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.

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!

Santa Made Me Do It

A few days ago I did two unusual things, simultaneously. One, I ran a deliberate horror RPG, and two, I did it on one of those "Actual Play" video podcasts, where everyone can see just how much I've let my beard explode into crazy-drifter-man mode. My beard looks like I'm preparing to product-test the Column B item in a Stephen Colbert "Meanwhile" intro.

But the beard, while distressing, isn't unusual.

The horror thing, though. That's highly unusual. The Actual Play thing is even moreso; it's unprecedented. So: how did such alarming things come to pass? Why did S. John do such a deeply un-S. John-like couple of things?

For this, we can blame a good-natured gamer named Preston Firestone, in a Santa hat. He recently ran A Kringle in Time for some groovy gamers, and of course, I happily consumed this, and it was a good time!

I let Preston know I liked it, so, he interviewed me, and that went well.

Because that went well, the Into the Darkness Club did a followup interview, this time on video, complete with the beard. That, too, went well, so there was a general good-natured chatter about maybe-I'll-GM-something-for-youse-guys-someday, which often comes to naught, but of course, I did mean the offer sincerely.

And that was that. All done. Until:

They took me up on it much more quickly than I supposed they might. At about ten minutes to Midnight, on the 29th of January (a Wednesday), channel host and creator Thom Raley mentioned that a slot had opened up on the following Wednesday. That would be the 5th of February, just a couple of days ago as I write this. Would I want to run a thing?

Heck yeah I would. Oh ...

And time stopped for me, for just the briefest little eternity, because then I had to face the fact that the Into the Darkness podcast is a horror podcast, devoted to the creepy and the awful and the ... well, all the stuff they mention in their opening disclaimer.

And sure, I know how to horror. I've been GMing for 40 years; I've horrored.

But I am, by and large, a swashbuckly, heroicky, mostly-comedy sort of GM. My most serious stuff is my 1930s crime-drama material. I mostly use horror as an ingredient in broader fantasy stews, something to punch up the peril and sharpen the stakes.

Even when I run Call of Cthulhu, greatest of the RPGs¹ and forever in my Top Five Faves, I don't run it as horror, not primarily. I run it as an investigative RPG, with dark fantasy undertones. I don't run it "horror forward," as some do.

So I asked Thom: Should it be horror?

And he confirmed: ideally, something in that general zone, yeah.

And I could tell he wouldn't be troubled if I went for something less-horrific. I mean, they'd done Kringle, which is jokingly horror-adjacent at best (and yet, it does deliver on the channel's disclaimers).

But they'd been super nice to me, these folks, and I felt I should participate more fully than just running in my usual comfort zone like a Toast or Slimes run.

And I'm also neck-deep in my forthcoming PDF series about High-Trust Trad (HTT) roleplaying and (especially) HTT adventure design. If you follow my daily ramblings on Mastodon ... or if you followed my old ramblings on Google Plus, you know it's pretty much all I've rambled about for the past fifteen years or so, give or take a city map.

And speaking of that, I've been neck-deep in the Candle Islands, for the Hammondal project.

So it felt like I owed it, to them and to myself, to design an all-new, High-Trust-Trad, full-on horror adventure for this purpose. And by golly I'd set it in the Candle Islands.

And that's what led to me running an all-new, Medium-Trust-Trad, full-on horror adventure for them. And by golly, I set that MTT adventure in the Candle Islands!

So yeah. Not HTT at all. MTT.

TF?

And this is where I apologize to you. I'm about to get terribly unfair to anyone who hasn't been following 15 years of my rambling about HTT, a topic I've carefully avoided being explicit about here, on the blog. Search for the word "trust" here, and you will, as of this writing, find only this post, right here. If you look deeper, you'll see I've been laying the foundations but ... no Trusty GM stuff. Not explicitly. Not yet. Someday, this might make more sense in retrospect.

As I've stressed in my social-media ramblings - and in those articles to be published when they're done - trust of self is one of the most critical vectors of trust.

I mean, obviously these are excellent players. No worries there. And they're excellent horror players ... Seasoned, even. And I consider this.

So, it is with ample sheepishness (hence the beard, which should be shorn for wool) that I stared down the barrel of my own rustiness as a horror GM. As I brainstormed adventure notions, I found I had plenty bubbling up ... and they were all richly High-Trust ... in a way that made me doubt myself as the right GM to host them.

But I wanted to run the thing!

So I realized, quickly, that I'd need to put on my HAZMAT suit, grab my long copper-beryllium tongs, and haul a couple of Low-Trust Traditional (LTT) elements from deep in the emergency game design vault, not for their sake, but for mine.

And I'm being a little overdramatic, mostly because it's fun. After all, even my best HTT adventures always contain some LTT elements. Toast of the Town begins with an encounter, for example (with Alderman Calway) before it sets the PCs loose.

But I'm being overdramatic, partly, because I knew I'd be going deeper than just an encounter in the table-setting, in the Injection Line, where trust doesn't matter (because the adventure really hasn't started yet).

But I was careful, too, to select an element that would avoid the worst gravitational effects on the PCs and expose me, instead, to the worst of it.

Structurally, Familiar Sights is extremely high-trust at first glance: there's a clear problem-cluster with attached facts (including locations and NPCs) and there's a brief Injection Line, complete with an encounter. So far, so Trusty.

The PCs are familiar spirits to a powerful mage, the Wood-Mistress, Clara Loga. She's the spiritual leader and guardian of a remote village where the villagers make buttons, and every morning, Bluebird (one of the familiars) alights on Mistress' finger to join her in song on her tower balcony. Just pure cozy fantasy - the kind I'll sometimes run absolutely straight. Usually, these characters' adventures would have goals like "make sure the blacksmith's birthday party is the best ever," and with HTT it's easy to make that kind of adventure richly tactical and engaging.

But shit's about to get fucky.

Some old friends of the Mistress come to town, walking alongside the bone merchant bringing the last autumn shipment of button material, and rip his face off to demonstrate their general murderous intent, to cow the villagers and discourage heroics.

Because it turns out that, ten years ago, they and the Mistress were rich, spoiled little murder tourists, on a world spree. It ended in a great city overseas, where the Mistress sold her friends out to save her own skin, and left them for dead.

She got into the village-guardian racket to cultivate a private stash to feed her crippling addiction to the souls of those who died suffering. And she's been making sure, for several years now, that that's how everyone in the village ends their lives (which are otherwise all bucolic and buttony).

And the familiars - the PCs - are leftover spirits she can sip from. They weren't from some rando other dimension. They're all dead villagers with no memory of the awful things Mistress did. In fact, they're grateful she "rescued" them and gave them a family.

And at the start, Mistress is out of town but she'll be back in a few hours.

So that's the broad scenario: a suddenly-terrified village, Invading murder-mages, Mistress returning at dusk to murder-mage them right back, and the PCs in a position to tip the situation any-which-way, whether they prefer to restore the status quo or author a new one, according to their values and their rapidly-evolving read on the situation.

The fact that Mistress can see through every PC's eyes, and feel their location, begins as a comforting tool used to help the village, but becomes less comforting with the adventure's revelations. Then, there are bonus problems, depending on how things go, relating to the PCs' former mortal lives (like many ghosts in many a ghost story, the PCs may have some unfinished business).

A tight little setup for a 4-hour HTT one-shot. Not bad at all.

But I doubted my horror-pacing chops in particular. I know exactly how to give PCs a problem-solving playground and keep it tight for swashbuckling fantasy or a hardboiled detective run, but to make sure the horror flowed in at the right pace, I nervously reserved for myself a kind of preconceived layering of revelation: it would be less dependent on detective-work, and more dependent on a handful of NPCs feeling confessiony. I selected a half-dozen NPCs to design for this purpose, and as it happened, two or three took prominence in the run in response to PC actions: Kevin, the young apprentice to the Mistress, Wolf (Vernon Brace), a familiar to one of the murder-mages, and then Clara, the Mistress herself.

So that's the big Low-Trust Element: maintaining that deliberate hand on the faucet of awful reveals.

That way, I reasoned, I could still give the PCs full latitude of approach and resolution, but selfishly retain that one thing, and that would be enough to re-balance my certainty that I could make this a good 4-hour one-shot.

And so, like the Mistress, I confess all this, to any who've read this far.

The resulting design (combined with the extra trust-drop from the Actual Play format) would currently score about a 60 on the Trusty GM Scale of 1 to 99. You know: that simplified scale I describe, in the future, in those unpublished articles? Yes, that one.

So, it's high-trust according to the soft definition I use for old modules from the 80s and 90s, but falls into medium-trust for the stricter standard I apply to my own work. So it's a kind of medium yearning to be high, like a couple of those I did in my industry days, but with a more earnest problem-solving core.

If I ever take Familiar Sights from design to writing and from writing to publication ... Probably I'll let it spread its HTT wings, and kick it up nearer a 70, by more carefully distributing the revelations where they can be found - and can be missed or reinterpreted - via PC enquiry, which will (as it always does) produce much more varied play results, since each group of PCs will have a different understanding of the problem. As it is, this group had a fairly complete one, giving them the best shot of approaching things with clear vision (the kind the Mistress could spy on).

As always: trust is only a spectrum of emphasis, and there's great gaming all along that line, of course. It's just that I've just got some commercially-dead design-styles to build a little museum for. In PDF form. Hence the fixation.

Of course, the good news is that the actual game worked out just fine. Really really well, honestly. We had a good, sometimes quite emotional game, and despite my clumsy control-rod intruding on the mix, the nuclear chaos of PC creativity still ran the show, and when the familiars ... did what they did ... I wasn't sure what was coming, and neither were the NPCs! Good times!

Soon, I may celebrate, by shaving. Because yikes.

Hope this finds you well.

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¹Editions 1 through 6, inclusive.

Retrointrospective

Well, it wouldn't do to let the whole of 2024 pass without a blog post on record, so I'll take this opportunity to look back over this year. It's been a rough one in many ways, but, as always, there are some nice things to note, too.

Loss

The loss of my Mom casts the longest shadow over the year, partly because she was awesome (dedicated her adult life to being a nurse and a respiratory therapist, always pursuing career paths that would let her help the most vulnerable), and partly because she was unhappy in her last years, married to a guy she didn't much like. For related reasons, it was impossible to attend her funeral, and she was, contrary to her wishes, cremated.

So, Sandra did the the most amazing thing for me, and took me back to the Cumberland area so we could recognize her passing in our own way, and reconnect with some happy memories. We sure did. We went to the graveyard where she always wanted to be buried (next to my great-grandparents, who raised her and who helped raise me), and we visited a ton of old spots ... libraries, parks, the old mall, old addresses where we'd lived, things like that. We got burgers at the diner where she'd met my biological father, and played some Ms. Pac Man, which was always Mom's favorite.

That trip made a big difference. It was really good.

Marking Decades

Being an old-timey RPG designer means that most years are some kind of ending-in-zero anniversary for one or more old books of mine, and this year was the 20th for A Kringle in Time, which was already more than a decade old when I published it. While it wasn't their intent, these guys gave Kringle a nice anniversary by doing an "Actual Play" of it. Good fun!

It was also the 20th for Uresia: Caravel. The final All-Systems version remains preserved in amber as a kind of showcase of what I can do. It's still a good one, I daresay.

It's also been (approximately) my 40th anniversary as a roleplayer! The first RPG I ever got was TSR's Marvel Superheroes back in 1984. I blogged here about how bad I was at running it! (I got better!)

"I Hate These Guys"

Of course, it's been a dangerously bad year for democracy and decency. Not just here in the States, but in so many countries around the world. A toxic stew of ignorance, greed, entitlement, cowardice and bigotry (with just a pinch of nihilism for spice) are dragging critical promises into the dirt, carving nations up for sale, and threatening to darken the future beyond our ability to survive it. Even in the best-case scenario, hundreds of thousands of innocent people will die and millions will suffer.

I maintain some hope that the clown-car incompetence and fractious nature of the opposition will doom their efforts to some extent, but enough actually-competent people are helping from the back row that I think the danger might overwhelm the resistance this time.

Meanwhile, the front-row imbeciles are stressful to watch. Even if they weren't dangerous, it's a mind-rending case of "The Stupid, It Burns." But either way, the fight is on.

Work

Work has been going well. It's been a little different because normally I'm not an escapist, which might sound strange for a fantasy-games guy, but it's true. Mostly what I write is satire, and mostly my design intent is a genre-lensed glare at current events, leavened with some jokes and warmth.

This year, Hammondal in particular has been doing double-duty as escape, sometimes. It's still the same-old-me of course, so it's still "sympathetic satire," still fundamentally space opera in half-convincing renfaire cosplay ... but sometimes, I let myself just daydream in "The Light of the Candle Islands," and wish that I could live there. I'm not sure, yet, how this will bend how the city feels to the reader and gamer. Guess we'll find out.

My Trusty GM series of articles is well underway and also engaging me nicely, but in a less-escapey way. Those articles are various forms of GMing advice, design tools, things like that. They'll be released in small sets, like five PDFs simultaneously, a few free and a few for sale.

The back-burner projects, including Fly From Evil and several others, continue at their own pace, and I'm happy with how they're all going. A few are knocked back, a bit, by the election results, since materials held in storage in Colorado will need to stay there longer than we intended. We were finally able to send for our stuff this year, but held off to see how things went. And, well. See above.

Way back early in the year I showed up on a D&D podast thingy, which went really well considering I'm not a D&D gamer! It's a cheerful listen, if you need some happy banter.

Entertainment

It's been a pretty good year for nerd fun! We're digging all the things you might suppose, like Skeleton Crew and What If ...? and the new Wallace & Gromit and all of the Star Trek shows. We enjoyed seeing Wicked in the cinema. We're still being virus-cautious, but we've got a local theater where it's easy to find mostly-empty showtimes. Good for us, probably not great for the theater.

Most of my videogame time has been devoted to replaying older games. I'm doing another run of the excellent and thought-provoking Deathloop right now, and replays of some old GBA and SNES and Infocom titles.

I do still play a bit of Starfield, because I've come to accept that it's never going to get any better, and I've found it's good with the volume turned all the way off, just a mindless shooter to mindlessly shoot while I listen to news clips and podcasts and things. I've played a bit of the new Indiana Jones game.

All of my reading is for work, but ... some of it is really good anyway! Some of it, not so much. Lots of historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. Those aren't lines of work where being an engaging writer is actually required, but now and then, one will surprise me and be amazing.

Bring the 2025 On

Life is a mix of the very-good (home-life with Sandra is wonderful, as always) and stressful (current events and health concerns) but the very-good parts are very, very good. So, overall it's just a matter of figuring out what actions we'll be taking on the stressful parts. TBA.

Hope this finds you well. I'm still around, still doin' the same stuff. I'm still active on Mastodon, and still on Discord as ghalev. Drop me a line sometime if you want to chatter. I'm slow at responding, but I often do eventually!

Risus: Thirty Years!

We're almost out of 2023!

This year has been the 30th Anniversary of Risus: The Anything RPG, the 20th Anniversary of The Risus Companion, and the 10th Anniversary of Risus 2nd Edition.

As I write this, we're at the end of December, and I feel like I should raise a glass to Risus before the year is done. I've kept quiet so far because I think it would be unseemly, nowadays, for me to parade the Risus name too much. But, 30, 20 and 10 years are worth taking a moment for, so I'll mark the triple-occasion with a story from the youngest of the three celebrants, the 2nd Ed:

It was a scary Colorado day, for the time had come to draw the Little Cartoon Bastards (the name my stick-figure "art" takes when the sticks pose specifically for Risus).

I always dreaded that part.

Not from dislike! I love the little idiots, and they represent the best of what Risus can be, but I can't draw. That's not some false-modesty thing. I hardcore can't draw. I can't-draw at a world-class level. I could fail to draw at the Olympics and win the can't-draw gold. Almost every Risus "illustration" took several drafts, and came from many false starts, and for every one that made the cut, there were six or seven that didn't, because they were worse.

But, the time had come, so I'd sit around doodling when I was hanging out with my players, hoping some of those doodles would work out.

Around that time, a Risus supporter I was following online got a guitar, and he was super happy about it, and his joy over it felt infectious, so I thought: "I should have a guitar-playing LCB for the new edition, as a shout-out to that gamer's new guitar!"

And I liked that idea almost too much? Like, I wasn't willing to let it go. I had a vibe in my mind and I wanted an LCB who would deliver that vibe: a triumphant vibe, a rock-and-roll-fantasy vibe. A happy LCB, shredding with joy.

But, see above. I cannot draw. So, it's a terrible, heartbreaking idea for me to develop artistic ambitions, no matter how humble.

I did something like 20 gods-forsaken drafts of guitar-playing stickmen. And they all suuuuuuucked.

I did many from pure imagination, and many from photographic reference. I searched the Web for classic images of triumphant guitar poses from the likes of Hendrix, Prince, Van Halen, Clapton, Page, Zappa, Buddy Frickin' Holly ... hoping that their moments of triumph could give me that triumphant vibe.

And if I could draw, that approach would have worked. I would have had the skill, the eye, the insight necessary to translate some of those moments into something sticklike.

But, see above. I cannot draw.

So, I was sad, I was adrift. I wanted a triumphant guitar guy. I couldn't let go of wanting that piece. But the chasm between my approach, and that desire, was blocking my path.

It took me a few weeks of beating my head against that wall before the tweety-birds circling my head got me a light bulb, out of pity.

It came to me when I was waking from a snooze, and I scooted to the computer to search for new references. This time, I was no longer searching for rock stars or guitar legends ... I was searching for people IMAGINING they were rock stars and guitar legends. I searched for pictures of people playing, not guitar, but AIR GUITAR.

Go ahead and try it. You'll see what I saw (well, ten years later, you'll see the equivalent of what I saw): that is the triumph I was craving. Not the reality of shredding guitar, but the fantasy of it, the love of it, the roleplay of it. The absolute frickiting nonsense of it. I wanted the joy of the daydreamer, and the air-guitar people are the people who GET that, and deliver it all the time, so I loaded my eyeballs with air-guitar triumphs and air-guitar dreams, and I stood, and I shredded some air of my own, because I knew this was was the missing piece that would snap the chasm shut, so I could stride across, as if I'd always known how.

I got it on the first (new) try. The little dude danced from my pen without further iteration. A triumphant doodle, by a guy who can't draw, of a triumphant performance, by a guy who can't play.

But we can pretend. Happy anniversary, little game (almost belated!), and here comes 2024.

May we all shred triumphant.

Staring Back at the Invisible

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We've come to the final entry in the Lexicon series. If you're new, hi!

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Back in our very first entry, we met the goofy metaphor of the “Invisible Rulebooks,” the rules which can't be found in the "rules" part of the Book of Rules ... but they're still rules, because in an RPG, any fact with tactical relevance is the equal of a rule, whether it's a "+1 to hit" kind of fact or "the Duke is self-conscious about his baldness" kind of fact or "this is a genre where protagonists can’t die just by slipping on a banana peel" kind of fact, or many others.

It’s a metaphor; Invisible Rules aren't always literally invisible. If an adventure module specifies that the Duke is self-conscious, it's right there on the page, plainly visible but still (in this context) an "Invisible Rule," because we won’t see it in the “Rules.”

Rules (of every kind) have some other qualities worth noticing, beyond Visible/Invisible. Let’s dive into our final set of terms, laying those crucial qualities bare.

SHAREABLE/LESS-SHAREABLE

Let's say we're imagining a merchant, in a fantasy world. My idea of what "fantasy merchant" means might come from a book of real history, or a videogame, or from personal memories of a hilarious NPC my favorite GM in the 80s portrayed with an AWFUL Cockney accent. Most likely it's all of those, and more. I think about fantasy merchants a lot.

If you and I have played the same videogame, we have some common ground. This makes that portion of our Invisible Rulebooks shareable between you and I.

If you and I haven’t read the same history book, I could loan mine to you, if you want, and if you're interested in the topic or if it seems really important to our campaign, maybe you'll read it. So that's another degree of (potentially) "shareable."

But there's no way for you to go back in time, in MY life, and experience the exquisite agony of that hilarious NPC with the terrible accent. The best I can do is describe it, which is another kind of "shareable" that's much more limited. If your own gaming life includes a similar NPC, that’s a kind of shareable too, though we might also be making assumptions about the similarity of our experiences that are only partially true.

If we're gaming in a gameworld we both enjoy, we've both probably delved into some of the published world material for it ... and, in certain playstyles (like mine) that's such a critical form of shareability that the facts presented in the worldbooks almost REPLACE the "core rules" as OUR core rules. Those rules are “invisible,” but they’re right there on the page, and they matter a lot to us if we care about this setting being our setting for this campaign.

Some of my impressions of merchants are also based on modern shop employees, or characters from movies, things like that. I'm only semi-conscious of that vast stew of influences, which makes them difficult to share. You probably have a comparable, but different, set of impressions. Those impressions can still inform how you roleplay, and how I GM, so they're still part of our Invisible Rulebooks, but they're poor on this quality of shareability.

And of course, one of the advantages of the Visible Rulebooks is they're super-shareable, and labeled explicitly as rules. One of many reasons why, in MOST playstyles, the core rules ARE the core rules.

Anyway, "shareable" is a useful concept, and it (in the main) means what it sounds like. Moving on.

EPHEMERAL/RELIABLE

Wait, didn't we DO this one? Sure did, but we started with a focus on resources the PCs can use to solve problems, back in this article.

But any fact with tactical relevance is a rule, and resources are just sets of facts. The existence of the Duke's toupee (a gameworld fact) is a rule. The law of universal gravitation that can make it flutter into a canyon, is a rule (most gameworlds have it, though it works differently in James Bond's world than ours, ditto for Wile E. Coyote). The formal game-system rules for falling damage if he dives after it and plunges 200 feet to the rocks below, are rules. They all live somewhere on the spectrum from the Ephemeral to the Reliable. The Duke’s toupee might be highly ephemeral if it only matters during one adventure, but the law of universal gravitation tends to stick around.

Worth noting: a fact the designer imagined as Ephemeral, or that the Game Master intended as Ephemeral, is something the PCs might still find creative ways to leverage, many sessions, even many real-world years, down the line in a long campaign, and that's awesome, and something we want to keep with us as we design. When the PCs concoct an elaborate plan depending on the existence of a toupee they remember from five years ago? Oh my god, yes please.

So, Ephemeral and Reliable aren't new to the Lexicon, but it's time to recognize that they're part of our set of descriptors for rules, because any fact can be a rule, which means we can design using any body of facts.

FIRM/SOFT

This one's pretty simple. Some rules have no flex. They are FIRM rules, rock-hard in some cases. If firing a crossbow takes a -10 penalty in total darkness, that -10 penalty is very clear, objectively-defined, and not something to be nuanced or haggled over. It just IS. It is firm. Visible Rules lean ... firmly (though not invariably) into firmness.

Many Invisible Rules are just as firm, though. Newton's universal gravitation is, in _most_ game worlds, extra-crazy-firm. The Duke is definitely bald. Firm rule. Diamond firm, Adamantium firm. Southern Moss-Type Elves can see in the dark? Firmly so. Only an equally-firm declaration of exception ("Rufus the Elf is blind") can change that, case-by-case.

But the Duke's self-consciousness about his baldness, while it may definitely absolutely exist, has a lot of room for nuance when we treat it as a rule. It absolutely IS a rule – it's a fact the PCs can make tactically relevant – but, there's flex because self-consciousness is a softer concept, with a lot of variables, a lot of range. It has gradients. It has tipping points. It has overlaps. There's a lot of latitude for the GM to interpret it very differently from another GM, with both interpretations being equally fair. That same lack of firmness – softness – can make it attractive to PCs looking to use it creatively, and for that to work, we (the players) must be confident that our GM will give us a fair shake when we do.

Firm's a simple term with big implications. Some of the Invisible Rules are firm, but a lot of them are soft, and we like that. It's good for the kind of gameplay I build for, and the kind of gamer I am.

DIEGETIC/EXTRADIEGETIC (AND CORRESPONDENCE)

I need "diegetic" a lot. I don't enjoy the word itself, but I try to use standard game-design terms when I can, and it's a standard. A fact is diegetic if it exists within the gameworld. The Duke's toupee is diegetic; the Duke's self-consciousness is diegetic. The rules for falling damage are NOT diegetic. They're extradiegetic rules that enjoy clear correspondence to a reality within the gameworld, but the Duke doesn't know about the Visible Rules. He doesn't even know he's fictional. He's troubled enough by his baldness, so please don't tell him.

The idea of "clear correspondence" between diegetic and extradiegetic elements can be important if you lean a lot into the Visible Rules. I don't often, but when I do, correspondence is a useful concept. Very briefly: if “one point of ammo” for a bow [a game mechanic, and thus extradiegetic] exactly and reliably equals one arrow in the gameworld [the arrow is diegetic], that’s a case of clear correspondence. If “one point of ammo” equals a variable number of arrows because we’re modeling a week-long series of battles abstractly with just a few die-rolls, that’s a looser, less-clear level of correspondence. Game systems play at many levels of correspondence clarity (and tightness, and causality) for a lot of good reasons.

CHARACTER-FACING

This is super-crazy-important. Something is character-facing if the Player Characters have direct awareness of it. So, the Duke's self-consciousness probably doesn't begin play as Character-Facing ... it's something of value the PCs might or might not discover, and if they do, they can exploit it or leverage it in some way. And if they never learn it, it remains diegetic (it exists in the gameworld) but it's something the PCs can't use.

The Visible Rules are never character-facing. The PCs can understand that "falling into a canyon can kill you," and some PCs can calculate acceleration and terminal velocity and stuff ... but they can never read the corresponding game-rules for falling damage. This distinction is huge; I can’t overstate it no matter how desperately I want to. The Visible Rules can in many cases be leveraged by the players, but only character-facing facts can be leveraged by the characters.

In the style I design for, the thing this entire series has been laying groundwork for discussing, the players would rather be left out of things, thank you kindly. We prefer to game by roleplaying, at least as much as possible. We game through our characters, so to solve the problems presented by the adventure, we need tools we (the characters) can know, and think about, within the imaginary world. That desire creates some style-specific needs for adventure design.

SHOOTING MORE COWBOY HATS

Let’s go back to the comedy-action version of the Wild West, where we are rootin' and (mayhap) tootin' as well. In our Invisible Rulebooks relating to genre conventions, we have some very interesting rules when it comes to these other qualities. They are (in many games) firmly Invisible (not codified by the game system), but are they diegetic? Are they character-facing? If we are to impress the villain by shooting his hat safely off ... he's going to be LESS impressed if he's conscious of the genre convention, and MORE impressed if he's unaware of it.

But that doesn't make it a bright line ... in order to make the shot, we (the rootin'-tootin' imaginary we) must have some confidence that we can shoot the hat safely. And maybe we misinterpret it as our pure skill, or the hand of providence recognizing our righteous good-guy intentions. And more to the point, maybe exercising genre convention means stepping halfway out of character, because that kind of convention, while it isn't wholly diegetic, and isn't wholly character-facing, can be crystal clear to the players.

This isn't meant to provide some kind of conclusion about genre convention, but to illustrate how I examine each rule when designing an adventure, a world, a resource, or even a system. A lot of this stuff, as always, is mushy, and spectral, and we try to notice.

WRAPPING UP

Some folks have taken the Lexicon series as design or play theory, and maybe it's useful for that to some degree, for some folks, but that's not what I've been writing it for. This series builds the ground floor to talk about the kind of game-design techniques I'm passionate about without (fingers crossed) too many distracting asides.

And I want that very much. To talk about game design. With you. With people who game and design differently from me, but who might want to (in the grand tradition of our hobby) rummage through my stuff to pluck out a few tidbits to enhance yours. That kind of rummaging, and that kind of sharing, is good stuff.

I also hope to make connections with others who game near to my own neighborhood, but the sharing is good whether you do or not.

My kind of design, when examined from a “rules” perspective, likes to emphasize tactical roleplaying with lots of potential for characterization, and while I use every tool at my disposal, it mostly lives and thrives through adventure design focused on in-character creative problem-solving. When designing problems (clusters of which form the tactical core of these adventures) I have a clear preference for the qualities of the rules I choose to design around: They tend to be Invisible, Diegetic, Ephemeral, Character-Facing, and frequently Soft (but a mix is great). Those problems need to be as non-presumptive as possible, to give the PCs (not the players) maximum latitude to create and implement solutions.

SO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

I'll be collecting the entire Lexicon series into a spiffy little PDF, knitting it all together, probably with some fresh edits and side-notes. It'll be released next to a handful of other PDFs, some of which are just fun and fluffy tools, some of which are kind of hardcore design-methody. Some will be free, some for sale. These blogposts will remain, and the PDF collecting them will be one of the free ones.

And I'll finally use the "T" word! See you there.

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This image is a Hammondal thing.
It has nothing to do with the Lexicon.
I just like it.

Flavors of Presumption

It’s time for another dip into the RPG Lexicon, where I explore the terms I use (for the concepts I need) to design RPG stuff.  If you’re new to this peculiar series, you can check the tags for the whole caboodle, hit the Glossary page, or start with the Invisible Rulebooks.

Today’s term gets us deeper into the heart of design: presumptive. In order to design a scenario for the kinds of RPGs I love, the designer (whether the GM homebrewing or the pro seeking to publish) must master the art of non-presumptive problems. They are the construction material that allows the design to stand. They are the stuff of adventure.

But while “non-presumptive” is North on my compass, it’s a term that depends on “presumptive.” So, in problem design, what makes a problem a presumptive problem, a presumptive challenge, a presumptive obstacle? What does such a thing presume?

A presumptive problem presumes the approach the PCs will (in some cases must) take. Any problem with a finite range of viable approaches is, to some degree, presumptive. A more assertive near-synonym is prescriptive. The most common “flavors” of presumption are:

The Dongle-Slot

When there’s just one, and only one, exactly one solution, I call that a Dongle-Slot problem, to honor the action-movie cliché of the special USB thumb-drive (or far-future equivalent) that, when slotted into the right port, averts the nuclear disaster. We could just as easily call it a push-button problem or a dozen other names, but the term “Dongle-Slot” feels more closely akin to “Porn Logic” (which it is), and it makes me giggle, which is how the science works around here.

Dongle-Slots are the epitome of finite, but they can take infinite forms, from the passageway that can only be traversed by destroying the Statue Guardian to the Fair Folk who will only lift a finger to help if you join in their special Vernal Equinox Dance to the evil ritual summoning that can only be disturbed with a splash of the correct blood from the correct priest at the correct hour after said priest was correctly murdered, there are uncountable ways to present a lock that cannot be picked, broken, or circumvented, and that has but One True Key.

When an adventure design subverts a Dongle-Slot by making it a reward rather than a problem, I call that a Dongle-Slot Surprise, but that’s a subject for another day!

The Exclusionary

A few times a year, GM or designer friends of mine will brag that they’ve designed a problem that “can’t be solved with combat.” This is the most common expression of the Exclusionary: a problem designed to prevent or discourage an approach, and it’s basically a Reverse Dongle-Slot. You can do anything for love … but you can’t do that.

While “can’t be solved with combat” is the most ordinary expression of the Exclusionary, it’s important to stress that violence (or reducing it) isn’t the issue. The limits are the issue … the desire to diminish Tactical Infinity into something less tactical, not infinite, or both. Doesn’t matter if you’re excluding violence, excluding trickery, excluding the mage’s favorite spell, or excluding that thing your specific PCs like to do with the sack of potatoes and a leprechaun in a cage, going out of your way to prevent an approach is what makes this presumptive.

Speaking of exclusion, more broadly: I don’t consider presumptive problems taboo. Sometimes, you just want to put a magnetic storm in the upper atmosphere so the crew of the Enterprise can’t use the transporter. I get that. I do that. Around here, the design goal isn’t to avoid presumptive elements, but rather to recognize them, to keep them at the non-critical edges of a design: they are parsley, not steak. Plus, again, “presumptive” is a spectrum: most problems you’ll design will be to some degree presumptive. The goal is to reduce that, to break out of the lazy habits that get us there … not to eliminate it in puristic terms.

The Optimal

One of the slippery ways a problem can be presumptive is when the range of approaches is theoretically wide open … but there is one approach (or a forcibly tiny set) that is objectively optimal. This can undermine Tactical Roleplaying, because when one approach is optimal, it becomes kind of stupid not to do the optimal thing … and when it’s kind of stupid not to do the optimal thing, that chokes out the potential for characterization, keeping it in the shallows, because “is this PC kind of stupid YES or NO?” is about as shallow as it gets.

So lets say a designer has the “passageway that can only be traversed by destroying the Statue Guardian” in their adventure design, and wants to keep it, but fix it, to make it less of a creative chokepoint … But also just desperately wants the PCs to destroy the Statue Guardian. So, instead of really doing the work to make the problem more creative, the GM just notes that, technically, the stone around the corridor can be bored through with the right magic or equipment, and also, technically, there’s another path that would take the PCs 30 miles out of their way, and, technically, the Statue Guardian can be rendered inert by a spell the PCs don’t have, but they could abandon the quest for a few days to go acquire it. This kind of design can get really technical.

That’s an extreme example to illustrate the point, but the Optimal is truly the subtlest of presumptive flavors. It’s worth your while to develop your senses to spot them and improve them (and not just with technicalities). Ironically, the tools of the Optimal can even be used to dismantle it, and we’ll get into that in a later entry.

The Videogame Choice

This one gets bandied about under many names: the Big Choice, the Moral (sometimes Ethical or other) Dilemma, the Quandary, the Trolley Problem. In tabletop RPGs, it's when the design just gives up on creative problems where PC priorities will emerge organically through the solutions they create … instead, we just shove a microphone in their face and demand they pick a side. Another way to knock characterization into the shallows.

I use the term “Videogame Choice” for a several reasons, but mostly to highlight that this is the kind of gameplay that can work really incredibly well in videogames, where a canned narrative can create a truly knotted, even gut-wrenchingly difficult choice (the ending of Life is Strange, virtually everything in the Walking Dead series, much of the Dragon Age games, and on and on).

Saints Row IV Boils It Right Down

But the reason they work so well in videogames is that, since videogames must be programmed, they thrive on the finite, even when sometimes managing an illusion of something more. When we’re playing a face-to-face RPG with a living, creative Game Master … we can, and should, expect much more than just a moment of selection. Videogame Choices can be very dramatic, but they are just giving up and shoving the mic, and as GMs we can not only do better, we can do better by many orders of magnitude.

Note that Videogame Choices include not only literal questions posed to the PCs, but any situation where there’s a clear A-B or A-B-C type choice: there’s just enough of the plague cure for Village A or Village B and the PCs must decide where to deliver it, etc. In fact, we could call it ...

The Menu

In truth, the Videogame Choice is a subset of the Menu, the umbrella term for any problem that boils down to selecting from a set of prepared somethings, instead of creating and implementing personal solutions.

A Menu doesn’t always try to be BIG or emotionally weighty, and menus can exist at many layers of RPG design. Sometimes, they’re provided as a consolation prize for other kinds of presumption: "yes, the only optimal approach is to fight the bandits, but you have over 200 spells and 30 pole arms to choose from!" And again, with emphasis: it’s not about the fight. It’s about the presumption.

And sometimes, the menu can be so large that it feels like a kind of freedom, if not any kind creation. And sometimes, the interplay between choices can result in emergent solutions that do feel like creation, at least a little. And sometimes that really is a suitable consolation prize. But if we leverage the potential of the Game Master sitting right there … we can do much, much better, if we want to.

Closing Notes

As with many of the most important conceptual tools in RPG design, the idea of the “presumptive problem” is slippery, mushy, spectral, and sometimes highly subjective. We can get lost if we forget that ideals are stars to sail by, not destinations. But if we never even look up, we begin lost, and our designs suffer.

Where we hit our stride is seeing those stars as whole constellations. By its lonesome, the ability to spot and repair a presumptive element is trivial … but when we marry it to other awareness like Tactical Roleplaying, Characterized Roleplaying, Porn Logic, and exploring the upper ends of the Invisible Rulebooks, it becomes an essential part of our toolkit.

My own ideal is what I call the half-dozen rule: I should be able to rattle off a half-dozen viable approaches to any critical problem without breaking a sweat ... then, after breaking a sweat, I should be able to rattle off a half-dozen more, and state with honest confidence that if I kept on sweat-breaking, I could keep on rattling, to infinity ... or at least to the limits of my ability to describe approaches.

And sometimes I get very near that star, but even when I can't, I sail by it.