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.

Porn Logic

I should begin by disclaiming: this article has nothing to do with porn. It's more entries into the RPG Lexicon, terms I use when discussing adventure design.

With that said, let's talk about porn.

Porn can be "about" anything. There are porn movies about pirates, porn movies about spies, porn movies about superheroes and galactic explorers and private eyes and advertising executives. These characters, like any characters in any medium, have goals to pursue and problems to solve: the rival pirates want the treasure map; the new planet is inhabited by intelligent humanoids with which we must make first contact; the grieving widow believes her husband was murdered for the family's cursed emerald, and so on.

It just happens to work out that, every time, that the way to solve these problems, and achieve these goals, is for everybody to engage in the naughty naked sexifying. After a given number of sex scenes, the plot manages to resolve itself in the momentary scene-scraps in-between. Another mystery artfully deduced by Max Hardwood, Private Dick.

The more RPGs lean heavily into the Visible Rules, the more adventure design begins to operate according to Porn Logic. Because visible-leaning play places high importance on things the system can define and resolve, the adventure's problems tend to shape themselves into the game's pre-defined mechanistic loops, which works out because, in such games, the Player Characters are in large part defined by their choices and contributions within those loops. Mechanistic loops are defined by the centrality of Flat Tactics: tactical sub-scenarios defined in system terms, which can be resolved by mechanistic problem-solving and consulting the system, with only occasional need for adjudication by the Game Master.

If the system’s core loop is chase scenes, for example, and the “goal” of the adventure is to rescue a political prisoner, it’ll just so happen that the way to rescue the prisoner is to have and succeed in a series of chase scenes. Next week, when the adventure is about healing a diplomatic rift, it’ll just so happen that the way to heal a diplomatic rift is to have and succeed in a series of chase scenes. In such a game, chase scenes are the optimal response to, and shape of, nearly every core problem, just as the solution in Max Hardwood and the Case of the Lethal Lubricant was to have a series of sex scenes, and when the villainous Madame Lube returned in Max Hardwood Gives Them The Slip, the solution was to - again - have a series of sex scenes. Porn Logic.

And of course, most of the core loops in traditional RPGs are more about fights than chase scenes, but it's useful to recognize that fighting isn't the actual issue here. The issue is how allowing the system to be important exerts gravity over what a game is "about," and whether the game's tactics tend to be "flat."

Videogames depend on mechanistic loops for their success because videogames are made entirely of system. Players can only perform actions accounted for by the system, against challenges defined in system terms. With sufficiently complex systems, or the wild-card of multiplayer participation, you can sometimes get emergent solutions (solutions that the designers didn't explicitly predict) but nothing approaching tactical infinity, because tactical infinity depends on playing outside the system, and that requires a living Game Master.

So, the more an RPG leans into Porn Logic, the more its gameplay begins to resemble that of a videogame ... or a card game, boardgame, or grid-and-counter wargame.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, where the Invisible Rules are more important than the system, and where tactical infinity and tactical roleplay are embraced as the core game experience, the process of adventure design is dramatically different. Mechanistic loops exert little or no pressure on the reality of the PCs, so if the adventure is about "rescuing a political prisoner," the PCs will need to create and implement a rescue. If the adventure is about healing a diplomatic rift, the PCs will need to create and implement diplomatic change.

These problems (and their solutions) are examples of Rich Tactics: tactical challenges and efforts that operate largely outside the game system, requiring frequent adjudication by the Game Master. Instead of relying on the kewpie doll of success appearing at the end of a series of chase scenes, the PCs must create and implement solutions for which no explicit mechanism exists. And so, the GM must prepare problems that need creative solving, rather than "set-piece" loop-sequences that need engaging. It's difficult to overstate how much this can alter the design process, and the resulting game experience.

It will be important to understand, going forward in this series, that at no point on this spectrum do we step outside of rules-based, tactical game design when we create adventures. Rather, we exchange Flat Tactics for Rich Tactics, and swap out the Visible Rulebooks for the Invisible. We don't even necessarily step beyond loops. We step, rather, toward non-mechanistic ones: richly tactical, character-facing loops which afford greater variety, more surprise, and greater potential for strong characterization.

And as always, these are simplified extremes bookending the spectrum of the Traditional RPG. Many systems offer multiple loop-styles ("this is about dogfighting and baking competitions"), every Trad RPG allows (with varying enthusiasm) for tactical infinity, every Trad RPG allows (with varying enthusiasm) for mechanistic loops, many gamers enjoy both Flat and Rich Tactics, and even creative solutions can dip into mechanism for fragments of it (rolling dice to pick a lock as part of a more complex overall plan, for example). But with all those variables accounted for, Porn Logic is still a thing. A big, hard thing.

Thinking in terms of Flat Tactics vs. Rich Tactics, and recognizing the gravitational pull of Porn Logic, are the game design and GMing side of creative vs. mechanistic problem-solving. If you want to support the gameplay of creative solutions, your adventures must provide creative problems.

Object of the Game

This one's a bit basic, but if we're going to get where we're headed with the Lexicon, we'll need it. I'll keep it quickish.

Every game has an object, or objective. If you're playing Chess, the object of the game is to put the opponent's king in checkmate. If you're playing Scrabble, the object of the game is to have the most points at the end. If you're playing Tic-Tac-toe, the object is to get three of your symbol (X or O) in a row, and so on.

The object of Chess, Scrabble, and Tic-Tac-Toe is the same, every time you play. That's a foundational or fixed object. In The Beginning, it was a given that a game's object was fixed, coded right into the game as a whole.

Then along came variants. Two Chess players could agree to play a Chess variant in which the object is to capture both of the opponent's Knights, for example, or variants where the object changes every 12th turn, or uncountable others. They're still playing Chess, but it's a different sort of Chess, which acknowledges the core version as the core version while exploring deviation from it (and some variants don't change the objective, but objectives are what we're here for today).

Tabletop wargames explored a variant on the variant: the scenario. Games with scenarios don't necessarily have a default, fixed object. Instead, the scenario frequently defines the object for each instance of the game. In a very important sense, each scenario in a game of Squad Leader (for instance) is a different game using the same core of rules, but with its own object, its own set of game-pieces (the units allotted each side) and its own game board (Squad Leader comes with several modular boards, miniatures games can be played on hand-crafted terrain and so on). So, instead of a foundational objective, we have one or more scenario objectives.

Variants and scenarios are in many ways a spectrum of the same thing. The most important difference is the concept of a default game (including one or more foundational objectives): if you play Chess without selecting a variant, you can still play Chess. But you can't play most wargames without first selecting, creating, or generating a scenario. In Squad Leader, the part that stays the same across scenarios is the system of rules and procedures. The combination of scenario + system makes for a game you can play.

The traditional RPG sprouted from wargaming roots, so it's scenario-based, too, with a system of rules, mechanics and procedures which don't become a playable game until the Game Master selects, creates, or generates a scenario with one or more scenario objectives (sometimes with a lot of input from the Players), and until each Player selects, creates, or generates characters (sometimes with a lot of input from the GM or other Players).

But, RPGs bring a new set of wrinkles to the Object of the Game, since Player Characters can pursue their own objectives both individually and as a group, and both within the scope of a scenario and over the course of many. Importantly, these character objectives, group objectives, and campaign objectives can be entirely divorced from (or even contradict) the scenario objectives provided by an adventure, or the foundational objectives baked into the system (if any). They can also change and evolve from the inside, interacting, combining, growing and dying in unexpected ways, because of the central importance of characters.

Which brings us to the lexical point. Tactical Infinity is key to the whole shebang around here, and objectives are the standards against which tactics are measured. Without objectives, Tactical Infinity would cease to be tactical. It would just be plain old Infinity, the kind the universe leaves laying around. The kind they have in waiting rooms at the DMV.

Every game has at least one Object. RPGs tend to have several, in shifting and evolving number and arranged in shifting and evolving priority weight, where the objectives and priority weight vary from object to object and from character to character, all within the same game. That's magic, of a kind, and it'll be awfully important, as we continue with the Lexicon.

This Map is Crude

This blog turned 2 months young yesterday, so I may as well commemorate that with a summary of where we are with the Lexicon series in particular. This is a crude two-dimensional squishing of a decidedly multi-dimensional topic: my view of my niche, within the larger realm of tabletop games.

I work the orange part of town, as a writer and designer. As a player, I wander the entire map from time to time, and beyond it (I also love some card games, board games, miniatures wargames, computer games, parlor games, yard games and more). As a player, I'm an omnigamer.

But in terms of what I make, I work the orange part of town, including those areas of overlap that contain a smidge of orange ... pretty much to the degree implied by the color, and to the extent implied by the overlap.

Some gamers think of these as "camps." I consider them neighborhoods. Maybe there's not much difference, but it means that I consider everyone in every circle my neighbors. I think that's difference enough from what "camps" implies.

I also think of them as subcultures, dialects, flavor profiles, notes and octaves, depending on the metaphor of the moment.

I'm confident that the view from your window will differ from mine, and from everyone else's. I'm keen to learn what you see. The terrain blocks itself, in some ways. I suspect a more universally-agreeable map would be four-dimensional and very blurry, possibly to the point where the text must be guessed-at. Plus kind of swirly. And there'd be Dorito crumbs. Alternate angles on the same implied "question" would take other forms entirely; overlapping circles, or even spheres, wouldn't do.

And it's Interactive Sunday. My inbox, as always, is open. I'm also really keen on finding some nighttime gamers for online RPG sessions ("night-time" in Colorado might even be broad daylight where you live). Either way, hope this finds you well, and gaming.

Challenging the Character, Not Just the Sheet

This is an RPG Lexicon post. If you're new, you can dive right in, but it'll make more sense if you start with the Invisible Rulebooks.

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Today in the Lexicon I want to tackle a breezy one. Some of the terms I depend on in RPG design are ... provocative, in certain contexts. This one, not so much. Mostly.

Today's terms are strong characterization and weak characterization, as they relate to the characterizing potential of an RPG challenge.

In games leaning invisible, one of the qualities of an excellent problem (for the PCs to face) is a goodly dose of characterizing potential. In simplest terms, this just means "different characters are likely to solve the problem differently."

By this extra-simple metric, most problems have some small degree of characterizing potential. Even the fillerest of fillers, the Locked Door, will be solved differently by your basic videogame-style fantasy troupe: the burglar can probably pick the lock, the wizard can probably cast some kind of open-sesame spell, the gronky bricks can probably crack the door open with their otherwise-uncalled-for craniums, etc.

This exposes the limits of the simple definition, because that is some weak characterization. It reveals the basic niche of each character, but we learn nothing about them that we couldn't already tell from glancing at their painted miniatures.

Let's consider an example, the "Jumper Mayor:" In Superhero City, the mayor has just stepped onto a 16th-story ledge of an office building downtown. His expression is a bit glassy, and the only words anyone's heard from him are "I think I'm going to jump." Nobody's sure why: demonic possession? Doctor Hypnotic's Hypno-Satellite? A mayoral doppelganger sent by The Devious Duplicator? Or is the mayor just in a serious emotional low-spot, isolated and in pain?

The point being, Deadpool would handle this differently than Captain America, who'd handle it differently than Wonder Woman, who'd handle it differently than Black Widow who'd handle it differently than Green Lantern, and more to the point, the different Green Lanterns (and the different Captains America, and so on) might also handle it differently, from one another. Hal Jordan is a very different person than Guy Gardner who's different from Kyle Rayner and so on (lots of Lanterns to choose from). So it's not about what the green ring can do: it's about the kind of person who's wearing it.

I mean, if you had a power ring, what would you do? Let the mayor jump, but catch him safely from his fall? Bind him to the wall and prevent him from jumping? Knock him unconscious first? Try to talk him down? Give him the power to fly? Trap him in a force-bubble until you can figure out what the cause is? Would you make it a point to stand there on the ledge with him? Fly in front of him? Solve it from a distance? Would you talk first to the mayor, or to the witnesses? Would it be important to let the fire and rescue people solve it if they can, and not "superhero" all over it unless absolutely necessary?

Any possible response to the Jumper Mayor might solve the short-term problem while exacerbating a long-term one, or be distracted by the short-term problem while missing some vital bigger picture. So, in terms of characterizing, the Jumper Mayor has a lot of potential for strong characterization: any superhero PC who seeks to solve this problem is likely to reveal more than just their suite of skills or powers or gadgets; there's a good chance they'll reveal something about their nature, priorities, values and beliefs, and that's good stuff.

What's more, any solution to the problem is likely to spin into ancillary problems which magnify that potential.

As usual, we're talking about a spectrum, not simple boxes tagged "strong" and "weak." But it's a spectrum with some recognizeable bands. Here's a quick half-dozen, arranged from weaker to stronger:

• Solutions to this problem reveal broad niches (tank vs. caster, good vs. evil, etc).
• Solutions to this problem reveal principal abilities or gear (gunplay vs. psionics, etc).
• Solutions to this problem reveal obscure abilities or gear (things the PC doesn't often call on: mastery of the cheese omelet, the ability to speak Hovitos, etc).
• Solutions to this problem reveal the kind of person the character likes to project (outward style, self image, declared values and allegiances).
• Solutions to this problem reveal the kind of person the character's friends and family would recognize even if others wouldn't (down-to-the-wire loyalties, priorities, insights, capacity for sacrifice).
• Solutions to this problem reveal the kind of person the character is, but keeps hidden or even subconscious (deepest beliefs, hopes, fears, snapping points and wells of inspiration).

This brings us to the faint chance of being provocative, because this cleaves along visible-to-invisible tendencies. If you've been following the Lexicon series, you can work that out without me belaboring it. If you're new, suffice it to say: I consider it a point of GMing quality (and adventure-design quality, often both at once) that a "good" adventure provides at least a few central challenges with potential for strong characterization. An adventure which provides nothing of the sort is one I'll reject as an editor, feel shame about as a GM or designer, and roll my eyes at, as a player (before declining to attend future sessions, citing hair-washing and nose-picking responsibilities).

I carefully refer to the potential for characterization. There's no such thing, in absolute terms, as a 100% "characterizing" or "non-characterizing" problem, because games leaning invisible embrace tactical infinity as the core of gameplay ... so we can't be sure (and never want to be sure) how any given PC or PC-group will solve (or nullify, destroy, or end-run around) a problem. But characterizing potential is still a real, recognizable thing, something we can include, or fail to include. A keen eye for that potential is a critical skill in RPG design, with an impact most strongly-felt in adventure design, but with powerful echoes in setting and resource design, and even a few drips down to the systemic basement. When the time comes to dive into the design articles, you'll see a lot of these terms.

In the meantime: breezy! Mostly breezy. See you next time, in the Lexicon.

"Give a Girl a Gusli, and Everything Looks Like an Audience"

Lexical Longings

I want to touch on my long-term goals with the RPG Lexicon.

The goal I've mentioned already is: I want to do some deep-dive RPG design articles, and those would be fraught with fraughty things if I can't pepper them with hyperlinks exploring the terminology I depend on.

The other goal is a loftier one: I want to meet other designers of like mind, working in or near my design niche, to form a community for mutual support, friendly chatter, and the exchange of techniques.

This niche I'm in is, frankly, a bit obscure. There's no mystery why; I'm very clear on the reasons for other forms being more popular ... but this old boat is my home for larger, deeper and older reasons than those can compare to, and her popularity isn't why I signed aboard. Bottom line: she offers experiences impossible elsewhere, and I treasure those, as player and GM. I can (and do) enjoy other forms on their own terms (I still love me some Scrabble), but they're unable to provide a substitute for this form, and that means this form's endurance is crucial.

This amounts to a conscious decision to be a bit isolated from the larger RPG design community. Not because I don't love those folks; I do (and I admire their work). It's just that, at the level of craft, their techniques are largely irrelevant to my work, and vice-versa. I can talk to OSR folk about how to promote a PDF on OBS; I can talk to storygame designers about how to work around Adobe InDesign's clumsy limitations on global kerning exceptions; I can talk to my D&D friends about coloring a map that will print clearly using only black toner. And I'm grateful for those kinds of conversations.

But when it comes to building worlds, characters, adventures ... the reasons I do this to begin with ... it becomes the difference between being a people-doctor and a horse-doctor. The skills relate, the tools relate, but ... the differences limit the fruitful exchange. Different dosages. Different arrangement of organs. Different bedside manner.

So, I'm hoping to build what doesn't currently exist: an online community of professionals writing and designing in my design neighborhood: worlds, resources, and adventures designed around characterizing, creative problem solving ... tactical roleplaying in games where the visible rulebooks are spackle-caddy to the invisible ones. Traditional RPGs with rules engineered around their own relative unimportance compared to the miracle made possible by a living, breathing Game Master.

I'm by no means the Last of My Kind, but I'm one of a small number. I think it would be better if we were all friends. Drop me a line. It's Interactive Sunday, after all.

Me. It's Totally Recent If We Round To The Nearest Century.

Warm & Crinkly

“In this replacement Earth we’re building they’ve given me Africa to do and of course I’m doing it with all fjords again because I happen to like them, and I’m old fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it’s not equatorial enough. Equatorial!” He gave a hollow laugh. “What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”     “And are you?”     “No. That’s where it all falls down of course.” – The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams

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I picked up my first copy of Hitchhiker's at the "Seven-Day Store" on Quantico, a convenience shop where Marines would go for Doritos and beer. They had a wall-rack of paperbacks with distinct leanings for the target audience: science fiction, spy novels, self-help books. They stocked the whole trilogy (this was in the last few months of it being a trilogy in the mundane sense), and after reading the back covers, I knew I wanted them. After begging a couple extra quarters from my father, I had just enough for the first one; I'd get the others as soon as I could.

I met Slartibartfast that night as I raced through the book, addicted from page one. Like that X-Men Annual that would show me a magic item before I needed magic items, Slartibartfast taught me fjords and "lovely crinkly edges" before I needed fjords and lovely crinkly edges. Later on, when I'd sit down to draw my first coastline for an RPG fantasy world, I'd settle for nothing less than a lovely baroque feel, and I knew I wouldn't care how equatorial it was.

Slartibartfast is the source of my obsession with crinkly coastlines, but that's just one facet of warmth, a quality I treasure at every level of RPG creation.

When I wrote about the basic qualities of good RPG writing, pre-blog readers may have noticed the abridged version of my usual laundry list, with "warmth" conspicuously absent. There are three reasons for that. First, that article was focused on RPG writing, while my love of warmth extends also into design and production. Second, warmth thus rated a place in the RPG Lexicon series, and here we are. Finally, and importantly: some genuinely good RPG writing is ice cold, and while my love of warm design is absolute and eternal, it would be unfair to include it on list of fundamental RPG writing ingredients.

Warmth in RPG design is something I love, design toward, seek out, and talk about. What's more, I'm often stopped mid-rant and asked to explain it, because I seem to be simultaneously describing a game's systems, worlds, adventures, cartography, typography, illustrations, page design, themes, philosophies, morals, politics, history and resources. But that's only because I am.

The version most people understand immediately is warmth as it applies to color: the red/orange/yellow side of the color wheel is traditionally the "warm" side, with the green/blue/violet side traditionally "cool." I'd love to tell you this stems from some deep spiritual properties inherent in the magic of color (because that would be romantic, and romance is warm) but the ice-cold truth is that of simple association: yellow with sunlight, red with blood and red-hot iron, flames with all three, and so on, while blue and it's neighbors evoke cool water, cool evenings, cool forest glades and death by frostbite. It's not magical or mysterious, but the emotional and thematic impact of color choice is difficult to overstate. It's more than just hue, too. Saturation connotes more warmth than de-saturation: the greyer a color is, the cooler it is, even if it's orange fire greying to cooler ash. Brightness, too, tends to connote more warmth than cold darkness, so this hits every part of the HSB graph (translate to RGB or CMYK at need).

In other graphic terms, straight lines and sharp corners are frosty; wavy and curvy are warm. The same associative logic applies to arrangements and spatial relationships: a perfect line is cold, but perfect parallel lines are even colder (distance is cold, too, so if they're parallel but far apart, that's even colder). A row of perfectly spaced, perfectly-aligned boxes may as well be ice cubes, especially if there's lots of cold air between them. Warm elements relate imperfectly and hug closer; they're too alive for symmetry (life is warm and death is cold). A hand-drawn line is the warmest line, because it feels more human, more organic, more personal, more likely to collide with something or even trip over itself. A perfect vector line is cold because it's mechanical, devoid of individuality, devoid of texture or deviation. Idiosyncrasy is warm.

Warmth is casual and playful; formality and conformity are cold. Warmth relaxes, kicks off its shoes, but it loves socks, because softness is warm. Fluffy is warm. Warm reclines by the fireplace, because actual warmth is warm. Sensuality is warm. Blankets and rugs, slippers and towels, warm from the hot dryer on a cold day. That's one of my favorite little ironies: if your RPG setting is wintry, it's more likely to have warmth, because if it's ice-cold (hard, sparse, dark) outside, a lot of the imagery will be about cozy coats and bulky sweaters, Viking halls with firepits, welcoming inns with hearthside ale, yellow light in frosted windowpanes, the life-saving guts of a light-sabered Tauntaun. Norway is cold but it isn't cold, because Slartibartfast gave it crinkles and Norwegians keep it cozy.

All these things bridge toward emotional and conceptual warmth, because home is warm. Home is lived-in, used, rumpled, messy. Home smells like cooking and pets and grandma's farts, and all those are warm. Brewing coffee is warm, baking bread is warm. The word WELCOME on a mat is warm, and the sentiment "welcome" even moreso, because sentiment is warm. Hugs are warm and love is warm and comforts are warm. The past can seem warmer than the future, partly because familiarity is warm, but the quality isn't limited to the past. Serenity is a warmer starship than Enterprise precisely because it feels so lived-in, homey, messy, imperfect, dirty. It wears its past on its sleeve so the heart rides with it. Fortunately, Leonard McCoy brings the warmth of a thousand suns, so Enterprise is fine.

Fallibility is warm; awkwardness is warm. Cold speaks to the intellect but warmth to the heart, so failure is warm, yearning is warm, well-meaning mistakes and embarrassment are warm. Sincerity and hope: warm. Sympathy is warm. Friendship is warm. Variety is warm. Humanity is warm. Fear is cold but every cure for it is warm. Courage is warm. Passion is warm. Contradiction is warm, and that's a good thing, because if you're designing for warmth, you'll meet more than a few contradictions, because this stuff isn't algebra (math is cold!) There are times when, according to context and connotation, any of these observations gets flipped on its ear. That makes it unpredictable but, that's okay. Unpredictability is warm! Just, not consistently.

This term is crucial to the lexicon because warmth is one of the stars I steer my work by: a core design ideal. That's not to say I don't also work with ice. Like with Norway, ice provides the contrast that makes the warmth brighter. Plus, sticking purely with warmth would be homogeneous, and that's cold. See? It's an excellent source of your daily irony.

It's also, as a gamer, a quality I crave, and I frequently go hungry. For a variety of cultural reasons, cold is the predominant temperature in RPG design, writing, and production, and has been across the hobby's history. There are, of course, many delightful exceptions, and I search them out, scoop them up, hug them, and game with them.

If you've been following this series, I'm sure you can't help but notice that the Invisible Rulebooks have a hold on me, in part, because they're rich in warmth and warmth-potential. The gaming territory they represent is the messy place outside the vehicle, as it were. It's about putting your feet on uneven ground, where the rules aren't just unseen, they're soft, malleable, irregular, contradictory, and ultimately down to the natures of fictional characters and the idiosyncrasies of a human GM. The resulting form of play is so frequently marvelous it kind of spoils me, on both sides of the screen, because that arrangement only works when there's a powerful mutual confidence in everyone's intentions and abilities. A confidence that, when it's present, warms the bones of every piece of related game design.

I'm sure there's a word for that, somewhere down the winding back-country road of the lexicon.

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Tactical Roleplaying

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This is #3 of the RPG Lexicon series. Click here for #1, if you're new and you're feeling linear!
(But, this one stands pretty well on its own, too)!

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Today I want to talk about a term I depend on, but which has stalled more than a few conversations in confusion: tactical roleplaying. It's the essence, in many ways, of what I love most in RPGs. S. John Hearts Tactical Roleplaying, Hearts It So Much.

We should probably start by being crystal-clear on the word tactics. Let's say we're playing Scrabble, you and I. I just played near a triple-word square, hoping to follow up on my next turn, but it's your turn now! Alas, your tiles suck. They suck so hard. But ... you've got just enough in your tray to cobble together a low-scoring word that fails to grab that square, but lies adjacent to it in a way that makes it unusable to others. If you make that play, you block me from my intent. That blocking move is a tactic: you made a choice, you took an action, to help you win.

In RPG culture, some folks get stuck on the word's military connotations, using it to refer to combat. That's exactly right, in some contexts. Not this one. Scrabble has no combat rules, give or take a few colorful homebrew variants.

That's where many of these conversations get confusing. But we've got it out of the way, right? Let's try it: Blackmailing Detective Phelps to get to the Chief of Police? Tactic. Handing a freshly-unearthed copy of the Necronomicon to someone else so they can read it instead of you? Tactic. Taking this Wookiee to custody? Tactic. Choosing between the Mines of Moria and the Gap of Rohan? Tactic. In RPGs, any choice or action that affects the outcome of character endeavors is tactical. Instead of players "winning" and "losing," Player Characters succeed by degrees (plus or minus qualifiers) at dozens or hundreds of endeavors over the course of an adventure. Thanks to the invisible rulebooks, RPGs have tactical infinity, and that's the magic mojo happy juice.

So, now we're at tactical roleplaying. Roleplaying is sometimes tactical. Sometimes, it isn't, because sometimes it affects outcomes, and sometimes it doesn't. That's the whole term. Tactical roleplaying. Roleplaying, that affects outcomes. As a player, I love it. As a GM, I do my best to serve the players by providing for it. As a designer, I consider it a core design ideal and a valuable point of contrast. But what are we even contrasting? Two things:

• The first is non-tactical roleplaying. If two PCs playfully banter while sharing the road, for example, that's usually non-tactical: it's atmospheric; it's entertaining, but it doesn't affect any outcomes. If we removed it from play, the course of events wouldn't change. We don't want to remove it from play, though, because banter is fun. We like banter. It even enriches Scrabble.
  
• The second is player-level gameplay: tactical decisions made by the player as the player, rather than the player as the character. It can be a mushy line, but it's not THAT mushy. This gets us into age-old RPG talky-points like "character knowledge vs. player knowledge:" If it's a decision based on the visible rulebooks, that's a player-level decision, for example. I adore many games where this is the core of gameplay (like Scrabble).
  

Sometimes, this can get into murkier zones of player knowledge (the player knowing the game-world better than the character ever could) or player intention (the player's goals superseding the character's). Handing off the Necronomicon, for example: is it an example of tactical roleplaying? Depends. If the character knows what harm reading such a book might do to a fragile mortal mind, passing it along is tactical roleplaying, and specifically it's an act of in-character cruelty. That character is a dick. On the other hand, if the character is innocent, and hands it off because the player has some understanding of the danger, that's a player-level gameplay, and that player is a dick.

So either way it's a dick move, but each version has a different dick.

It should be easy by now to track how we cascade to this from the Invisible Rulebooks. In games leaning visible, procedures and mechanisms are more important, so reliable resources are more important (for defining both PCs and the obstacles they face), so decisions based on knowledge of the visible rules are more important. This calls on the players to drive the gameplay, and calls on the GM to focus challenges in that same head-space lest the PCs be rendered mechanically irrelevant (a dick move). These are all just spectral tendencies but they can really add up, because they're mutually reinforcing. In such games, there's usually a clear division between "the game parts" and "the roleplaying parts," to the point where some gamers will even express preferences in those terms.

Over the course of the hobby's history, there's been an unfortunate tendency to cast this in terms of role-play vs. "roll-play," as if to suggest that mechanistic groups roleplay less, or value roleplaying less. In my experience, that's seldom true and never fair. Gamers leaning visible don't roleplay less than gamers leaning invisible. Nor do they value it any less. It's just, in those games, roleplaying is less tactical, because the tactical "load" tends to focus on "the game parts." Meanwhile, "the roleplaying parts" are still welcome and encouraged, because they enrich the game, making it more immersive and entertaining for everyone.

In games leaning invisible, the resulting change isn't "more roleplaying" but rather roleplaying becoming more tactically important, gradually fusing with and (at the further end of the spectrum) becoming the central mode of gameplay. This, in turn, magnifies the impact of characterization, and lets players just game wholly in character, if they like, with fewer reasons to poke their attention anywhere near a mechanism or procedure (because the characters are busy, solving problems and overcoming obstacles and buckling swashes and probably still bantering). And just as visible-leaning games have just-as-much-roleplaying, invisible-leaning games have just-as-much-tactical-meat. The trade-out is where it sits: crucial decision-making tends to slip from the hands of the players, flowing down into the fictional world, to the hands of the characters.

Are there other consequences to all this? Oh, so many. But we've got a whole blog to explore them in. See you next installment, in the Lexicon.

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Deadly Goobers, Hollow Points: Another Dip into the Lexicon

We've previously examined tactical infinity and the invisible rulebooks. Be sure you're up to speed on those, because these new terms depend on them. As before, I'm not really describing concepts here (if you've been gaming more than a week, you already know these concepts); lexicon posts are about the terms, which are the tools, I use in designing.

Today's terms: I find it useful to recognize the difference between reliable and ephemeral resources, and their proximity to mechanistic vs. creative problem-solving.

Gameplay in RPGs is frequently about solving problems: There's a child in need of rescue. There's a war that needs preventing. There's a planet that needs exploring or a beastie eating villagers or a mystery we haven't solved or a mark we haven't robbed yet. An adventure contains problems, and the PCs set about solving them ... whatever "solving" means to these PCs, in this context. While we're at it, some PCs spend a lot of time magnifying, multiplying, and creating fresh problems of their own!

Boiling it further down: this frequently comes down to the application of resources to attempt solutions.

Reliable resources are those recognized and defined by the visible rulebooks. If a game has a "Strength" score, for example, being strong becomes, to some extent, a reliable resource. If a game has rules for 9mm hollow-point bullets, having a pocketful of those becomes, to some extent, a reliable resource (usually moreso if you've got a gun). The extent to which a resource is reliable is the extent to which the visible rules recognize and define it.

Reliable doesn't mean "guaranteed to succeed." Your 9mm pistol might be able to jam or misfire; you might be able to miss, and shooting the problem might not solve it. Reliable just means "guaranteed to be something you can look up in the visible rules." Skills, stats, spells, superpowers, potions of invisibility, starships, weapons, armor, tricorders, cars, fanny-packs, provisions ... if the visible rulebooks, to any extent, define and describe a thing, it's something that has, to that same extent, the "reliable" tag. The same bullets can be more or less reliable in different games, based on how reliably you can look them up to understand what they can do.

Ephemeral resources tend to emerge from elements the GM has prepped or improvised for the adventure or campaign, including things like the weather, current events, the nature of a local culture, or the quirks and interests of specific NPCs. These sometimes matter only in the here-and-now. An offhand mention of an NPC priest's peanut allergy is a resource the PCs can leverage toward a solution, if the priest's potential for misery and maybe-fatal anaphylactic shock might be part of that solution. Maybe that priest will never appear in another adventure, but right here, right now, his allergy goes on our list of assets, next to the wheelbarrow we left over the albino.

For the PCs to apply an ephemeral resource often requires the invisible rulebooks, because not every game explicitly defines the mechanistic effects of peanut allergies, and even if they do, they seldom provide a mechanism for determining if any given priest is subject to those effects, or if the PCs know about those priests. These resources spring from the mouth of the GM, and the GM must ultimately adjudicate their uses. To the extent that the visible rulebooks do not recognize or define a resource, that resource is ephemeral. As with the bullets, this peanut allergy can be more or less ephemeral, depending on the game.

I've been using the word "extent" a lot because this is all super-duper spectral. A given resource can occupy any position from wholly reliable to wholly ephemeral. Similarly, any attempted solution can occupy any position from mechanistic to creative. While we're at it, a thoroughly-defined resource can still be used in creative ways, and an ephemeral resource can still be leveraged using visible rules.

Yet, despite all this spectral mushery, there are clear consequences for any design's reliance on the visible or invisible rules, whether we're talking about adventure design, world design, resource design or ... anything we design.

In games which rely heavily on the visible rules, player characters tend to be defined in terms of several reliable resources, and they're often outfitted with belongings which are also reliable resources. As a consequence of that, adventure-design tends to follow suit by defining most central problems in mechanistic terms: the difficulty of the lock, the thickness of the star destroyer's armor, the power level of the telekinetic villain. In games of this kind, there's distinct pleasure to be found in managing and applying reliable resources in reliable ways (which might still have highly unpredictable results, depending on how everything works). There are frequently optimal solutions to central problems, and it's satisfying when the PCs can deliver that solution.

At the other end of the spectrum, characters in invisible-leaning games tend to have fewer reliable resources on their character sheets, and adventures for such games tend to define central problems in less-mechanistic terms, and those problems seldom have optimal solutions ... so the pleasure and satisfaction comes more from recognizing the potential of ephemeral resources, and applying that potential creatively.

Because it's always spectral, all these pleasures (and pleasures combining them) can arise in any game ... but the tendencies are real, cascading through every form and level of design.

And that's why I wanted to get these terms out of the way early. They're pretty basic, but we'll need them a lot going forward. See you next time in the Lexicon.

No Amount of Mechanistic Definition Could Stay SAINT THRAZAR From Using His Axe - or His Lapels - Creatively.

The Invisible Rulebooks

When asked to explain the Invisible Rulebooks in person, I usually start with this scenario. If it's any consolation, it rambles in person, too:

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You're a player in a wild-west RPG, and it's kind of action-comedy western with occasional dramatic historical stuff, but mostly it's just action of the rootin' tootin' variety. Train robberies, stagecoach chases, high noon gunfights. Barroom brawls where the piano player keeps on playing no matter how many bodies slide down the bartop and slam into the piano.

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So you're a player, in that, and you're playing the kind of rootin' tootin' character who likes to shoot the ten-gallon hats right off the bad guys to let 'em know who's boss. Bang!, pling!, and off the hat goes, embarrassing the bad guy without endangering him.

Some RPGs have specific rules for this. Some don't. But in an RPG, you – and I mean the fictional you, the rootin'-tootin' you – can try anything, and expect a fair shake on succeeding or failing or the mushy funtime chaos in-between. That's tactical infinity (which I usually describe with fake nuns; see this article for the fake nuns).

• If the game has specific rules for hat-shooting, the GM might opt to use those rules.
• If the game has specific rules for shooting, but not specifically for shooting hats, the GM might opt to use those, and apply them to hats.
• If the game has no specific rules for shooting at all, but has rules for doing stuff in a broad sense, the GM might opt to apply those rules.
• If the game has no rules that seem to apply well enough, the GM can improvise an off-the-cuff rule, or simply provide a ruling.
• And so on. The permutations are many.

Lots of RPGs have rules for shooting. Some have rules for missing.

In the real world (as I understand it based on infrequent contact), if you send a bullet toward the crown of a bad guy's head, and miss, there's a fair chance you'll miss wide, sending that bullet into yon prairie backdrop or Old Man McGillicuddy's Traveling Snake-Oil Wagon. There's also a smaller, but genuine, chance that you'll miss a little low, and blow a chunk from his head, or miss lower, and slug him in the neck, or shoulder, or chest. Bullets aren't really made for making ten-gallon hats safely go pling!

Some RPGs are very interested in modeling that sort of thing, and a literal use of such rules could transform this rootin' tootin' symbolic gesture into a deadly accident waiting to happen. Because you're not just rootin' and tootin', you're shootin'.

Some RPGs are more genre-conscious, and if they're written with western action-comedy in mind, will explicitly place genre conventions above conventional physics in this situation: in such a run, it's safe to shoot someone's hat off. If you fail, you might embarrass yourself instead of the bad guy, but those are the only stakes. Nobody's going to lose a chunk of skull over this. And the same goes for shooting the bad guy's belt-buckle so his britches fall down, which bends the real world even further in the name of genre.

Some RPGs simply have no specific take on what happens when a gunshot misses, in any situation, symbolic or literal. Some do, but only consider the question in a way that wouldn't apply to the funny hat shot. Again, there are many permutations.

But none of this is a problem – none of it at all – if the Game Master is clear headed and fair and on the same page as the players.

Even if a literal reading of the rules suggest that Black Bart just lost a wet chunk of his frontal lobe, even if the rules have no idea where the bullet went, even if the rules never even mention bullets, the GM can make the call, and move on. Because GMs don't need to rely on the visible rulebook alone, they've also got heads full of Invisible Rulebooks.

We've all got a library up there. We've got the Book of Realistic Firearms As I Understand Them, and the Book of Genre Conventions Volume XIV: Action-Comedy Westerns. We've got the more general Book of Physics and the Book of Ensemble-Based Table Behavior and even the Book of How We Decide Who Gets the Final Dorito.

Of course, my version of the Book of Realistic Firearms As I Understand Them is probably different from yours, because we have different experiences and sources to draw from.

And if I'm very serious about it, my Invisible Rulebooks might give more deterministic weight to Realistic Firearms over Genre Conventions, because people, like games, have varying levels of genre-awareness (or genre-patience, or genre-interest). We can agree on both the realistic stakes and the genre stakes, but still disagree on which of these takes precedence in this game. Or we can agree on all of that, but still disagree on the odds of succeeding.

So, your Invisible Rulebooks, and my Invisible Rulebooks, are differently sourced and differently weighted. Probably. It's hard to tell, because they're invisible. But you and I still depend on them, and sometimes, in the middle of a game, the differences can become apparent.

And naturally, we have these internal rulebooks on every imaginable topic. There's The Book of How You Can Tell if Someone's Lying, for example. Maybe the GM has strong opinions on that one, and those opinions will inform the behavior of the campaign's NPCs. But if the GM's opinions on how a liar behaves differs from yours or mine, some of the GM's implications can be lost. And it doesn't even matter if the rules address it ... not if the GM is banking on the players noticing, in play, the way Fickle Joe the Stoolie touches his collar when he insists that he hasn't heard anything about Nickels McCone.

Every day, at gaming tables around the world, little wrinkles arise in the tension between our written, visible rulebooks, and the GM's library of Invisible Rules, and each player's own Unseen Stacks. My dog-eared invisible copy of Social Niceties in 16th-Century Muscovy might collide, at any time, with some other gamer's more general What Old-Timey Times Were Maybe Like Back In The Day, referred to in the same moment. My scrawny pamphlet of What I Suppose Brain Surgery on Klingons Would Be Like might contradict the more-informed knowledge of an actual physician at the gaming table, but it'll inform my version of Leonard McCoy either way, if that's who I'm playing.

And every day, gamers deal with it just fine. That's what a friendly table of cooperative roleplayers, with a groovy GM and a supply of Doritos, can achieve. And we do it so constantly that we scarcely notice how awesome we are for doing it.

And then, sometimes it doesn't go so well. Any gamer with a few miles under their adventuring boots can probably recall a time or two.

In traditional RPG design, there's a spectrum of design philosophy on how explicitly and thoroughly and often the visible books should render the invisible books unnecessary ... on how important the rules, mechanisms and procedures should be, compared to the judgement of the Game Master.

At one end of this spectrum, there is the idea that the written rules should do all that they can. Even the most thorough and explicit rulebook can't entirely supplant the need for GM judgement, but by golly, it can minimize it, providing a solid foundation on which expectations can rest, a reliable court of fair outcomes, in written form. In games at this end of the spectrum, the GM's judgement is necessary only for spackling the inevitable (but hopefully rare) gaps in the visible rulebooks.

At the opposite end, there is the idea that the rules should be constructed from the observation that GMs and players handle this stuff every day, and can do so more effectively if the rules just stand the heck out of their way (politely near, in case they're needed), leaving more brain-energy for the GM to focus on NPCs and adventures and things. In games at this end of the spectrum, the visible rulebooks are only necessary for spackling the inevitable (but hopefully rare) gaps in the invisible rulebooks.

Then there's the spectrum between, which is so roily with variables it looks less like a rainbow and more like a river of oil.

I consider both of those extremes, and all points between then, laudable. I consider them all considerate and well-meaning. What's more, they're all at the heart of proven, excellent works of RPG design. And professionally, I've worked every inch of that river for nigh on thirty years.

But I do have my favorites. Personally, I've built a cozy cabin near to the far-out end, the wilderness end, the trippy end, the get-the-rules-out-of-my-way end. That's just my happy-place, and that's probably obvious to anyone accustomed to my work (and if you're new to it, maybe that sounds icky, and maybe it sounds awesome, and either way you're not wrong).

I've been observing, for ~25 out of those ~30, how a design's position along this spectrum runs deep into every aspect of the RPG experience, and by "design" I don't just mean rules (ho-hum), I mean the good stuff: worlds! Genre resources! Characters! Adventures! And that right there, where I consider those the good stuff, and rules the ho-hum? That's the gleam on the tip of this iceberg, because once you recognize the invisible rules as a thing, you can design for their use. And I do.

It doesn't matter a lot to the Doritos, not really. Not often. I'm just on a low-sodium diet and I miss them so.

The term "Invisible Rulebooks" is one I find useful. It's a goofy metaphor, but terms are tools. What's more, it's a starting point for other terms in my toolkit. We'll get to those, and here's hoping you find them handy, too – no matter where on the river you camp, or what lengths of it you wander.

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This is #1 of the RPG Lexicon series. Click here for the next one!

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He knows you've got this. I know you've got this, too.