Stealing Fire, or, Playing the World

When I think back to the most memorable times I’ve roleplayed, it is when the imagined world takes on a life of its own. At these times, a space that exists only in the electric tension of conversation becomes concrete and real to the participants. When the ritual ends, the world again dissolves into a dim shadow in the mind of each participant.

How do we seek this state explicitly? And what do we call it? I don’t mean immersion, the idea that I myself am situated in the game-world or that the veil between sense and imagination thins. If immersion exists, I don’t experience it at the table. Instead I mean TODO TKTK. For now, let’s call it “playing the world.”

Goals and Non-Goals

Sort of like a roux forming a base for many different sauces, playing the world can be our base for many different goals. We can take an OSR-inflected mentality and say that our ultimate goal is to challenge players to use their wits in overcoming deadly obstacles. We can take a more narrative-focused approach and say that our ultimate goal is to construct interesting situations and play to find out what happens. We can take a more “traditional” approach and say that our ultimate goal is for one player to present a place and scenario of interest to entertain others. My own aim sort of sits between all three. I want to feel the world as a dynamic participant; when I play a character I want to push against it and find it push back against me in turn. When I play the world, I want to be surprised and delighted by the direction I find myself taking.

A good story may emerge from play, or it may not. The characters may experience satisfying narrative arcs, or they may not. A session might be a tense, sweaty challenge or (quelle surprise!) it may not. These are non-goals for me; I don’t prioritize them one way or the other.

So now that I’ve decided I want to play the world, how do I do it?

Converge the Rules of the Game and World

One solution we see in the OSR is the slogan “rulings over rules.” It is accepted that rules will frequently diverge from what a sensible player might expect to happen next, and that the sensible players’ consensus should prevail. I’m not against that, and I think it can be a helpful attitude. But I also think that you can save yourself a lot of this trouble by aligning the rules of the game and the rules of world.

When game-rules form their own abstract layers, the world gets lost. Consider the combat system in a D&D game. “Hit points” and “armor class” don’t stand in for anything in the world; any attempt to rationalize them in the fiction is nonsensical. It would be fine if that was just fodder for inane forum arguments, but what happens when a player says TODO

“Say What Honesty Demands”

Probably the most famous dictate in Apocalypse World is to “play to find out what happens,” explained here in Apocalypse World 2e (page 80):

Play to find out: there’s a certain discipline you need in order to MC Apocalypse World. You have to commit yourself to the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters. You have to open yourself to caring what happens, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside.

We’re definitely going to have to play to find out what happens, rather than playing with a desired or planned outcome in mind. But it’s this dictum’s lesser-known sibling that has captured my imagination: “say what honesty demands” (TODO: context ).

What does honesty demand? There’s an element of truth-value to honesty; the MC should not lie to or mislead other players. They should share what other players’ characters know, sense, and can do. They should also share information freely; one’s character always has more information than one’s player anyhow.

Honest also has an element of fair dealing. If a player has an idea that should work but will wreck your plans, what does honesty demand? Let them do it! Maybe tell them “this wrecks some of my plans, so I might have to think a little bit first.” They kill the demon lord on their first meeting, they corner the onion commodities exchange, they burn down the lavish plantation house. Don’t try to minimize the consequences of their actions to keep the game on its original course; instead follow the breadcrumbs. TKTK consequences

There’s also something of self-knowledge and anti-cognitive-dissonance to honesty. Playing a character honestly sometimes means blundering forward even when you know they face certain failure. TKTK

Shared Responsibility

To play the world, there must be one. I know that’s a little tautological, but consider that there are many players at the table, each with their own experiences, biases, and internality. Different games put everyone on the same page differently. Some TKTK

To play the world,

Concrete interest, abstract disinterest

Smaller, Sharper Stakes

The shape of a fantasy RPG campaign is a lot like a piece of serial media (your comic books, television shows, webnovels, what have you). Serialized stories lend themselves to a spiral of

Games to play the world

Some games, like Heart, turn this impulse on its head. Your characters in RRD’s dungeon-crawler-parody escalate unto their inevitable and gruesome end. Nearly all the game’s Zenith upgrades kill, destroy, or render unrecognizable the user. I admire this ruthless pruning of high-level characters, but I like to play longer games (about 40 sessions usually, running weekly for around a year). Therefore, I have to take the opposite approach: wherever possible, resist escalation and scope creep.

There are ancillary benefits to pruning scope. The more a world feels indifferent to our main cast of characters, the more alive it feels. And the smaller our stakes are, the more anything feels possible. Let’s take an example. If players are guardians and caretakers of a small coastal town, the destruction of its port or the death of a single resident are reasonable motivators for play. It also feels feasible to follow through on such a threat: how do your characters grieve for their lost friend? How does the community rebuild after disaster?

Compare to stopping a world-destroying menace or overthrowing an interstellar empire. If the world is destroyed, that’s it for the game, I guess? You could go with Dragon Ball (TKTK title) route, and bring everyone back with a wish. There is something endearing about Toriyama’s carefree plots, in which deus ex machina is as mundane as a trip to the grocery store. It also makes building tension quite hard if any disaster can be reversed and any defeat is a temporary setback. It’s hard to play honestly if honesty would ever demand you say “everyone dies, world explodes, thanks for playing.”

Games to play the world

Adapting World

Ethical Non-mono-game-y

(Apologies for the tortured section title.)

This isn’t the only way to play games! It’s not the only way I play games! You can’t take this approach to playing For the Queen, or Ribbon Drive, or Microscope and I love those games. If you don’t want to play this way, don’t. If you’re curious about this playstyle, and you mostly play big-box D&D or collaboration-forward story games, I encourage you to at least give it a try.

See Also

Adapting World

Ethical Non-mono-game-y

(Apologies for the tortured section title.)

This isn’t the only way to play games! It’s not the only way I play games! You can’t take this approach to playing For the Queen, or Ribbon Drive, or Microscope and I love those games. If you don’t want to play this way, don’t. If you’re curious about this playstyle, and you mostly play big-box D&D or collaboration-forward story games, I encourage you to at least give it a try.

See Also

I’ve never really understood the appeal of “simulationism.” In Ron Edwards’s (fatally flawed) “GNS” framework of Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism, it seems the most phantasmic. I know what “gamism” looks like (theory-building D&D character builds), I know what

I’ve been playing Disco Elysium with my partner and it’s got me thinking about adapting Disco into a tabletop game. I know of two piece of prior art (Jamais Vu and Detect or Die) that take the same approach: one player is the GM, and the rest play components of an amnesiac detective’s psyche. Their goal is to replicate the experience of playing Harry, solving a mystery, and dealing with his mental state. My own goal would be the inverse: I want to play a game set in Elysium, or a setting like it. Maybe the players are other officers in Disco Elysium’s Revachol; maybe they’re union organizers in Graad;

For a while I’ve had trouble articulating

What can we gain by playing the world? There’s an electric kind of moment that I find myself chasing when I sit down to play an adventure game.

I want to sketch out a playstyle focused on the conversation at the table and the imagined world we create with it. I call it “playing the world,” though others have staked out their own names for similar modes of play.

Over the past year I’ve drafted a handful of blog posts all centering on a core idea: “playing the world, honestly”[1]. Rather than continue spinning my wheels, I’ll lay out the threads of my thoughts here and hope something coheres at the end.

Our goal isn’t to create a compelling narrative (though if you can tell good stories about the game, that’s a good sign). Similarly our goal isn’t to create a well-balanced challenge (though problem-solving will likely feature in our play). But what is it, then?

“Playing the World”

Sort of like a roux forming a basis for many kinds of sauces, there’s a base for most roleplaying games. It’s a conversation that creates and maintains a shared, imagined space. That imagined world (so delicately composed of consensus and negotiation) is our primary focus in play.

When I play as the world I want to create a situation of interest to the other players and draw them into it. Then I want to be surprised and delighted by what they choose to do. “Oh,” I’ll think, “I didn’t expect anyone to break down the wall and reveal the hidden chamber so early! It’s heartening to see them help this person who can offer nothing in return! It’s ironic to watch them prepare for one trap, only to blunder into another one!”

And conversely, when I play just one person in the world, I want to push on it. I want to make decisions and see my impact reflected (either for good or ill)!

There’s nothing that gets me down faster than feeling like the outcomes are secretly predetermined. If I discover the culprit too early, they’ll be a red herring. If I escape the alien aboard my doomed spaceship too easily, it turns out there’s a second one in my escape pod with me. If I challenge the duke to a duel and am beaten, a mysterious champion will take my place and beat the duke for me. Let my actions have

Collaborate!

module that featured shadow demons,

  1. a bit of idiosyncratic phraseology I’ll expand later ↩︎