Fictional Logic

I held onto make-believe a little longer than the other kids.

Not quite long enough that anyone ever questioned it, really, but definitely long enough that it was unusual. I didn’t care as much for games of chance, skill, or strength. Instead I wanted to escape into a somewhere or somewhen else, to be elsewise for a while. Science fiction and fantasy novels absorbed me utterly. I found the small patch of trees behind my house transformed into magic druidic woods, my too-cold bedroom became an escape pod drifting away from the wreck of a spaceship, my flimsy hiking pole a wizard’s staff. When I played video games, it was simulated worlds that hooked me. I could never quite conquer the feeling that there was something more to find or a new nook to explore. Maybe the overworld of Sonic Battle contained a secret new area? Maybe there was a hidden region lurking after the Elite Four in Pokemon Sapphire?

I never quite shook this feeling. Today in my love of history books or my very limited travels, I’m still curious about what it would mean to live in a world alien to my own.

Finding that spark in roleplaying games is why I love them so much. Not only am I exploring the possibilities of imagination, but I’m doing it socially.

What I want is to play by the rules of another world. The sharper and realer the world can be, the better. Obviously it’s hard to build something sharp or real out of the gossamer material that is a conversation, so I’ve learned what works well for the kind of game where I can feel that world-spark and what doesn’t work. Honestly, there was plenty of trial-and-error along the way.

The most important thing is strong consensus on what the world is and how it should function.

Not ‘Story Logic’

Some games specifically run on a kind of narrative logic, where the rules exist to mirror specific story-telling rules. Let’s take Fate as an example. Fate Core is probably the biggest gulf I’ve had between how much I expected to enjoy a game and how much I’ve actually enjoyed it, in the decade that I’ve been playing RPGs. It comes down to how Fate models the world and play.

The core of Fate are Aspects, fictional tags that can be applied to any object. Most players first encounter them during character creation, where they serve as both useful bits of characterization and important gameplay mechanics. Your character’s Aspects define things basic truths, but they only affect dice rolls when you spend a game currency called a Fate Point. The best explanation for why Fate works this waycomes from this blog post attached to the Fate website (emphasis mine):

But that’s the fundamental reason that aspects are “fueled by” Fate Points. […]

Fate Core, as far as I can see, tries to emulate fiction. That doesn’t just mean “a physical simulation of fictional worlds”. That means the flow and structure of fiction. That means that when we look at how a game of Fate ‘should’ flow, our reference point should be ‘does this play out like a book, or a movie?’ rather than ‘does this work like how it would work in the physical world’?

A slippery, ice-covered surface, in fiction, doesn’t mean that every description or shot of people on it involves them slipping and sliding around. That’s boring. What it probably means is that at some key moment, somebody will slip because of the surface creating some dramatic moment. And that’s what Fate tries to emulate -how the dramatic elements work together, not the actual effects of fighting on a slippery surface. It follows the rules of fiction regardless of realism, not reality -even ‘cinematic’ reality.

In Fate’s model of fiction, details are established and then used only when dramatically necessary. Fate Points serve as the game enforcing a pacing mechanism, so that each player has some control over those dramatic moments.

The effect this had on play, at my table, was unexpected and dramatic. Aspects and Fate Points were vampiric, sucking the color and fiction out of the world and replacing them with the cold logic of numbers. When you spend a Fate Point, you can shore up your own die rolls, reroll dice, or make someone else’s die roll easier or harder. That means any two Aspects become interchangeable; they’re vehicles to use Fate Points to purchase probability, or to act against your own best interests in characterful ways (to earn Fate Points, to later purchase probability). It almost reminds me of how Marx describes the commodity fetish? The real qualities of the fiction are obscured by their relationship to dice rolls; they are made equivalent through bean-counting rather than existing in and of themselves.

Not ‘Game Logic’

I feel a need to make a passing nod to D&D, marginal as it may be to my own hobby^[1]. The spell-casting in Fifth Edition is deeply emblematic of my issues with number-heavy games. Let’s take a look at Firebolt (emphasis mine again):

You hurl a mote of fire at a creature or object within range. Make a ranged spell attack against the target. On a hit, the target takes 1d10 fire damage. A flammable object hit by this spell ignites if it isn’t being worn or carried. This spell’s damage increases by 1d10 when you reach 5th level (2d10), 11th level (3d10), and 17th level (4d10).

Why does the object only ignite if it isn’t being worn or carried? There’s no story-rule or world-rule being expressed here. It is purely a point of gameplay expedience, because burning away your foe’s possessions would be too powerful. What’s the point of having fire magic if I can’t set stuff on fire?!

I can enjoy a good tactics boardgame but as I found with ICON, I never really want it within my RPG.

A Case Study: Adapting Earthsea

So what do I want? Let’s take as our first case study an attempt to create a Wizard of Earthsea RPG. We can discard immediately any notion of a systematized wargame, which would be anathema to LeGuin’s work. Instead I have two approaches in mind.

One is to use the game to codify the movement of the characters through the arc of an Earthsea book. We could make a passable attempt that looks something like:

• All characters start with an internal conflict, probably represented as two warring forces or impulses within them
• Early in the game, we are confronted with some challenge or situation that represents a violation of the natural balance
• The game mechanics guide us along as the characters grapple with their place in the world and their self-conception
• In the game’s climax, the characters regain their balance and come to understand an important lesson, often one about non-interference or self-acceptance

Our characters will have journeys much like Ged’s self-acceptance in Wizard of Earthsea or Tenar’s escape in Tombs of Atuan. We won’t be bogged down in unnecessary detail, and the story we tell will have the appropriate structure.

The second would be an attempt to transcribe the rules that govern Earthsea and let the events unfold as they may. We know something of dragons, naming, and the consequences of magic from A Wizard of Earthsea. We know something of the “Nameless Ones” and old powers of Earthsea from The Tombs of Atuan. So on and so forth, we can then play characters in this world and let the narrative emerge post-hoc. Maybe the rules systematize magic, and the relations between powerful wizards, and the social structure underlying wizardly life. Then our wizards will come to do things like take advantage of the women’s work that they rely on, or unbalance the world in a doomed quest for power, or get into perilous magical duels.

These two hypothetical games do both sort of exist: Archipelago by Matthijs Holter and The Seven Part Pact by Jay Dragon. The former takes a “deck of narrative prompts and narrative metacurrency” approach; the latter is a series of complex interlocking board games and an associated magic system. I am sure there are many people whose ideal Earthsea game is the former, but I find myself mostly uninterested in playing it. The latter I have played but once, in a very early playtest, and playing again is my RPG white whale.

‘Fictional Logic’

If we’re going to play a game with a traditional structure, what I want the rules to run on is fictional logic. I don’t want to hear about how much damage the third-level spell “summon lightning bolt” is, and I don’t want “demi-god daughter of Jupiter” to give me a +2 on rolls relating to my lightning powers. I wanna have rules that model lightning powers, and then let me throw lightning at people!

Give me something like Boasts from Wolves Upon the Coast or License Levels from Lancer rather than XP for failing rolls or whatever. Boasts give you a world where a very bro-y, masculine behavior (essentially the Viking equivalent of “YOLO”) is the key to unlocking great combat strength. That’s got really interesting implications on play! Hell, you can give XP for killing monsters as long as you really sit with that one. Why does killing increase your power? Who counts as a monster?

(TODO: does this section need to be expanded)

Is this simulationism?

No?? Uh. Maybe?

Look. GNS^[2] is a fundamentally wrongheaded model for understanding games. It stands in a long tradition of attempting to resolve the contradictory ingredients of D&D (wargaming and science-fiction fandom)^[3] by schematizing out the contrasting ingredients. None of these schemas work very well. I think I’ll rely on Vincent Baker here to say that The Forge was primarily concerned with exploring ‘narrativism’, and “gamist” and “simulationist” are things that Forge games were not.

So what is simulationism? I don’t know, whatever you want it to be. Maybe the only time I’ve ever seen anyone claim the label is The New Simulationism.

Is this blog post simulationism? Is it The New Simulationism, even? Ugh, I don’t know. Some of that stuff sounds good to me but frankly it seems exhausting.

(TODO: does this section need to be cut)