Critters v. Nasty Mages

A spooky one for the spooky season, Through Familiar Eyes is in pre-launch over on Backerkit. It's a kind of fairytale horror piece, self-contained with pregens with their own tiny tiny system. It's a number of things that might be of interest.

The tiny tiny system will be the first public appearance of Applesauce, the house RPG system I've been running for the past couple of years now, finally ready for curtain call. It's a hundred words long, so it's the kind of chonky crunchfest you probably associate with me.

It gets to be so svelte because Applesauce adventures are very much in the high-trust zone, with so much gameplay for the PCs that the system can usually just hang back, and when we call on it it can zip in, do the thing, and zip back out.

The horrific bits are pretty horrific, but ... I'm a sap, so the PCs have lots to work with that can turn the horror on its head. It's been tested with a couple of groups so far and I'm hoping to run more in the next couple of days or weeks (drop me a line if you'd like to play in one, or run a test group, or if you'd like to be a test-reader on the current draft).

It's about faith, and love, and addiction, and (ultimately) the fragility of cruel people.

It'll also include a kind of GMing newsletter called Cooking With Applesauce, as well as some preview material for the fantasy city-guide it lurks in the hinterland of.

Anyway, I think it's really good and also pretty creepy! Give it a peek. Boo!

What's Forever For?

Feeling the Heartbeat of HTT, and the Cumberland Style

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While I’ve been groping around for the tools and language for HTT (the High-Trust Traditional style of play Cumberland is devoted to) for as long as I’ve been a gamer, I’ve only blathered about it openly since the days of Google Plus, that platform Google hit-and-quit back in the day.

And my methods of trying to convey what it is have changed over the last 15 years or so, as dozens of perfectly-clear-to-me explanations have crashed and burned. Often, it’s mistaken for some tangentially-related idea. “Oh, you mean sandboxes!” No, if I meant sandboxes, I’d just say sandboxes. “Oh, you mean FKR!” No, if I meant FKR, I’d just say FKR. “Oh, you mean immersion!” No, that sounds comfy but it’s not what I mean. And so on.

It's often the case that we round to the nearest familiar idea.

Sometimes, not often, someone will be like “Oh, you mean … basically every Trad RPG ever.”

And … kind of! That’s closer! It’s still not there, but it’s more true than the others.

Because if you play any trad RPG long enough, you’ll have HTT moments. Depending on the prep-habits of the GM, and the roleplay-focus of the table, they’ll be more frequent, or less so.

HTT is about designing to support those moments as more than moments: they can be the dominant mode of play. Sessions or campaigns made of HTT moments. Or, as close as we can manage! It’s soup.

If that sounds mushy: yep. This is a spectrum of emphasis. It’s not about hard white lines. It’s not remotely puristic. It’s about wanting more of a thing, and recognizing that there are others who want more of a thing, and recognizing what kind of RPG design supports that desire.

So, You’re Like Someone Who Loves Pickles on Your Burger So Much That You Pile Your Burgers With Pickles?

Yes I do and yes, I do.

But back to RPGs.

Thirty-something years ago, I thought the heart of what I love in RPGs was Tactical Infinity, and I said so, on convention panels, in correspondence, and eventually named it in an article. That term has even gained traction over the years, in some of the other RPG neighborhoods.

But I was only partly right, and it took nearly ten years (because I was eyeballs-deep in the industry for that time) to appreciate the emphasis that phrase was missing. As I noticed exactly what that was, I happily expressed it in my work, from Vanth to Uresia to the Risus Companion and beyond, though it crystallized, almost entirely, in the early Fly From Evil runs. Once I started supporting more than just Tactical Infinity, those magic moments started flooding every session.

And, ridiculously, it was just … character. Character nature, character values. The phrase I needed, to honestly describe the design I needed, was Characterized Tactical Infinity, or CTI to save some typing. 

But Isn’t Tactical Infinity Already Characterizing?

That’s what I had been hoping, but the answer is: sometimes. Not always and, honestly, not usually. Not with a great deal of depth, if it’s unsupported by anything but attitude. I mean, great roleplayers are going to be great without support, but without support, their great roleplaying is often reduced to decoration, atop the gameplay.

That’s what I meant about the GM’s prep habits, and the table’s roleplay focus. Those can turn the “sometimes” into some version of “pretty often,” or more. Or, in many cases, a whole lot less. When it’s a whole lot less, that’s Low-Trust Trad, or LTT. The bulk of 80s and 90s RPG material were designed around the mushy middle ground, regular old Trad, or Medium-Trust Trad. That’s also, I think, where most campaigns landed: somewhere in that big ol’ middle, where pickles are something on the burger.

My own work for the RPG industry (my GURPS and Star Trek stuff and so on) was almost entirely MTT, with a few LTT jaunts as the work demanded, and some visible yearnings for HTT.

One of the social-media graphics
I use for introducing folks to HTT.

So You And Your Gamers Sit Around Talking Like This?

Oh! No. Very much no.

This isn’t table terminology at all. We don’t have or need any special table terminology. We just show up and roleplay, the GM is a regular GM doing the regular GM things. We put our d8s on one leg at a time, like anyone.

In fact, if we did show up to the table, determined, as players, to “play HTT,” we would fail to do so. Ironic but true. Only roleplaying gets us there. We show up to roleplay. Our characters’ perspectives are all we give a wet slap about, in play.

The GM alone can support the leap from that to HTT, and it won’t get there by us blathering about it at the table. The GM gets it there through prep.

The wonky language is design stuff. Crafty stuff. Its only value is to RPG design, and it’s mostly about scenario design, specifically (with a dash of worldbuilding).

Because the mushy middle isn’t some compromise. It’s the logical consequence of trad’s own shape and nature, and, frankly, MTT is awesome. If I could play in well-run MTT campaigns for the rest of my life, I’d be pretty content. I’d still feel that extra-special tingle in those HTT moments, but, with a good GM doing old-fashioned 80s-and-90s-style prep, those moments would be frequent enough.

Oh. Is That Nostalgia I Smell?

It’s mostly pickle juice. But generally, a firm no in the sense that I’m not interested in returning to the 80s. For one thing (and it’s a big thing) most of the HTT-supportive game design from the 80s and 90s was for military sci-fi (games like Space Master and Twilight: 2000 had scenario libraries where maybe 20% of the scenarios were HTT), and … I’m cool with military sci-fi, I am. But it’s not my jam. We had HTT support from other quarters as well (some great [old] ones from Call of Cthulhu, a few from the short-lived Flashing Blades and others), but it was mostly orbiting the sci-fi bang-shooty.

And, frankly, they got to HTT for their own reasons. So, their designs don’t serve as any kind of ideal for me. I’m glad they exist, to study. I’m glad they exist, to game with. But they’re a bit musty and moldy, and don’t address my own needs as a roleplayer in ’26 anymore than they did in ’86.

So, is this a thing from olden gaming times? Sort of. It has roots in the back-then.

But is this about nostalgia? No. This is about building things those fine folks never imagined, and maybe never would have wanted.

So when you look at the post-industry modules I’ve designed for publication (Big Dice Games currently publishes both Toast of the Town and Slimes in Blossom Grove, and both are free) they won’t seem very Space Master and they shouldn’t. They’re frothy, humanistic swashbuckly pulp-fantasy. Familiar Sights, which I designed for a YouTube run last year, is a kind of dark-heroic horror fairytale. I’m working on designs right now that are like those, but also 1930s private-eye adventures, post-nuke adventures, superhero, comic space-opera, and others. I’ve got some that are just cozy stuff like trying to help a friend have a great birthday.

And sadly, I haven’t yet found a single 80s or 90s HTT fantasy adventure. Pendragon had some HTT-ish seeds, but never a complete module. A few of the MERP modules peer close, then dance away, skittishly. Groovy works like Rough Night at the Three Feathers have the variables, but they’re charged situations rather than problems, and so on. "Situations Not Plots" doesn't get us to HTT.

So, I don’t have much to be nostalgic for, except for some excellent GMs who first showed me this style at their table, because they happened to GM in a way that supports this, and they did it so well that I could never stop pondering it.

So I’m not having any 80s or 90s over here, except as a cadaver to dissect.

I call this one the Square of Gameplay.

So This Is About Designing Frothy Fantasy Adventures Shaped Like Twilight: 2000 Modules?

I mean.

Sometimes.

Sometimes, yeah.

But also, shaped around a different set of actual priorities and design goals. And shaped around whatever genres and modes and tones we want at the moment.

So, mostly no? But sometimes.

“Infinite Character Tactical Wossname”

Absolutely. “In-character creative problem-solving” is another fair phrase, if that’s cozier. I’ve written about Tactical Roleplaying before, and I’ve written about Characterization before, so if you’ve got those things down, you’ve got all the pieces. Let’s assemble the whole:

• Characterized: Gameplay reveals, exposes, explores, and challenges the nature of our PCs. To support this at the design level, scenarios consist of problems built more around values than capabilities, and the problems are carefully designed to have no “right” approach, because if there’s an objectively-correct answer, character has less room to matter than competence.
• Tactical: Gameplay isn’t just tactical, it’s crazy-richly-tactical, because the Invisible Rulebooks are the main rulebooks, and they are vast. The facts of the gameworld, the facts of the campaign so far, the facts of the scenario … all of those facts form the tactical playground, and that includes a lot of subtle and slippery facts, including a lot of facts the PCs don’t begin understanding, and might never completely understand. To support this at the design level, problems have complexity, nuance, exploration, mystery, and stakes the PCs are likely to be passionate about. Those stakes create the potential for outcomes the PCs will consider more- and less-desirable, and from that, we get gameplay.
• Infinity: Because the PCs are people (of whatever kind; droids and ghosts and bunnies can be people too), they can face problems however they want. They can try literally anything, and because there’s a living GM ready to make the call, literally anything can get a fair shake. What’s that you say? You hit Superman with a baseball bat? It doesn’t hurt him! He smiles warmly in response! You failed to hurt Superman! But you got a fair shake. To support this at the design level, scenarios consist of problems, and only problems. Rather than impose events like encounters, or Hard Choices, or narrative shapes, HTT scenarios are just the facts, about problems, usually clusters of problems, all tangled-up in a yummy mess. HTT scenarios are both fully open-ended and fully open-middled. We do not design infinity and we don’t do infinite prep, because we don’t need to. The infinity comes free in every box of trad. We just support it rather than tamping it down. With problems, we provide gravity-points worth orbiting, diving toward, or sling-shotting around, instead of boundaries.

But That Does Remind Me of Sandboxes and FKR and Immersion and Stuff

And that’s reasonable. Those are some neighborhoods nearby. The OSR, too - and some of what they do helps highlight why Characterized was the missing word, for me.

You can explore, and enjoy, and embrace Tactical Infinity while still being only tangentially concerned with character. In fact, you can, if you want, give zero shits about character and still have a grand old time testing player skill, which is what some OSR material is interested in, and it’s what a lot of LTT has always been interested in, going back to classic Champions modules and early Boot Hill. Player skill + character capabilities = game outcomes.

And, frankly, I think it’s a lot of what of those Twilight: 2000 modules are interested in, too.

But because a lot of those designers understood that the hard realities of post-nuke Poland is more nuanced than just Good Guys with Guns vs. Bad Guys With A Functioning APC We Would Like to Own, they cared about NPC motivations. They cared about what it might take to get a post-nuke community going and what might tear those communities apart. They understood the complexity and importance of logistics and diplomacy, because those are what war comes down to, in the end. They understood that, even in a war zone, people need clean drinking water even more than they need ammo. They understood that from small-unit tactics to whole-theater strategy, there are always more things to consider than mere capabilities. So, sometimes (about 20% of the time), they provided facts in so many dimensions (military, but also social, cultural, legal, religious, economic, and more) that they fired up the potential for combinatorial explosion in exactly the way that drives the cylinders of the HTT engine.

And I bet they had some awesome HTT moments. Even if they had no use or need for that term.

Combinatorial What-Now?

I’m not a computer guy, but I’ve dabbled. Basically, combinatorial explosion is considered a hazard if you’re making a computer game. It means, in practice, that you need to control the number of available choices, because choices combine, and they multiply and compound one another … to the point where, if you offer too many options, your software and your hardware end up with insanely-multiplied needs. You can quickly reach a point where you need something that feels like infinite code, and infinite RAM.

That’s why, in a videogame, things will often boil down to two or three choices at a critical juncture, or shunt play into a contained minigame environment where dozens of powers and weapons can combine, but they can do so because they’re defined in very finite dimensions, like damage and range and speed.

And it’s why, in a boardgame like Squad Leader, you can’t sneak through the village dressed like nuns unless the scenario hard-coded that option before play began.

That’s why I say Combinatorial Explosion is the combustion that drives our engine. Without a single line of code, and without a single line in a rulebook, the PCs can try literally, actually, anything. Because they’re people. Imaginary people! But we don’t hold that against them, and we don’t limit them. We give them complex problems, that matter to them, and then they create their own approach, and get a fair shake, every step of the way.

So Let’s See if I Got This. The GM Preps Problems, Then the Players Have to Solve Them?

Oooh, so close.

The GM preps problems, absolutely. Nailed that part.

But then the characters (not the players) do the rest. And what “the rest” entails is something we prep for, but have no intention of controlling or limiting.

Toast of the Town is still, as of this writing, the textbook example of what I personally mean by HTT design. One of several problems in that adventure’s cluster is that Dolemon Drake, the villain, has gotten away with murder, before the PCs even arrive.

So if the proper formulation was that the PCs “have to solve” the problems, that would mean that groups that fail to solve that problem would be doing something poorly.

But that’s not at all the case. That’s why, in Toast, I wrote about one table of playtest PCs who teamed up with Drake to save the lives of the people he’d convinced the townsfolk to go butcher. They chose to help him get away with the murders he’d already committed. Because they cared more about saving the still-living than avenging the already-dead.

That’s not failure, and it didn’t feel like failure, to the PCs (or the players). It felt like triumph.

And I’ve GMed that adventure for 30-something tables, and it’s gone 30-something different ways. Every group endeavored to solve the things they cared about. Many groups have sold some of the problems down the river, to better solve others.

Yes, please.

In simple wargame terms: the PCs decide what their “victory conditions” are. The module does not. The GM does not. The game rules do not. The PCs alone do, according to the problems at hand, according to their sympathies, according to their values, according to their life goals and party goals, according to what they know and what they think they know, and yes, according to their capabilities (just one ingredient in a highly varied soup). And the GM is there to support that. The GM has prepped, for that.

We, as players, trust our GM to prep stuff that matters to our characters. The GM trusts us to roleplay with sincerity. Adventure results.

Oh, That’s the Trust Part? I Was Going to Ask About the Trust Part.

Yeah, that’s a big part of it. There are some tangents worth considering (self-trust, etc.) but that circle is the most important. Basically, as a dedicated player who makes characters carefully fit to this table’s group and this table’s intentions for this campaign, I’m trusting that my efforts won’t be wasted, that my roleplaying won’t be just decoration. As a dedicated GM, I’m trusting that I’ve got a table full of sincere, engaged roleplayers to prep for, to serve, because in this style of play, “Game Master” is very much a service role.

A jokey little seed can't quite communicate everything,
but it helps land the basic idea of facts that expand
the range of PC action vs. those that constrict or prescribe.

Hmmm.

I agree.

So What Was All This About?

I’ve been promising to write an article describing High-Trust Trad. Here we are. This begins what those Lexicon posts were laying the groundwork for. This is my favorite kind of RPG.

I also created this post to highlight that, maybe, HTT isn’t what you want at all. It might not be something you’d enjoy. The profile of the HTT player … madly in love with both sincere roleplaying and with creative problem-solving, fused together … that’s a niche taste. Ditto the HTT Game Master, who finds joy in both substantial prep and constant improv.

We each have our own passions, and in these post-trad generations, “Tabletop RPG” means so many kinds of game, many of which bear no resemblance to Trad, let alone High-Trust Trad. There are RPGs now where you don’t even play a role. So it goes, and some of those are great! There are games out there for everybody, and there are hundreds of new ones every year.

But if something in all of this (waves hands vaguely at all of this) sparks a familiar fire in you … I’m preparing to consider beginning to think about emerging from the cocoon I’ve been in for a while. Been building a body of work, and it’s all about this. Adventures, resources, that new fantasy world, design-technique book and articles, yadda. Some of it amounts to a textual museum, for those curious about this design form, as it was and how it might become, and I’m hoping to someday have a little adventure-design club. With burger nights.

Going forward with several things in the works, I'll distinguish at need between historical HTT (works designed by others from approximately 1982 to 1997) and the Cumberland style, to which I've been privately devoted since Fly From Evil, and publicly since the free Uresia modules cited above.

In 1993 I thought that “Tactical Infinity” described what I was about. And I wasn’t wrong, I was just missing the why. I was missing the answer to the question: what’s that big ol’ infinite possibility-space for?

If it’s stocked with the right ingredients, we can use it to serve up that magical fusion, where roleplaying is the game.

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I'll maintain this post as a living document for understanding the Cumberland style, updating it at need. I’m ghalev on Discord; hit me up to try my free, all-text, 1-on-1 adventure-design workshops, or drop me a line at blogmail@cumberlandgames.com. If you've published HTT-supportive works of your own, I really want to hear from you so I can help promote and celebrate them! And heck, as long as I've finally posted "the long version," here are additional shorter-version graphics from over the last 15 years:

Hammondal & Trust

Over on the Dice Camp, groovy questioneer luxet asked a question both compound and substantial, so I'll treat it as a mailbag entry here on ye merrye blogge. The context is Hammondal: Light of the Candle Islands, that fantasy city guide I've been working on these last couple of years, and The Hammondal Campaign, a related book I've been working on these last few weeks. I'd recently yammered a bit about that, and included this image of one of the city's 23 neighborhood maps, with numbers scribbled onto sites given entry in the guide:

Knoutside. One of 23 neighborhoods in Hammondal.

This is my development draft of a full-page, text-encrusted district map I'll eventually create, with the site-numbers doodled on by hand. This occasioned the question:

Just found myself wondering to what level of detail Hammondal is being created? I mean is every building mapped out with occupancy/use, or just a smattering of named locations (looking at numbered places here)?  Intrigued, given what I've picked up on your preference for high trust how that balances out when putting together a city? Also, will it be ready to run around it for my next campaign? ;)

The last part is the easiest to answer: Unless you're really dragging your feet on your GMing, the book probably won't be ready as your next thing to run, but it's nice of you to ask! Like Baymax, I am not fast.

The first part is pretty straightforward, too. We're definitely into "smattering" territory. Light of the Candle Islands has (in the current draft, anyway) 500 intramural entries (that is, explicit numbered sites inside the city walls) and a small handful of extramural ones (sites just outside the town proper, like the lighthouse prison run by the church, on an island out in the bay). There are approximately 4,200 buildings and other identifiable features visible within the walls of the city, so I'm only diving into about 1 in 8, with the rest left to be inferred and populated at need.

Importantly, the 500 entries won't all be "mapped out." There will be a small number (probably 5) entries that get an interior floorplan and full-fledged article, but most just get a paragraph or two of text. Most of the book's 35-ish maps will be the 23 neighborhood maps, plus that small number of interiors, plus a basic map of the Candle Islands, stuff like that. And when I say an "article" I mean, approximately, the equivalent of Blind Geoffrey's Barberie & Cauterie, which I wrote for Citybook 7 for Flying Buffalo back in the day. There will be five of those scattered through the book, highlighting a few "anchor" sites more intimately. There'll be other "breakout" articles, too, but mostly the book will be those 500 or so brief, paragraph-scaled site entries and neighborhood summaries.

That middle part, though. About trust. That's a hell of a topic. Even here, there's no time to dig as deep as it goes, but let's dig a little.

Digging into that Middle Part

How does designing for high-trust trad impact building a city, or any other gameworld? Because, make no mistake, Light of the Candle Islands is designed to be a complete, self-contained gameworld. Even if it does a big ol' flopsy-daisy and I never get to follow it up, it'll be a whole-ass thing. For that matter, the problems and opportunities described in The Hammondal Campaign take place entirely in town, or within a literal stone's throw (depending on the trebuchet, and how angry you are at that lighthouse prison). Both books are designed, from the ground up, to support HTT (high-trust-trad) play.

But high-trust design doesn't really require a specific level of detail. Not exactly. It does require certain types of detail, that I like to group into two sloppy buckets: adventure food, and character food.

In high-trust play, the facts of the gameworld are the "core rules" of gameplay. They are the enduring, reliable truths the PCs can always reference and leverage, from the existence of gravity (Hammondal comes complete with Earthlike gravity) to intimate facts like the Metropolitan's (she's kind of like the city's archbishop) open-secret love affair with an actor who plays at the Zorya (the city's most popular theater). If the PCs know about that affair (and really, everyone in Hammondal knows at least something about that affair), they can use it in some way. That's adventure food: facts the PCs can get their mitts on, and that GMs can spin scenarios around.

In high-trust play, Player Characters are tailored creations. Once the players and the GM come to some agreement about what the new campaign is about, everyone creates characters for that campaign, specifically, precisely, deliberately, with care. We make PCs to have those kinds of adventures, in this specific setting. So, if you're running a Hammondal campaign about a troupe of actors dealing with vampires being a total bummer to the theater community, everything about that foundational agreement informs who the PCs will be. They might be from wholly different cultures and be wholly different species, but they were made for this exact campaign, built from what we, as a group, understand about those cultures and species and the shenanigans we want to get up to. So, facts that serve that process of character creation are character food.

And of course, the yummiest facts can serve both roles, be both kinds of food.

Every other kind of information is filler, and filler is nothing to be proud of, so as a high-trust designer, creating Light of the Candle Islands for high-trust play, my design focus is that two-fisted food metaphor: stuff for making characters, and for using in adventures.

But ... doesn't every gameworld have information like that? Yep, pretty much, and that's why pretty much any gameworld can be great for high-trust play, but ... some more than others. The crucial distinction (that most readers will never notice) is that Hammondal is a book designed specifically for high-trust play, and that guides which facts make it into the book, which facts stay in my notes, and which questions I build the book's answers around.

And since high-trust trad adventures depend so completely on motives and values, that exerts a potent gravity on what qualifies as character and adventure food. It means we know about the Metropolitan's love life (and her standing with the Prince, and her dicey dealings with mercantile interests) because that's the kind of thing high-trust adventures need plenty of ... information that other playstyles would think of as filler, in many cases!

Which brings us back to the question of the flopsy-daisy! But, time will tell. And hey: maps!