It took me a long time but I think I finally know why I like tabletop RPGs.

Roughly a decade into playing these games is a little late to put my finger exactly on what draws me into them, but bear with me. There are lots of factors, obviously, but many of them aren’t particular to RPGs. The social aspect of a game that requires four or five friends is hugely important, but I can get that from Root or Mario Kart or doubles tennis (though maybe not with how injured my ankles have been this past year).

To start at the beginning, 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.

Dipping a toe in

I came to RPGs as a teen through a dim half-understanding of what D&D was, mostly played as group improv punctuated by dice rolls. We used the SPECIAL system from Fallout as the basis for our stats, because we all loved Fallout: New Vegas. A friend introduced me to Lasers & Feelings which was the first actual RPG I played. Our group later tried to get a Stars Without Numbers campaign going, but it fell through. When I was offered a spot in a D&D campaign in college I declined, saying “I already have math homework.”

After an intensely lonely summer thousands of miles from anyone or anywhere I knew, I found myself more amenable to social activities that required homework. Two D&D enthusiast friends helped me roll up a Warlock (I requested the lowest-complexity spellcaster I could build), and I joined a campaign when I returned home in the fall. That game, plus hacking Blades in the Dark and listening to PARTIZAN (the best season of Friends at the Table, I’d say), were my road into tabletops.

But I really didn’t like D&D

If I come to RPGs to play by the rules of another world and to follow its logic, D&D gives the opposite. Let’s take a look at my punching bag, 5e’s Firebolt spell (emphasis mine):

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 this spell have different behavior if the target is a worn or carried object? It’s not because Flim-flam the Wizard encoded those restrictions when creating the spell. It’s because D&D has deep wargame roots, and the rules are principally concerned with balanced and easy-to-adjudicate battles. The abstraction of the miniatures clashing on a square board takes precedence over the imaginary world. Now we’re not modeling the rules of magic, we’re modeling a vague approximation of a fight that we can imagine our characters actually slogging through.

Fate and story

So D&D is out. Maybe what I want are games that are concerned with modeling narrative instead of modeling a game board. Pretty soon I found myself trying out Fate Core

At the core of Fate are Aspects, fictional tags that can be applied to any game entity. 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 and interesting truths, but their primary use in gameplay is to modify dice rolls. They only do so when you spend a game currency called a Fate Point. The best explanation for why Fate works this way comes from this blog post attached to the Fate website (emphasis mine again):

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.

Here we see an abstraction again: Fate Points stand in for dramatic pacing and narrative technique. In Fate, details of our imaginary world are principally important in how they impact story beats.

I think this is a self-defeating design decision. We’re right back to playing the abstraction, not the world! Let’s say my aspect says “unbeatable duelist” and the foe is a “third-string brawler” and we get into a fight. What matters is who rolls what and how Fate points are spent. The texture of the imaginary world is smoothed out into the abstract Aspect system, erasing it in the process.

My experience of Fate wasn’t one of aspects allowing free-form fictional play, but instead one of skill modifiers and +2 bonuses. Honestly I’d rather play D&D; the mechanics there provide a little more “percussion” than the Fate model.

If only there was a timely release accompanied by a widely listened actual play that had a different spin on a similar abstract mechanic…

Sentences in Realis

Just Aspects in Fate, Realis runs on Sentences. A Sentence is usually an “I always” declaration (I always bring amusement with my antics, I always wield a spectral power), optionally with some conditions (When I have room to swing a large weapon, I always win duels; I always reveal the truth to others about themselves). Sentences also have a Reality score from 0 to 3 that determines which Sentence wins out in a conflict. Reality increases as Sentences become more conditional (called “realization”).

These conditions are the key differentiator from Aspects; they drive action toward the world and not away from it. Let me give an example. In an early episode of Friends at the Table’s actual play of Realis, the players encounter an obstacle with the Sentence “I always frighten those who see me” +1. Having mostly +0 Sentences (and defenders winning ties), the players will have a hard time prevailing in direct conflict. Instead they… turn out the lights. Now they can’t see the obstacle, so its sentence cannot come into play. The Sentence still abstracts the mechanism by which it is true (which is actually sort of the story-logic that controls reality in the world of Realis), but it leaves the conditions and effect as existing firmly within the fictional world.

There are plenty of mechanics that I don’t like in Realis (including the ever-frustrating “class specific trigger”), but the Sentence is TODO

TODO: expand on the parts of REALIS that don’t work for me

Playing Earthsea

How do we put this idea of “playing the world” into practice? Let’s set out to play a game set in Ursula K LeGuin’s Earthsea setting and think about our options.

We could start with D&D 5e, because it’s already a pseudo-medieval fantasy RPG that ‘everyone’ knows. Of course we’ll need to think about tacking on a mechanic for the balance of the world, the management of which is a core theme of the series. Maybe your characters have a limited pool of Tao points that they can spend to take decisive action or use powerful magic. They can regenerate Tao points on a long rest equal to 1d6 times their level—nah I’m just fucking with you. This is on its face a terrible idea. TODO: explain why

We could go with something FKR-y (TODO: explain what that is).

Archipelago

Seven-Part Pact

Playing the World

Further Reading