Will There Be Apples?

Let’s consider a game where player characters cook regularly, to resolve conflicts or scenes. During character creation, Alice selects the following ability:

Keep the doctor away: Whenever you prepare a dish that incorporates apples, choose one:

• The flavor is surprising and unique
• The apples stay crisp and don’t brown, no matter how long they’re exposed to air
• The plating is visually arresting

And for the sake of the thought experiment, this is the only apple-related ability she’s taken. She’s excited to use it in play and everyone agrees it looks like a fun power. The game has no focus on fruit, and incorporates a variety of food-related equipment and skills. There’s a potential problem: will there be apples in this game? Because if Alice’s characters never come across any, then this ability won’t come into play. It still exerts a gravity on the game, but Alice really would like to get to play with her apples.

If the game is GM-less, maybe Alice can conjure the apples into existence herself. Problem solved!

A game with a referee may make this a little trickier. Alice can simply verbalize her desire for apples^[1] during Session 0 (or at any point in play, really), but that may be as far as her narrative authority extends. If the referee is attentive maybe they’ll write “apples for Alice” in their session notes. Then later, if they remember what the hell that means, they’ll prepare some apples in a future session. Maybe the characters will be tasked with making cider, or maybe they’ll encounter apples for sale in a market, or run across a haunted orchard. Problem solved? Well, only inasmuch as the referee has energy to do this for every player. Maybe multiple times for every player! When I’m the ref, this quickly spirals beyond my ability to keep easy track.

Setting pre-game expectations can help. That can take the form of a referee explaining a campaign pitch: in a post-apocalyptic campaign with no access to fresh fruit, an apple might be hard to come by. If Alice knows that the game will be Mad-Max-inspired, maybe she won’t take the apple ability because she knows that it won’t be useful. Alternatively, if the group is building the world collaboratively, then we’re back to our GM-less solution (Alice adds apples to the world) or our referee’d solution (Alice asks the referee to include them). Obviously this isn’t foolproof: a campaign set in a sprawling forest may or may not have apples. It’s hard to say for sure.

Flagging-based strategies to solve our apple problem all feel like coping mechanisms to me, ways to work around the fundamental tension of traditional RPGs^[2]. They really boil down to “just GM good”^[3]. For my project the Drowned Isles, I find this conceptually unsatisfying. How can I spend effort beforehand to make refereeing the campaign easier and more fun? I think my ideal solution is to attack the problem at its root: the ruleset. For example, we could generalize our earlier ability:

Whenever you prepare a dish that incorporates fruit, choose one:

• The flavor is surprising and unique
• The fruit stay crisp and fresh, no matter how long they’re exposed to air
• The plating is visually arresting

In this case we lose some flavor^[4], but now Alice’s character has a much greater chance of using her ability. Often I’m okay with that compromise, but sometimes I’m not.

We can also grant players enough narrative authority to “do their thing”, even in a referee’d game. Maybe our player-characters have a pouch they can produce any ingredient from, once a session. Or maybe they have a signature ingredient they always have access to. Or maybe there are some rules for sourcing arbitrary ingredients, but only when you’re in a bustling market town. We’ve got options! No more no-apple campaigns!