What IS Storygaming?: Weeds, and Being Amongst Them

 

Lex, as is his wont, fired off another blog post in response to the last one. Which is awesome! I'm going to respond to it! And here's the post, so you can read it yourself!

This is going to be an interesting blog post. On the one hand, I think Lex made some actual criticism of what I did that I think are appropriate. I'm more than happy to cop to them here. On the other, there's just some basic temperament stuff I think we're dealing with that could stand to be called out. And on a third, mysteriously-appearing hand... I think he's wrong in a few spots.

But first, this, which I definitely wanna call out as a good thing.

You guys remember blog rings? I remember blog rings. They were one of my favorite things of the ancient era.

People with a particular passion would write about that particular passion on their blog, and they would find other people who shared it through various means, either meeting them in person or hanging out on the same online forums. They would shake hands and make a gentleman's agreement to link to one another in a little sidebar and refer to one another's posts when it became useful to do so in the course of one of their own.

We used to have relatively long-form communication then. People would write out their ideas in more complete forms and toss them back and forth. Things happened. Ideas had their rough edges polished off. Concepts were refined.

It was a better day than this of the 280-character pithy reply. Maybe we should go back to those days.

Anyway, Spyder got around to writing a reply this morning to the What IS Storygaming? response I had to his video. You know what that means.

Once more into the trenches, my fellows.

Am I going to use old-school quote response style? Maybe! It kind of feels appropriate. Let's roll back the days to blogrolls and Usenet.

Yeah, this is unironically something I want to see happen again. So, far as I'm concerned, regardless of whether I "win" or "lose" the argument, what is occurring right now is a win. And I like that. I didn't get to this, back in the day. I was very effectively removed from those days for all kinds of reasons that we won't get into here, but this, to me, is a ton of fun.

Let's start here because it seems like the right place to begin, mainly because it undercuts the whole point of the previous process altogether. It also misses the fact that my previous response was way nicer than my natural inclination is, because I wanted it to actually stand as a potential reference.

This caught my attention, so for the moment I'm just gonna keep reading and see what he does with it. "Undercutting the point" is an interesting claim, and I want to know what he means.

But more importantly, I don't care about the camp metaphor. The essential question was, what is a thing? I talk about what is a thing. I don't need to dress it up. I don't need to make it colorful and do a little dance.

And this is where that first "Our goals do not align", comes in. An essential part of how I do things is to allow people to come to a conclusion. What you're calling dressing it up and dancing is saying that a trail already exists, and that maybe Weirth can find it.

You don't have to like it. But it is how I operate. I have no intention on stopping.

 Here's the thing. I'm not trying to do anything per se in terms of persuasion, because that is lost effort. I don't need to persuade someone that story gaming is better than the mode of play that they're already engaged in, because either it is or it isn't. But just as importantly, that's what the OSR dickheads do three quarters of the time online, and I don't want to be one of those guys.

I'm not trying to persuade Weirth, or anyone, beyond attempting to communicate the concept in a way that allows for actual understanding, which is really hard to do. You talk to people, and try to figure out how you best communicate to them. 

I, on the other hand, am going to point out something that Spyder seems to have forgotten here, and it's something that's kind of critical when writing this sort of thing and publishing it online. That's that the one person that you're talking to is not the one person that you're talking to.

Your audience is everyone who reads it. In order to reach out and communicate with all the people who are reading it, and in fact, most of the people who are going to be reading it, you have to talk about the things that they know and their attitudes, and not just the single point of contact, because you chose to make that not the case when you decided to go wide with the publication and make it public.

You've invited the public in, so even the guys in the cheap seats get an opportunity to be seen from the stage. Give them a chance. Talk to them.

Here I'm addressing the inevitable group of people who are going to read this from outside, many of whom are going to be coming over from OSR lines because a search turns it up at some point, or they hear it talked about in a conversation.

This, right here, is one of the most interesting things Lex says. It's not that I disagree. I am posting this on a blog. It's public. Yes. Talking to one person seems counterproductive, on first blush. It is a reasonable point, and I want to give it its due.

The problem is that I very rarely see Lex's point actually work. Most of the stuff I've read on the web that's convinced me to change my mind are conversations between individuals. There's unspoken history I don't know, context I don't have, rough edges that never get hashed out, the gaps are the things that somehow pulled me in. I'm attempting to provide the thing that got me in the first place.

So, I did think about tomorrow, it's that what I think may be valuable  for someone is just hearing the name "Tony Bath" and not getting much more context on what that means unless they go hunting. If they don't want to hunt? Fine. No skin off my nose.

Now this is just wrong, and not only wrong, but an underhanded jab. A mistake did not lead to the creation of the Forge. An intentional choice, grounded in the experience in the TRPG hobby of the time, driven by men of both ego and capacity,[4] led to the creation of the Forge.

The Forge itself led directly to what is a significant backbone of the theory and practice that is responsible for the modern indie RPG hobby as the cottage industry that it is.

Note the careful evasion of actually defining what that "mistake" was. If you're going to call it out, you've got to call it out. If you're going to evoke it, you've got to evoke it.

Now, this is just silly .I was very clear. And also, quoted out of order, if I may add? That doesn't read well. But, here, earlier in the post you're quoting:

Lex. Lex. Mechanics are a concretization of philosophy. And I know you know this. Pitting philosophy against mechanics is the thing that the Forge was reacting against, which is at the heart of modern DnD! One of the old guard shouldn't be making this mistake. And yet, here we are.

Here's the error, which compounded in the 3.5 days. System matters because philosophy and mechanics must be aligned, with mechanics flowing from philosophy. Men of great ego and capacity, driven by widsespread ludonarrative dissonance, created the Forge. I was certainly not trying to jab at anyone, and I wish you'd just asked for clarification instead of assuming I meant an under-handed jab.

Perhaps the largest mistake here is to think that this is a personal message. What's the title on this particular growth in my digital garden? "What is story gaming?" That's not about a particular conversation or a particular person or even a particular story.

That title is consciously chosen, along with the cover that goes with it. I specifically picked up the idea of the fairy tale, the quote "fairy story," as central, an illustration, because it's universal. I want to talk about universal themes, not of stories necessarily, but of design.

And yet, here you are, writing to me. Calling me by my username: Spyder Openly. Hell, if you wanted to you could just call me Nathan. I wouldn't care.

But, if this wasn't a personal address... why personally address? Like, on paper I understand what you're saying, but in the practical, we're writing this blog posts to each other, with Weirth as an implied part of the conversation. Because, as it turns out, it's far more fun to write to people, and to address their context. You attempt to not leave out too many gaps, but you and I and even Weirth have been doing that as we have gone on.

And that's actually okay, for the record. Gaps have a way of getting people moving.

The problem for this paragraph of yours, this penultimate point, is that you didn't actually provide a practical demonstration of the philosophy of story gaming. You talked a lot of hype about how it could happen, but you didn't show how it does happen. You never grounded it. You never landed the plane.

You could have easily done it from the beginning. Your 24-minute walk could have been a 10-minute distillation, especially given the "he already knows that" bits, which really are the actual explication of the process and thinking of story gaming.

If he already knows all that, then you didn't need to have that conversation in the first place, and you certainly didn't need to make it public. If he didn't know all that, then my approach of explaining the philosophy and the grounding motivations followed by more literal examples is far superior to your hype-man approach. That's before we even talk about the failure of the Count of Monte Cristo illustration. That was just a dud across the board.

I don't convince a wargamer by doing anything. I don't need to convince a wargamer, especially if they're asking questions about what it is. I don't need to persuade them. They're already doing it.

All I have to do is say, "Hey, the same methods that you're using to think about tactical gaming, if you apply those to think about how the story moves and why the story moves —maybe with some mechanics that help you with that along the way — you're golden. Keep doing what you're doing."

That doesn't make for much of a discussion.

Except that there's one problem, which I feel like isn't being addressed. If you do exactly what you said, you will hit so many branches on the way down that you'll practically look like a candy cane. Communication sometimes has to be succint, but I don't believe it to be one of those times.  Could I have been more concrete in drawing forward from the wargaming experience to the storygaming one? 

Absolutely. I'll cop to that. Sure. 

I won't pretend that I wasn't talking off the cuff, while walking around. It's a flawed video, a first attempt that I don't think is perfect (particularly with discovering not one but two deadzones right outside my house), but I think I like the format and want to improve on it.

But my basic read was to provide elucidate on the common ground between wargaming and storygaming by showing that I knew their processes, understood them, and liked them, and then try and say something like what you said:

"Hey, the same methods that you're using to think about tactical gaming, if you apply those to think about how the story moves and why the story moves —maybe with some mechanics that help you with that along the way — you're golden."

But  I would add a bit to it, and I tried to, and I fucked it up. So here's hopefully me doing that last part better. 

"Those methods that you've learned: systemic generation, carrot and stick rewards, and committing to the overarching narrative as it proceeds, can be applied in ways you wouldn't expect. You can take all of these methods and apply them to a deeply psychological game."

And then I would end with a question

"Do you want to know how to do that?"

Because, contrary to what you may think, Lex, I am not trying to convince Weirth, or even win him over. And if, at that point, it had been established that Weirth understood me but didn't wish to go any further than that, cool! Communication was achieved.

But communication is a two-way street.  He has to know that I can understand him. And that's what I tried for, well done or not.

As I close, I'm posting this next one out of order, but I think it's fitting that it's put here, so I hope Lex agrees to the appropriateness. If not... well I did it and we'll just have to make sure I don't do it again.

For the record, I essentially disagree that mechanics are a concretization of philosophy. Mechanics can be guided by your philosophy, but they aren't strict reifications. The philosophy has to come first. It's what motivates and grounds, so we have to talk about the philosophy absent mechanics first.

 I didn't say mechanics are always a successful implementation of your philosophy, but mechanics always express a philosophy. But, given how you were just busting my balls about not providing concrete examples of the storygaming philosophy... well the chuckle you got out of me was at least somewhat warranted. Concreteness for me, but not for thee?

"What Even IS Storygaming?": Explaining the Joke

HUGE Shout-Out to Alex for Using THIS Edition of Brother's Grimm to respond to me!

One of the hardest things to understand about how I operate is that, for all my verbosity, that my goal is always simple: truths found are better than truths told. If I can get you to the water, without knowing that I left a trail of breadcrumbs for you to get to it, I count it as a success. Weird thing to do, I know, but I have learned that truths told don't sink into the skull correctly. Better to miss and look like an idiot than look like I accomplished my goal, only to have it go poorly later. I think of this as a respectful way to deal with people.

So, I've been in something of a conversation with World of Weirth for a little while, both publicly and in the DMs of Twitter. I thought, while on a walk, to try and produce a rambling stream while I walked. And with the exception of finding out that there's not one but two dead spots near my home for service, I think I did pretty well!

 

The aim of the video was to make a reasonably-educated BR/OSR person start asking questions. Most of the time when I am talking to someone, actually talking to them, I sound them out, first. I don't deal in arguments, I deal in people, and therefore I first see what happens when I start shaking trees.

Weirth's response was perfect: he DM'd me the following. He ran a Google search and asked if this was what I meant.

My goal was to create a desire to go find out more, and then start talking about what was found.

My mission for the night was accomplished.

So, I was happy, and posted it to Twitter, because why not? Who knows what will come of it?

I woke up to a magnum opus from Lex, who politely posted a really good summary of storygaming... and missed the point of what I was attempting to do.

Because I suppose Lex doesn't know I talk to people, first.

Well. Time to talk to him.

You know, every religious philosophy on the planet generally has an admonition against the summoning of demons, devils, or other negatively aspected spirits. There's a really good reason for that, actually, because if you draw a seven-pointed star in salt, surrounded by two circles with the text SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET written between those circles in the blood of a schoolgirl, and then you set a silver brazier fueled by hawthorn and dragon's blood with a pair of d10 and a d6 on top being slowly melted, you will actually summon me, and it never ends well.

So we have to talk about this.

He's right, of course! I tagged him, openly. I started this. It's my doing. This will be fun! 

Spyder means well and he seems like a good guy, but he is absolutely the worst possible person to be discussing this, in part because he gets lost in the weeds so easily, and also because he's trying to keep one foot in both worlds, somewhere between the OSR and story gaming.

When he's having a conversation with them, he gets entangled in their expectations and promises without actually making the argument he needs to. Fair enough, he's a lot younger. He's not as bloodied.[1] I've danced this dance before, so let me get my big feather fans out, because we're going to do it again.

For the record, this is the footnote. And yes, it's awesome.

I think I'm a bit more bloodied than Lex expects. My style of engagement is because I have drawn blood being right (and wrong) before, not despite it. It is not "niceness" that drives me, but a desire for actual truth.

My goal was not to present my camp, but to get Weirth to find my camp, on his own, in his own good time. It is the most respectful way I know to address someone, from very bloody experience. But, Lex couldn't have known this, and therefore.. here it is. The explanation. 

Ish.

He starts talking about the perception among the OSR that story gaming is about telling a specific story. He almost gets somewhere with that, but I think the connectivity failure drags him off the important point, which is that the OSR and D&D itself specifically, historically, have been far more about running and telling specific stories than story gaming ever was.

In fact, story gaming in part came about as a reaction to and reactionary movement against the railroading and specific storytelling of D&D in particular. You may wonder, Lex, what is your grounding for saying that D&D of all things is about telling specific stories?

I will simply step to the side and point at all of the pages that have been published in the last 50-plus years devoted to modules and scenarios, many of which are very specific as to what you need to do, in what order, where, how, and what the outcome should be.[2] That, in and of itself, almost defines story gaming by representing its antithesis. That is explicitly not what story gaming is about, so we can discard that right off the top of the deck.

Here's the footnote:

Truthfully, you can only love Expedition to the Barrier Peaks so much before you have to acknowledge it wants a single path through the module and it will enforce it with colored keycards to get it.

Now, this is where the advantage of my style comes out. I know that Weirth would roll his eyes at the above. He's a dyed-in-the-wool wargamer. This would bounce right off him, because he knows he's not being talked to.

I knew this.

So I skipped it.

Weirth agrees with Lex and I about this, pretty hardcore. This is simply superfluous. It's a waste of space.

So now we need to talk about the affirmative. What is story gaming about? What is its central mechanism of practice? Spyder makes a vital mistake, and it's one that he's prone to, by first and foremost talking about mechanics. That's just wrong. It has very little to do with mechanics at all, at any level.

First and foremost, story gaming is about a philosophical approach to the practice of play that is essentially different from many games that came before, and became the inspiration of the indie gaming movement. That philosophical practice is a focus on the character as prime mover of play and not externally applied architectural pressure.

This is not a completely umbrella truth when it comes to story gaming, however. There are many games that fall under the rubric of story gaming that deliberately subvert that assumption. Bluebeard's Bride starts with a very specific situational setup and narrow specification of who the protagonist is.[3]

Notice the philosophical approach: that it is about the actions and exploration of the character within a specific situation, and that character's motivations and how they change over time, which is the center, intentionally, of the experience.

Ah, now we start to actually talk. 

Lex. Lex. Mechanics are a concretization of philosophy. And I know you know this. Pitting philosophy against mechanics is the thing that the Forge was reacting against, which is at the heart of modern DnD! One of the old guard shouldn't be making this mistake. And yet, here we are.

The mechanics are the ludogical side of the situation, the experience.

And, if you listen to my rant, you will see me trying to breadcrumb back to this. My references to Bath are not accidental. Bath is actually a perfect expression of what Lex and I hold in such regard, he just has a different goal: to present a series of tactical situations. If  I could get Weirth to see this, with something he knows, he then knows it in his way, which is what I want.

This philosophical approach didn't originate with the Forge, of course. It was reified in many ways, written down, presented in actual games for the first time to what was rapidly growing as the alternative RPG hobby. The roots go further back.

You can make a good argument that 19th-century Kriegsspiel in Prussia was one of the first manifestations of what is modern story gaming. After all, Kriegsspiel was played by a group of players and run by a set of referees who had no set of mechanics to adjudicate the results. Instead, they used their understanding of the game space, of the setting, of the capabilities of the things being discussed to judge whether or not the intended result by the players would be reified within the sphere of play.

It just so happened to be that their sphere of play was 19th-century field warfare, and the referees were experienced officers and subject experts. But that's not truly different.

From the modern manifestation of story gaming, the biggest difference is that in the ensuing time we have developed tools and methodologies, technologies for making that job easier, codifying expert knowledge, and making it easily referenceable.

But now I'm doing it. I'm getting lost in the weeds talking about mechanics. It's not about the mechanics.

.... I know this, Lex. Quite strongly. If anything, I got a pretty good education on this from Jim Parkin, the FKR RPG afficiando. And, remember that Free Kriegsspiel was a later development in the Kriegsspiel, and that the philosophy you're talking about was originally pretty damn crunchy, because philosophy and mechanics are not opposed. Mechanics express philosophy. And I know you should this.

Let's talk about another game, which I would consider a predecessor of the modern story gaming experience. We'll even throw in a moment about mechanics here while we're at it: Toon.

I know. You're confused now. How in the world is Toon a story game? Well, look at how it's actually intended to be played, and one of the central axioms of how it is to be run by the GM. "Is it funny? It happens."

While there are some fairly crunchy mechanics that describe characters, they're not overly extensive. This is the critical bit of GM advice that cements the whole book: "Is it funny? It happens. "What kind of a story are we telling? It's a comedy. It's a Saturday morning cartoon."

It's the kind of thing where ludicrous events happen, and if the intent is funny, odds are good that it works. If there's a question, err on the side of funny. This is, in its own fumbling way, a movement toward story gaming, because it is about the story that is being woven at the table.

It's not about the narrative that's being woven at the table, but about the story that's being woven at the table. The differentiation between a story and a narrative is critical. If I refer to something as a "fairy story," odds are good that you know what I'm talking about immediately. More so if you've studied the Brothers Grimm and understand the history of the term fairy story through the Victorian era into today.

You might even be familiar with the way that Tolkien used the term fairy story. But every fairy story is not the same. In fact, if I tell you that we are about to share a fairy story, you don't have any idea exactly what's about to happen.

Any number of narrative elements and a million billion narrative combinations could hit the table next, and you just don't know. But you do have a feel for the themes, for the way stories are structured, and for the way characters interact within the framework of a fairy story.

The word themes was bolded, italicized, and underlined by me, because at this point Lex's explanation gets a bit ridiculous. What's the word I keep using in my video, over and over and over and over and over?

THEME

At some point, if it's not obvious that Lex is explaining my own theory to me, I'm not sure what to say but "Seriously?" I know the word story trips Weirth and his kind up, and so therefore I use the word theme. Because that's what a story is! A narrative with thematic coherence! Really good stories use theme in genius ways.

Stories are narrative that evoke theme.

Put a pin into the word evoke. We're gonna get back to that in another blog post.

That knowledge that you can understand what kind of story we're telling is the essence of what story gaming is. That there are kinds of stories and that we can look to them to help guide our decision making, no matter the mechanics or absence thereof. Not only can we, within the context of this game, we should.

Take a moment to sit back and imagine the equivalent of Kriegsspiel for fairy stories. Imagine you're sitting down with one of the Brothers Grimm, and he says, "All right, you're in a big dark forest. Who are you?"[4]

Now it's time for character generation. Who are you? What kind of character fits into a fairy story? You could be a talking fox, or a child who's been abandoned by his parents, or a troll, or a wise old owl. All of those are characters that fit into the context of a fairy story.

You're probably not a grizzled soldier wrestling with his PTSD or a wizard who's just shown up to try and get some gold pieces so he can level up.[5]

Here's Lex's footnotes, for completeness.

As an aside, this actually leads into one of my favorite bits of online accidental punditry, which supports story gaming while pretending to be D&D. It's where Deborah Ann Woll sits down and invites Jon Bernthal to play D&D with her, but what she does is not how D&D is conceived as being played by many of its advocates.

What we have here is pure story gaming: setting up a situation and then asking someone who they are, why they're there, explaining what they see, asking what they intend to do, making the character the core driver of the experience with no preconceived idea of what the outcome should be, but instead deciding where the narrative power resides.↩︎

Though I'm not going to lie, the idea of a D&D wizard wandering into a proper fairy story and getting absolutely fucked up, given the rules of the fairy story universe, does make me laugh to contemplate.↩︎

Yes, Lex, I know this already, because I literally talked him through taking Bath, something Weirth understands, and trying to convert it to Dumas. The contrast is purposeful. It's meant to get Weirth thinking as to how to do it.

The philosophy of story gaming is taking that general idea that you know what kind of story we're talking about, and you can judge the probability of outcomes by not simulating a physical mechanical world, but by thinking about the themes and styles and nature of a story, and just playing that out.

You also may rightly object and say that you can certainly play D&D in that mode. You can play D&D where your outcomes and actions and choices are guided by the kind of story that you're in. After all, that's why Appendix N exists, right? It exists to provide a flavorful stew of influences and stories, which should, and some would say must, guide your decision making as to how outcomes of decisions that are in doubt can be resolved.

I would say you are correct, but that is not the philosophy by which D&D has been played for 40 years at most tables.

Once. Again. With. Fucking. Feeling.

WEIRTH KNOWS ALL THIS ALREADY. SO DO MOST OF THE BROSR. This. Doesn't. Need. To be. Said.

Now we're going to get around to talking about mechanics. Having established the philosophical premise that the story framework itself should be what guides the methodology for deciding what comes next when a question comes up, free of any illusion that we're actually simulating a physics, then what is the point of mechanics within story gaming?

After all, you could certainly run it like a free Kriegsspiel with the GM simply deciding. Collaborative storytelling, it's called. It works. It's fun. You should give it a try sometime.

So why mechanics? Because we're not simulating the physical processes of a world. Instead, mechanics exist to help simulate the story mechanics of a story. Are there story mechanics?

Anyone who has seriously studied writing can tell you there are many, and the number of books that try to teach people about those story mechanics almost rivals the number of teachers who have a class to convince they have the secret of writing the next great story, whether it be a novel, a short story, or a screenplay.[6]The focus on simulating the architecture of stories is one of the things that differentiates story gaming from more traditional forms of tabletop RPGs.

His footnote is amazing.

Did you pick up on the fact that I have very little respect for most books about writing intended to teach people how to write? It may have been too subtle.↩︎

That being said. I know. Like I said, Bath is a really good example that Weirth alreayd knows, which is why I went there. The rest of the post continues on from there, and I don't have anything really constructive to say beyond this point. Lex made the very mistake that created the Forge, and then more or less restated a core philosophy that I have a great deal of love and respect for. While thinking I missed it. 

Regardless, that's probably enough on that subject for now. I'm sorry, Spyder. When you summon the devil, sometimes you get the horns.

As any good Christian does when he meets a demon. I shrug. Chuckle a little bit. And go about my business.

In the end, this exchange has been ironic. Lex wrote a essay to explain story gaming philosophy to me, while missing that my entire approach was a practical demonstration of it. You don't convince a wargamer by dumping a decade of Forge terminology on their desk; you lead them to a familiar shore—like Bath—and let them notice the water for themselves.

Mechanics aren't opposed to philosophy; they're philosophy made tangible. And if you have to explain the joke, it usually means you missed the punchline.

Always Winter, Never Christmas

 

This is a post about the conversations and experiences that killed my tolerance for endless, formless campaigns and forced me to start constructing a system that actually knows how to end.

The realization that time and narrative require rigid boundaries didn't just break my understanding of tabletop games; it became the foundation for how I rebuild them. When you realize a system lacks the structural mechanics to bear the weight of actual stakes—when there is no engine to measure the toll of the journey, no architecture for conviction, and no framework to forge a genuine ending—you have to design one yourself. 

I have a habit of collecting extremely traumatized people for friends. I don't mean "Oh, he had a hard life". I mean "Oh, someone dismantled you at an early age, burned down all the sense of safety you could ever have, and pissed in the ashes". It's a heavy thing, but these people have a perspective on aesthetics that's utterly unmatched. They don't have the energy to bullshit. They're not going to meet you halfway. 

You either meet them where they're at, or you don't.

It all had to be reassembled, as an adult, so they're much sharper about what they like and why. All the precision of a child, but none of the nostalgia to cloud it. And, because they had to start all over, their opinions are sharper, clearer, more primally accurate, and thus more correct than they'd otherwise be. 

I said what I said.

One of these friends, who I have known for years, has never played RPGs. He knows I love them, he knows I play them, but he has no direct experience. It's a topic we've discussed, for years. And then, one day, he found out that there are no actual structural support - act 1, act 2, act 3, this is how it ends -  and he was confused. "But people can't figure that kind of thing out, not innately. That's like saying it's always winter, but never Christmas!" And I knew what he meant: 

Narrative is a function of time, and time is independent of you. Things end, whether you like it or not. It's not a decision to be made. Time is involuntary, and meaning is made within its constraints.

I'd never really considered this, not seriously. I'd played TTRPGs since I was 15, starting with 3.5 DnD. I remember thinking that you did all 20 levels, just inherently, and that the 20 levels were a story structure. And I remember the exact feeling I had, when someone told me that was never the intent: "Then what the fuck am I supposed to be doing?" I remember forcing that feeling down, ignoring it for years, just "playing to find out", which in this case meant "Ignore common sense and play until everyone just sorta agrees it's done". Which almost never worked, just for the record. Either we'd play until we got sick of it, or things just petered out, or we'd realize that the real ending of the narrative was six sessions ago, and now we had this month and a half or more or just... treading water. I felt like twenty or so years of bad practice had been called out, all at once.

I contacted another such friend, who used to play TTRPGs and doesn't anymore, and asked him about the conversation, and he agreed. "Yeah, absolutely! That's why I don't play them anymore. You don't need to tell people what happens on the journey, but journeys end. You can go on a new journey, but the old one ended, and it happened regardless of what you did."

The thing was, this friend? He's the best GM I ever met. He ran two of the best campaigns I've ever been in. The two of us were totally in lockstep about aesthetics being the crown of ethics, that what you like is a deep reflection of what's in your soul. And if there was any one person I ever wanted to be like, in GMing, it was this dude. The games he ran for me actually changed my life, and in one case changed my soul. He understood things about running TTRPGs I could barely comprehend, true things, things that made me a better person, and when he walked away I had no idea what to make of it. 

Well.

Now he'd told me.

And there is no one alive who understands the medium better, whether I wanted to admit it or not.

When I asked him why so few people seemed to understand what I was grappling with, he had one question: "How many people in the TTRPG community aren't moral degenerates, and therefore have an opinion worth a damn?"

I know the answer to that question. And nodded. "Well, at least I know what I need to do."

So, later, I went to a third such friend, and recounted what had been told to me, and he looked at me confused: "Yeah, that's part of why I never tried beyond a single session with you. I didn't know where it was going, and I have enough uncertainty in life. I thought I told you that, fifteen years ago. I thought you knew already." 

I had forgotten.

Yeah, he'd said it then.

I hadn't heard him.

So, I protested that it wasn't an uncertain process, that it was something felt out, by the group. He asked me if that was congruent with what I believed groups of people were actually capable of, comfortably, or if it took more effort than most people could get away with.

He already knew the answer to that question. We laughed.

To decide what time is is to be in Hell, no matter the context. It is to be in winter, but to never be in Christmas.

I used to think the point of the game was the freedom to keep going forever, to invent the shape of the story as we went. What I actually had was a long winter with no Christmas at the end of it — session after session of treading water, waiting for an ending that no one was willing or able to call. My friends saw it clearly because they had already lived through the version that destroys you. 

They weren’t stupid. 

They weren't going to volunteer for the smaller one.

When someone who has had to rebuild their entire sense of reality tells you that your medium is fundamentally broken, the only ethical response is to listen. They demanded a structure that honors the journey by allowing it to finish. To ask a player to invest their heart and their personal myth into a story requires the basic decency of a structural guarantee. It requires a system that measures the stress of the journey, forces a climax, and promises a resolution. 

Finality is what gives choices meaning. 

Without the guarantee of an ending, no belief is actually tested, and no sacrifice actually matters.

RPGs Have an Identity Problem

"We think that we know a man or a woman, when so much of what we know is actually that man's or that woman's situation, his or her place on the board of life. Move the pawn to the last row and see her rise in armor, sword in hand." 

— Gene Wolfe, Home Fires

"In so far as I am not loved, I am unintelligible to myself."

- St. Dimitru Staniloae, The Experience of God

The central problem of most RPGs is the lack of any real-group dynamics, also known as the "get along gang": people who are together and it makes absolutely no sense as to why. They haven't killed each other, but they're not friends, despite having lived through tumultuous circumstances together. There's a gray zone where nothing is truly established in the group, and people just sorta... muddle along. No matter what happens, nothing changes between characters, not really.

For an extreme structural example: in one game a player ran an openly evil character who began committing escalating acts of coercion and sexual abuse against an NPC. His alignment was known, yet it still left the table unable to read the situation. I thought it would do enough, but it didn't, because there were still too many gray spots. Was this coherent (if reprehensible) roleplay? Boundary-testing? A cry for help from a player who was personally deteriorating? Because the characters had no real relationships or shared moral baseline, and the players had no deeper knowledge of one another’s characters or states, everyone stayed stuck in that gray zone—uncertain how, or whether, to respond.

Old-schoolers will think that I am solely referring to modern DnD tables there, but no. The same things can happen at old-school tables, and it looks about the same, between the characters and their players.

See, both games do the same thing:

"Hi, I'm Nathan, and I'm playing Xenith, a lawful good paladin".

You see the problem? These are aspects of someone, but they're not who the person is. If anything, these are the makings of a parasocial relationship. Xenith is a lawful good paladin, sure. But nobody would know what to do with that. You get a picture, but you don't get a person out of that. How far can you push Xenith's lawful tendencies? He's a paladin, but why? What drives him in being a paladin? What get him to stop? And how might Xenith change his small and personal aspects, the stuff that actually makes roleplaying fun? These are questions that players actually need the answers to, in order to roleplay. And, let's be clear, sometimes players do need to ask these questions. A game that's about playing a role shouldn't make you guess as to how to address them. That utter lack of clarity makes the central point of the game a matter of luck or tons of trial and error.

Which games are specifically supposed to not do!

And before some smartass points out that DnD's source material doesn't do this, it absolutely does, even with Conan, who was said to wander because he was struggling with depression and black moods that he tried to avoid. You know exactly who Conan is: a man driven by his darkness to find life, however he can get it, morality be damned.

And, again, before some smartass points out this is theatre kids shit, I remind you that 1e ADnD literally has a table for how the races are supposed to interact with each other, and penalizes you for ignoring it.

Yes, RAW 1e DnD enforces RPing. But it also falls into the same problem: the center of what makes a character a character is not actually addressed. It has better tools, sure, and you could use them better, but better doesn't mean good, it doesn't make roleplaying a game.

This problem was solved, almost entirely, the instant I went to Burning Wheel. See, Burning Wheel has what are called Beliefs, and they are public knowledge. Here's Xenith's Beliefs, if I were to put him into Burning Wheel:

1. Bahamut the Platinum Dragon spared me from a life of hardship; my sword is his.

2. Honor is the only thing that matters.

3. Elkvor took advantage of my mercy. I will not let that happen again.

The difference really couldn't be starker, could it? You know exactly what Xenith is about now. The Beliefs are public, and nobody has to guess about what Xenith is about. And because the other players don't have to guess, they will treat Xenith in a consistent way, and that consistency will create a sense of identity.

And with identity, there's relationship in return. And now you have a cycle going. A loop that will keep people coming back for more.

Not only that, but thanks to the artha system, you know I am rewarded for playing my Beliefs to cause drama, and for playing against my Beliefs, if I think it a good idea. There's even a "Go do something so awesome that it just isn't captured by your Beliefs" reward, and it leads to some truly elevated roleplay. Now other players can decide to write Beliefs that clash with mine, or that work with it, and they get rewarded with power regardless. The most basic social element, choosing to ally or be against, suddenly becomes an actual choice in the roleplaying game. Alliances and grudges now have gameplay weight, because identity is clear.

With Beliefs public and rewarded, the gray zone collapses. Xenith is no longer a collection of labels; he is a person the table can see, push, support, or oppose. Alliances and grudges gain weight because identity is no longer a guessing game. Move the pawn to the last row, and the character can finally rise in armor, sword in hand—because everyone at the table now knows who he is, including his player.

Demon City: Read Thru, Part Two

 

Welcome back! This week, we're continuing on with my read-thru of Demon City.

This game has found me in the middle of a really interesting transition, and it's relevant for this part of the read-through, so we're going to get into that first.

Yes, There is Objectively Good Design in TTRPGs

We have to get this out of the way, because apparently it's a controversial point. There's good game design, as an objective reality.

I will define what good design is for the purposes of this blog post:

Design that, when used properly, gives back more than it takes.

Random tables are objectively good design. They almost always give back more than they take. Obviously, it's possible for implementation to screw up a random table. Yes, it's possible to screw up implementation, but it's pretty hard to really screw up a random table. The point is, a random table takes a load off the GM that allows him to not spend so freaking much mental power during the game. It is objectively better to have a random table over not having one. Sorry not sorry.

There is also bad design:

Design that, even when used properly, takes more energy than what it gives back. 

The entirety of F.A.T.A.L. is an example of bad design. Overcomplicated, bloated, and needlessly detailed... oh and it's also one of the most hatefully stupid games of all time. Hilarious to read, though!

1:1 PVP Is Superior

So, for the last month and a half I've been running a 1:1 PVP  game, also known as a Braunstein. The players are all inherently against each other, and plotting against each other, Diplomacy-style. I don't plan situations, I just take their orders, make sure they make sense, and then adjudicate how everything collides together. Then, when the play sessions come up, I just focus on shaking things up as hard as I can, forcing the players to reconsider what they're doing.

And it is objectively the most fun I have ever had running a game. Just flat out. It's not close, it's not subtle. I don't plan. I don't push. I don't even think about the future. I manage. I just sit back, people fuck around, and they find out.

I have had a more meaningful time. You've got tape, right on this blog, of some campaigns I've run that are magical. Actual magic. 

But I have not had a more fun time running a game, ever. It's awesome.

Yeah, I spend "just about" as much time adjudicating actions between sessions as I did prepping, if not more so, but it's not prep: it's play. It's not work, it's fun! I'm having a blast! I get regular installments of this completely unhinged fantasy EVENT. All for the low price of setting up the scenario and telling everyone not to play nice.

So, to recap, 1:1 PVP gets me more enjoyment for far less work, if not less time, and has pretty much redefined what I want out of a game.

So This Game Found Me At An Interesting Juncture

Two months ago? I would have eaten this game up with a freaking spoon. Immediately. 

But Father Time is fleeting and cruel.

Now, I am absolutely not in the target audience of this book, not anymore. See, you have to convince me that leaving 1:1 PVP would be just as worthwhile as running it. And that is an ask. A real ask. Because I now got a system that automatically maintains moment, right through missed sessions and weird adult life schedules and other basic problems of "stop time" in RPGs, and I am absolutely happy with it. You have to really sell me on playing this game at this point.

The sections we're covering in the book today are the Host advice, worldbuilding help, actual pitches for campaigns, and some "sketches" to help the Host riff.

The Host Advice

Oh man, Father Time is so cruel. This should have stolen my heart. And two months ago, it would have. There's a distillation of all the different kinds of horror "plots", sorta like plot infrastructure for Hosts to use, without railroading players. And this section is brilliant. If you're not running 1:1 PVP.. you need to read this section. Like, you owe Zak S for this part of the book, alone. Zak breaks down different kinds of plot structures that players can move around in so thoroughly and well that it would be stupid to not get the book.

But, given that this wasn't two months ago? But was just read a few days ago?

Yeah.

I don't particularly need it. Which is incredibly weird. It's so well-written, and I could see adapting some of it, particularly the "dungeon style" plot, but this is fantastic advice for something I don't plan on doing that much anymore. It is, without a doubt, the best guide for "stop time" TTRPGs ever written.

Not close.

Worldbuilding Help

I loved literally every sentence in this section. The book breaks down how to access archives, how Uber drivers can be useful, and how the FBI actually works in a way that I find relevant. There's not a bad word in this section, other GMing guides should be legitimately ashamed that they don't think to put stuff like this in their games, and if they do, do it better. Kthx.

Seriously. Again, this is S+ tier stuff. Literally no notes.

Campaign Pitches

How the fuck is this section even better???

So, Zak breaks down how to make distinctive campaigns, with little modifications and hacks to the system to reward certain kinds of actions. If you're playing the game, just steal these ideas, outright. But if you're not, this section is a masterclass in manipulating the system lightly to provide a compelling campaign pitch to your players. Literally it's all perfect. This one section sells me on running Demon City by itself. I cannot praise it enough. There's about a half-dozen pitches in here, and they's even a Stranger Things kinda a pitch, and it's awesome.

Sketches

So, this one's a bit of a weird section, but it's essentially a bunch of just half-baked enough ideas that you can insert into a campaign. There's tons of ideas on how to weaponize crime in the interest of horror games. This section is worth revisiting, from time to time, to have it jog your imagination. Zak S literally rewrote how I think RPG books should be written, with this one section.

So Yeah. 

Demon City is an absolute masterclass in TTRPG design. Zak S cooked here. The Host advice is the best "how to actually run horror without railroading" material I've ever read. The worldbuilding section is criminally practical. The campaign pitches are pure rocket fuel, and the sketches section single-handedly raised my standards for what an RPG book should deliver.

If you're running traditional stop-time games—especially horror, mystery, or modern-day campaigns—you should buy this book yesterday. It will make you a better GM, full stop. Even if you never run Demon City itself, the ideas here will level up whatever you're doing.

But for me? Right now? It's bittersweet.

This game found me at the exact moment I fell in love with something else. 1:1 PVP has ruined me (in the best way). It delivers consistent chaos, player-driven drama, and zero prep guilt in a way that feels almost unfair to everything else. I still love what Demon City is doing. I respect the hell out of it. Parts of it will definitely leak into my Braunsteins. But the honest truth is I'm not rushing to switch back to traditional campaign play.

Father Time is cruel like that.

This was Part 2 of my read-through, focusing on the GM-facing material. There's still at least one more part to go. If I do not see you next week, I do not blame you.

It is no easy road.

Demon City: Read Thru, Part One

 

Welcome back! This week, we're beginning of my impressions of Demon City.

Every once in a while I run into an RPG that's so coherent that it can only be called foundational. If you read the game, you will walk away with your tastes fundamentally altered. These are the kinds of games that need to be read and played, because they will actually change you, and that's the kind of game you want to play. Stuff like ADnD 1e, Burning Wheel, and Ironsworn, even if you wind up not liking them change the way you do things, and I am of the opinion that such things should be in your library of games.

Demon City is one such entry.

Also: if your favorite RPG (or something monumental like, say ACKSII) isn't on that list, understand I am trying to talk about things that fundamentally change how you interact with the hobby, once read and understood.

Also also: I'm not claiming to make a definitive list. If you need absolute certainty, go to Hell. You'll find plenty of certainty there.

So, why is Demon City so important?

1. The only actually gameable usage of Tarot, at least so far.

2. It utterly understands what it's trying to model.

3. Its mechanics are objectively correct.

Tarot Is Hard to Design Around

My brother-in-law, Kyle, the smartest most erudite person I know, tried to design a tarot RPG for years. He gave up on it. couldn't wrap his head around it. This is the dude who taught me almost everything I know, and whose methods of learning enabled me to go on and do my own things. And he couldn't figure it out.

I've looked at a few games that claim to use tarot cards, like His Majesty the Wyrm. I have not been impressed, at all. They're usuually used as limited number generator, as opposed to fully exploring using cards and images for randomness. There's nothing in these games that I couldn't do with a regular deck of cards.

And Demon City absolutely nails it. You have multiple decks, with cards traveling between them. The layered imagery of tarot is used to full effect, not to mention that Zak doesn't shy away from going full on esoteric when necessay. It's a fine line to walk, but I didn't miss a beat with what Zak was saying.

Well, except the Rider deck is demonic. Fucking burn that thing please.

Demon City Utterly Understands Horror

The thing people do not understand is that cities, as we have constructed them, are abominations. The instant nature stops being a sparring partner and becomes our play-toy, something has gone horribly wrong. And cities are this play-toy dynamic fully expressed. Modern cities are actually horrifying. And Demon City takes every effort to show that it understands this fact.

And it does it by quoting Isaiah 24:12... which becomes all the more poignant once you just look at the full chapter:

Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.

2 And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the servant, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him.

3 The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word.

4 The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish.

5 The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.

6 Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left.

7 The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth, all the merryhearted do sigh.

8 The mirth of tabrets ceaseth, the noise of them that rejoice endeth, the joy of the harp ceaseth.

9 They shall not drink wine with a song; strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it.

10 The city of confusion is broken down: every house is shut up, that no man may come in.

11 There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone.

12 In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with destruction.

13 When thus it shall be in the midst of the land among the people, there shall be as the shaking of an olive tree, and as the gleaning grapes when the vintage is done.

14 They shall lift up their voice, they shall sing for the majesty of the Lord, they shall cry aloud from the sea.

15 Wherefore glorify ye the Lord in the fires, even the name of the Lord God of Israel in the isles of the sea.

16 From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, even glory to the righteous. But I said, My leanness, my leanness, woe unto me! the treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously; yea, the treacherous dealers have dealt very treacherously.

17 Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth.

18 And it shall come to pass, that he who fleeth from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that cometh up out of the midst of the pit shall be taken in the snare: for the windows from on high are open, and the foundations of the earth do shake.

19 The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly.

20 The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again.

21 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth.

22 And they shall be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days shall they be visited.

23 Then the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the Lord of hosts shall reign in mount Zion, and in Jerusalem, and before his ancients gloriously.

It is important to understand that the description of this city assumes that the people within it are rotten to the core, and have been abandoned so that the harsh and cruel world may take its pound of flesh.

Like it or not, this is modern horror in a nutshell: humanity fucked around, and now it's finding out. Horror is not about personal transgression punished, but the societal consequences of the rape of the natural world turned on its people.

Demon City understands this. Sharply.

The Mechanics Are Objectively Correct 

Look, folks, I don't say this lightly, but there's literally nothing incorrect about these mechanics. I don't mean they're good. I don't mean they're bad. I don't even mean enjoyable. I mean, when I'm reading these, Zak presents solutions to problems that are so good that I immediately know how to fix other games.

On almost. Every. Single. Freaking. Page.

From the incredible initiative system to the downtime actions leading to advancement... all of this is simply correct. There's more than a few games I can think of that would benefit from having these systems be dropped in, with almost no modifications. It's a shame these ideas haven't spread that much. May have to fix that, with my.... miniscule reach. But it's not nothing.

In Conclusion, 

Demon City is not just another horror RPG — it is a foundational work that earns its place alongside the greats. It delivers the rarest achievement in game design: a system that feels inevitable once you’ve seen it. The Tarot implementation is the first one that actually matters. The horror vision is unflinching and thematically profound, rooting modern urban dread in something ancient and true rather than cheap jump scares. And the mechanics are so clean and purposeful that they expose weaknesses in other games while offering elegant fixes you’ll want to steal. 

You may not run Demon City forever. You may not even love every session. But after reading and playing it, you will design, referee, and think about roleplaying games differently. That is the mark of the truly important titles — the ones that don’t just entertain, but reshape the hobby inside you.

We'll go onto the GMing section next week! It is here I leave you. If I do not see you next week, I do not blame you. It is no easy road.