The Problem of Advancement and Endings

So the modern RPG usually follows a pretty settled formula: you start out unable to stop bad crap from happening, so you get some XP and level up, gradually erasing the chaos from the game. You now have control, hurray!

Well, not really. That’s boring as hell.

See, the thing that makes a plot move is tension, the pull between law and chaos. Without tension stories don’t live. So basically most Western TTRPGs,  on a design level, kill themselves. We remove tension and the game deflates. Storygames are particularly bad at this, creating games where complications are tied inherently to failure… which the advancement system totally chokes out. PBTA particularly is bad at this, and can only be played for a short amount of time before the mechanics grind the story to a halt. For a genre that prides itself on mechanics generating story, this is a deadly flaw.

“Just have the GM smooth it out!” you might say. "That's up to the group to figure out!" No, that’s making excuses for bad design: a game should not need a GM to houserule or ignore the mechanics to keep playing. Period.

“These games aren’t meant to run for long!” Even if that’s true grinding to a halt isn't the same thing as an ending. Storygames don’t usually do ending mechanics… which I think a really bad idea. Endings are the hardest part of a story to get right, enough RPGs don’t have advice and mechanics to support this to where an entire book, World Ending Game, focused on ending the stories from other games.

So not only are most storygames advancing the fun out of their game, but they're going into mechanical oblivion.

Yes, trad games are usually worse about it. That should just be a given.

The irony is that it’s because we bastardized DnD.

See, we get XP from The World’s Most Banal RPG. Duh. We all knew that. But XP and level growth originally happened in a context: the random encounter. Advancement didn’t affect the chances of random crap happening to you, it just indicated how big of stuff you could handle, and even then the numbers weren’t perfect; by and large you weren’t ever the top of the pile. And therefore you were always in danger. That’s good game design!

Trophy Gold is another game that manages to thread the needle. Dungeons are made as flowcharts of possibilities that must end. Not only that, but advancement doesn’t turn you into some god on earth, but just gives you a BIT more of an edge. You could run a Trophy Gold game for years, with bite-sized little adventures that you can drop in and drop out of. And that's a really good setup!

And yes, Crescendo and The Truth Found in Death address these problems, each in their own ways.

Crescendo's solution is to make higher rolls create more chaos within in the setting. So the more powerful you get the more out of control things get in the setting, because your efforts are just so much more powerful. As the game progresses it gradually goes from deep introspection on who your character thinks he is to having to deal with his intentions not matching up to effects those intentions have. And that's the sort of thing character development thrives on! The ending of an arc of Crescendo is called The Festival, where characters discover how they have changed, in the context of a public celebration. The ending of a game of Crescendo is called The Apocalypse, where players get one last time to define their characters, and the world responds one last time... but not in the way the players expect. The game ends in a final, irrevocable, statement on the characters and their relationship to the world.

The Truth Found in Death takes the problem in a more BDnD way: by putting chaos generation into the framework of the game. In every adventure there are four times when the players have to help randomly determine where the plot goes. Nobody knows where the one-shot is going. No one. And four  times in those two hours the plot jukes like this... and then ends as the characters wrap up the adventure on go on to their next thing. Which we may or may not see in a future session. Dunno. But it's done. Eventually players will be able to build and protect their own towns, which will dramatically alter gameplay for those who have stuck around long enough. By that point there will be differing levels of player interaction going on, and the game will have gone from a bunch of murder-hobos looking for adventure to a political thriller. With lots of blood. Since The Truth Found in Death is a Westmarch game I don't think it's the type of game to have an ending, per se, but each session will be totally standalone and offer its own ending.

There's a pretty big gaping hole in most RPG designs when it comes to advancement and what you're advancing to. It's not a universal problem (and ironically enough DnD not only did it first but better than most), but it's widespread and asks players to do something that full-on professional writers have a hard time doing: pacing and finishing the story. But I'm not just blowing smoke out my ass. Whenever Crescendo and The Truth Found in Death get released they have their own ways of handling advancement and endings that will help each story to be satisfying.

The Truth Found in Death: Scene Economy and Masochism

I am GMing a Power Rangers game for my friends. It’s been a great time, filled with a lot of camaraderie, heart, role playing… and barely any fighting??? The first two sessions were essentially the characters trying to figure out where they stood on things. Which isn’t bad (and was role played so well I didn’t care much at the time) but… an action RPG should have action! And adventure! Get to the point!

There is an irony in having Kull in the blog picture. If you know you’re hopefully laughing. If you don’t go listen to a Kull story. And then you’ll probably get it.

Point is: they didn’t have much mechanical support in just getting to the conflict. “But Nathan, you’re the GM, that’s your job! Don’t blame the game for what you’re supposed to be doing!” you’ll say. And that’s not wrong? I see where that criticism is coming from. 

But you know my first rule is GMing, at least at this point? Always let the player tie their own rope; only act when the players aren’t creating enough trouble on their own. The best GM is one who you barely notice because you were just… playing. I’ve got players who make great trouble, just not the type of trouble that requires combat. If the game stalled I would have thrown in a combat. And the game barely stalled.

Yes, my players are just that good. I’m extremely lucky!

But.

I think there’s a problem. The problem is that people get tired. Whenever I get to my RPG nights I'm tuckered out. My job's stressful and can really take it out of me. So when I get to game night? I don't really have a lot of chutzpah left. I want a good story but I don't necessarily want to hunt down my friends in a game to have good drama. Good drama involves suffering. Sorry folks, that's how it works. And you know what I  can't pull out of my tired soul as much anymore? Y'know, thanks to the two and a half intensive years of EMDR therapy, nights spent crying on the floor, and awful panic attacks?

Oh, right, suffering.

And I know for a fact that people, when tired, try to avoid suffering. It's rather difficult to go "Yay let's do suffering!" when you're not tired, as opposed to when you are. An adventure game requires suffering. If you want a good time the fictional pieces need to be in trouble. What makes it a game is that it isn't you. It's one thing if a game system does it, but when a game system isn't doing it... I don't think that's a good thing. Perseverating on how you're going to harm your fellow player's characters just doesn't strike me as a humane thing to do. The game producing those moments, giving everyone something to react against? Sure. That's fine, you didn't make it whole cloth, out of your own skull. You're playing a game to deal with a type of situation that you may need to experience, somehow.

But figuring out how to stress out your players over a long period of time?

No, I don't think that's the GM's business.

And here we come to the idea of scene economy: having a script that runs on in the background, telling the group "this is the type of scene you're doing right now". Before anyone balks, every single adventure plot is more or less the same structure, and that's okay. The point isn't the structure, but what happens within it. Obviously exceptions exist, and me referencing Kull earlier means I'm not only aware of them but am making the game specifically to make sure most of Kull's stories don't happen. Because, let's be blunt, a lot of Kull's stories are an almost excessive amount of world-building with very little adventure. The word navel-gazing comes to mind.

I wonder how many people I just lost by writing that.

Oh well.

Now, there's obviously various adventure stories with their own structures and whatnot, but I'm not aiming to do them all, I just want a framework that allows people to focus on their feats of awesomeness in the face of chaos and death, which is really the essence of a good adventure story anyways. We enjoy the guided tour up against the raging chaos and, provided we're given a genuine chance to see things in a visceral light and see actual triumph.

Fortunately this wheel has been crafted before: Misspent Youth. Robert Bohl's fantastic little RPG has a seven act structure that slots in perfectly with the ideas I've got for The Truth Found in Death. I'm not going to take it straight, because I've got some ideas that will work really nicely with these acts (and I've always found Misspent Youth's conflict mechanic too shallow for my tastes), but it's a great place to start. It gets you on the ground, forces everyone to focus on one big bad thing going on right now, and then weaves seven of these conflicts into a tightly focused narrative of pulse-pounding adventure. If we didn't want a story we could play Grand Theft Auto or whatever, but RPGs are inherently about narrative in a way most games are not. But there's nothing that says that any one person at the table really controls that narrative or its structure.

I think RPGs should allow you free play in the story you’re meant to tell, but really nothing else. This isn’t because I want to restrict players but because it’s hard to do an actual adventure correctly, given the breakneck pace and how tired people are before they play. Asking people to come to every session with their A Game is… not kind. A scene structure lets everyone lean on the mechanics and do what they came to do: kick ass, take names, and drink out of skulls.

The Truth Found in Death: Robert E. Howard and Pulp

 

I’ve heard a lot about Conan the Barbarian and Robert E. Howard. I’ve been told his prose is like a fever dream, lurid and crazed. I’ve been told his work is the true inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons, and that Tolkien's influence is but a skin over the Howard skeleton built.  I’d mostly written the author off, just because I don't like DnD all that much. Murder hobos aren't my thing. And DnD takes some real work to not be about murder hobos. So if Howard is the origination of murder hobos? No thanks.

Well one night I got bored. So I decided to listen to two of Howard's stories, one about Conan (see above) and the other about Solomon Kane (see below):

And, since I like Solomon Kane more than Conan:

I get it now.

Howard's stuff is about strong, already-formed characters running into a world that is on the verge of complete and utter chaos. Or maybe it's there already. No, I don't mean the nicely-held "I'm so chaotic!" personality that people like to think is cute. It's not, and that's not chaos. Chaos is when you can trust nobody because nobody is actually out to help. You are faced with a scenario where the law of the jungle prevails. Nobody can handle true chaos long. Ever. True chaos is so bad that anything, even slavery, is preferable to it. True chaos creates situations so desperate that to judge the solution is not just silly, it's arrogant. You either go into a state that's so awful that it's almost beyond imagination or you don't. There isn't a question of what lessons the character needs to do to evolve into the person who is going to handle that chaos. The character can already handle it. It's now a question of how far the character will go and what his process is in handling said chaos.

Oh wait, that's exactly what The Truth Found in Death is about! I mean, granted, the goriness and the eulogies from The Iliad is in there too, but at its core that's what I want TTFID to be about.

...

Reinventing the wheel is a bitch, ain't it?

So, I got some research to do. A lot of it. But what have I gotten out of my two pulps so far? Well, characters are integrated, the chaos is eldritch and sapient, the people are brutal, and all previously held notions of morality need to go out the window. Because yes, it is that desperate.

The biggest thing that jumped out at me was Howard's character work. Conan and Solomon were not people in flux. They were not changing. And it was because they didn't need to. They had what they needed to face the problems at hand. That didn't mean they were cookie cutters, quite the contrary! Conan had his particular sense of honor up until a point, and he stuck to just that sense of honor and nothing else. Solomon routinely questioned his own actions but always deferred on the side of what was going to work, right then and there; Solomon actually cared for life itself ideologically, something Conan did not inherently seem to have regard for.  I could feel who the characters were and, while I wouldn't necessarily be able to break it down into Traits or whatever, I would be able to ascertain if the characters were acting like themselves. There's a consistency to the characters that's simple and direct, but deep enough to where you can always have a decent idea of what they'd do.

There's something lacking in modern DnD discussions that I've poked my head in on: the evil of pulp isn't a common thing, it's an eldritch awfulness. This isn't the type of evil that one can convert or do anything really about, other than kill. The problem isn't "what is there to do?" but "how can we get rid of this virus without losing too many human lives?" Even when the foes are human, they're of a moral calibre so incredibly low that there's nothing else that can be safely done. There's a desperation in these tales that I feel is missing. And I really like having it in there. It makes gameplay much more interesting.

And of course, the main thing I'm really liking about these stories is just how amoral they are, at least by my modern sensibilities. Ever since Wolfe I've developed a bit of a taste for seeing fictional scenarios where "good" solutions are simply impossible. How characters handle these stark scenarios I find really interesting! What does the character value? Why? What will they do? The actions then raise questions, ones of which I find stick with me for awhile. Could I have done better? Could I have made choices in that situation that were of a more moral bent? Is my desire for a "moral" answer coming from a post-Enlightenment  mindset, where abstract principles are more important than what's right in front of my nose, or from an actual sense of right and wrong (and yes there is a difference)?

I'd really like to throw things like this at players and GMs. To see situations where people have to go "Well, this is what's in front of me, and I have to act", and then to process what that looks like. Most of us in the West have forgotten what chaos, real chaos, actually looks like, and why people are so afraid of it, and why we should be afraid of it still! In the face of the real law of the jungle, where only the strong rule and it just so happens that the threat is stronger than most people, there's only opposition. Argue about how the weaker should be treated all you like, that's an abstract problem, and not the problem that I'm getting from pulp, at least so far. And I find it really compelling.

The Truth Found in Death

 

Awhile back I was talking with the inestimable Mike Low, who linked me to one of his articles on violence in gaming. I'd been thinking on some of the stuff that he brought up in the article, and randomly decided to try and change the name of my Conflict mechanic in Crescendo to Struggle. I wanted to see if Mike was right; would removing words usually associated with violence in our day and age lead to people using the mechanic for non-violent purposes?

Actually, it did.

One of my playtesters called it out, specifically, when she noticed the change from Conflict to Struggle: "Wait, this isn't just for fighting?"

Mike, you were right. Not that I should be shocked. But yes, you're right.

Now, as a martial artist, fan of MMA, and US vet, I don't think violence is inherently a bad thing, nor is killing. If you have to do these things when you really need to there shouldn't be a stigma around it whatsoever. There's a very good reason why pre-modern societies tended towards militarism and blood: to say you're a state means you're willing to kill to keep what you and yours have. But games shouldn't necessarily be about violence, its costs, and things related to it. Violence should not be the default option. Period.

The Truth Found in Death is about violence. It's about the necessity of violence and courage in the face of certain death. It’s about how yes, violence can be beautiful, because people are beautiful and therefore can commit violence beautifully. But it’s also about the cost of violence. How you have to harden yourself to take it and dish it. Your body and soul will pay costs you never thought you’d have to, but here comes the piper a knocking! And ultimately how that violence may bereave others of their loved ones, changing them permanently. That change doesn’t stay put; it radiates out. 

The Truth Found in Death will use a modified PBTA engine. The game uses a single d20 to resolve all Moves. There are no stats in the game. Instead there are Exploits, feats of derring-do in the form of a sentence.You may use these Exploits to reroll your d20 rolls as often as you like… at the expense of possibly changing the plot in large ways. As you gain and spend XP you will be able to use your Exploits more often without affecting the story as much.

The Black Swans I pioneered in Crescendo return here, as does journaling! Journals will be used to not just record specific actions and use then to make more Black Swans, but also to record the actions of NPCs affected by the players’ actions. Lore will also be recorded in the journal, primarily as campfire stories and snatches of songs the party members sing to each other. Training sessions, where party members test each other, will also have elements of that time recorded.

And then there’s the core of the game: the fighting. The Truth Found in Death does not feature a dedicated combat system. That may sound odd, but without a mechanical start/stop this allows combat to ebb and flow organically, which help keep the immersion of the players. All creatures the players face have two principle elements to them: Locks and Approaches. Locks are a defensive aspect that has to be figured around: a kobold is a Jumpy Little Bastard. These Locks are absolute mechanical defenses: if someone swings at a kobold they’re going to miss, because he’s a Jumpy Little Bastard and moves out of the way! But if his back is to the wall, where can he go? He’s stuck, isn’t he? Or, y’know, maybe you just get him at the top of a cliff… the fall will do the trick, won’t it? Creatures also have Approaches, which tell you how they’re going to try and hit you. If you mess up your attacks or aren’t paying attention then you’ll get hit, flat. HP is low, and while HP recovers quickly the Conditions you get when you lose HP don’t, further hampering you in the fiction.

Thera is a lot to do on The Truth Found in Death yet; the game text is very much so in its beginning stages. I’m truly blessed to have friends who are willing to test my initial ideas, so that I can see where I want to go. 

I find game design to be a form of meditation. It helps me to process my life and figure out where to go next. The Truth Found in Death arises from musings on the incontrovertible fact that the most beautiful moments in my life are in no small way indebted to the ugliest.  Without those dark moments I’d not have the light I have today. Goodness does not come free. 

The payment, invariably, is in blood.

No, you won’t get the same answer to that problem. 

Nor should you.