

What I am most interested in lies at the intersection of:

1. fiction that is not stories, in the narrow sense of "story." Stories have a narrative structure, especially one based around a satisfying set of choices that change an individual, with the beginning pregnant with the end; fiction in the sense that I care about is just a set of claims that are consistent with each other but not reality, and which are asserted for interestingness rather than deceit. A description of a cool sword is fiction but not a story. A big setting supplement is also setting but not a story. A campaign that kind of meanders and does a bunch of interesting things may or may not be a story, idk, but it is certainly a fiction.
2. play that is not games, in the narrow sense of "games." Play in the general sense is ____________ ??????? but "properly" gamelike to the extent that goals are clear and actions are clearly delimited.

Thus, the answer to me re: "are RPGs games" or "are RPGs stories" is that they're neither, but adjacent to both.

Joesky tax

Is the OSR based on a false origin myth? Should it die? Is it an ineradicable discourse? Has it died already again and again? There are many stories you can craft. 

But unlike you heretics, I don't believe in crafting stories - I believe in procedures. As always, once you roll the dice, you should stick with result forevermore. Once you click on the below button, that's what the OSR is.

Recently, a Knight at the Opera discussed how media stand in the shadow of each other; for instance, how early film served as a simple recording of play-like performances despite the possibilities being so different. I don’t know that there’s any RPG form living more thoroughly in the shadow of its parent than PBP versions of tabletop gaming, with more tragic results: it’s a direct transplant of the GM-player conversation loop that is so often strangled rather quickly when the medium simply doesn’t support it. Traditional RPGs, with their task resolution and strict GM/player division of labor, tend to fare worse than storygames, with their conflict resolution, weak or no role specialization, and oftentimes just explicitly passed around narrative control. OSR-style play falls squarely on the former side of this divide.

But OSR-style play has long emphasized a few ideas, like GM neutrality its enforcement through randomized tables, that mesh well with another style, one that’s been finding its legs recently: solo gaming. OSR procedures and solo oracles fit so well together because they’re a solution to the same goals: providing surprising challenges and the illusion of an independent world. 

But solo gaming is also solving another problem: doing without the conversational loop. (Indeed for solo play the former problems arise from the latter.) Perhaps they’ve progressed faster than PBP on this front because while each exchange from player to GM and back in PBP is achingly expensive, in solo it’s impossible.

The thing, though, is that nothing about oracle use and other solo tools makes having a GM impossible - it only makes impossible the GM who wants to tell a particular story. And a GM can do things an oracle can’t - like playing with secret but consistent information, and so on.

Here’s the general proposal, then: for a PBP game to describable either as 1) an OSR game where players know all or most all of the objective GM procedures and can execute the role of neutral referees themselves, 2) several solo games which take place in the same continuity.

This style can also play nice with:

1. Pendragon-style personality mechanics for narrating other PCs 
2. Using multiple systems (say Gary likes combat puzzles and I don’t, so he uses Pathfinder 2e to govern events in his posts and I use B/X or whatever) - since all or most all mechanical loops can be closed within any post, only diegetic continuity matters
3. Since I keep looking for ways to slot it into everything, using 1:1 time as a regulator of “how much” narration any post should be doing
4. GMs uploading tables to Perchance, dungeons to twine…

I know what you're saying - "just use a game actually meant for this!" But maybe you game with people you like IRL and who don't want to learn another system. The truth is that you can run things in a more old-school style without changing any player-facing rules.

As with any campaign style, you want buy-inv - such as to the idea that you're running a sandbox campaign where character death may lack individual narrative heft, in which challenges are not guaranteed to be fair, and in which lateral thinking goes a long way. The goal here isn't to sneak in OSR play to people with no interest in it, but to work with the fact that many groups don't want to learn a whole new system specifically.

Ask "how do you do that?" when players declare skill use

GM: "There's a pie in the middle of a room, surrounded by a bear trap."

Player: "I use Sleight of Hand to disable the trap. 18! Does it beat the DC?"

GM: "Hold your horses - exactly what are you doing to disable it?"

Player: "Hmm, I throw a stick on the bear trap to activate it."  

GM: "Success! The trap snaps shut."

You know already know this: play the world, the answer is not on your character sheet, blah blah blah. But in my experience (especially with new players) this doesn't require the lack of a skill system or anything, it just requires you to remind them to describe the physical actions they're taking and to engage with that.

Encourage use of automatic character generators

It's a trivialism that character creation needs to be easy in order to allow comfort with lethality. The traditional solution to this is to make character creation simple, but the 5e market is so large that there's also a lot of tools.

As someone who hates character creation minigames but is in a 5e game with friends, the straightforwardly named https://fastcharacter.com/ has been a godsend. I just specify the level and anything else I want to determine and boom. 

Giving access to devices like these doesn't mean players who enjoy the minigame can't engage in it - but it does mean that they don't need to feel like every character is an irrevocable investment.

Use any XP system other than XP for combat and set milestones

Does this count as changing rules? I don't know, but as elegant as say XP for gold is or whatever, I think that really XP for combat and "XP for this particular thing the GM has in mind" are the most fatal to open-ended risk-reward play. You can use just about anything else (handing out cards with XP for possible quests, actual XP for gold/exploration, leveling up arbitrarily when people feel like it's time to out of character or after a certain number of sessions, leveling up when people surprise you) and it will avoid the main problems.

(Does this count as changing the system? IDK, but in my Curse of Strahd campaign nobody complained when I gave them checklist XP adapted from Into the Depths.)

Use GM-facing procedures like morale, reaction roles, and hazard dice

That's not changing the rules either!

Just use bears

More generally, don't engage with anything mechanically you don't have to or that doesn't have a meaningful payoff. Be sloppy and arbitrary about stats, if there are players who are sticklers about e.g. tripping rules or whatever let them be the resident expert and defer to them on that, and so on.  

I've been doing a lot of the first, recently, which is why I haven't done much of the latter, or blogging. (Hooray, not being unemployed!) I'm far from the only person in this sphere who teaches for my day job, so nothing in this is original - but I don't know whether I've seen the analogy enumerated at length elsewhere, so here's a stab at it.