#gleeblor

[anim-ttrpgs]

it really is gleeblor to try and explain to a lot of people that no the GM did not covertly orchestrate every single element of my PC's victory, and when you try to say that, they get all like "oh you sweet summer child" at you like you still believe in Santa Claus

It completely robs you and your PC of absolutely any accomplishments.

I promise you this isn't Critical Role, plot armor does not have to be the default, and the alternative is not just adversarial GMing

[thydungeongal]

Okay, so I'm going to explain gleeblor by going back to the feeling that inspired my very first post on it:

I've been running this blog for quite a while and while I would never claim to be knowledgeable of the entire variety of RPGs out there I do consider myself more knowledgeable than the median RPG enthusiast. Now, a lot of people who end up commenting on my posts have very narrow experiences with RPGs as a medium, sometimes having literally only ever played D&D and maybe another game. And when communicating with my audience I often find myself in a situation like. Oh hell, this person thinks that D&D is the default RPG, the template on which all RPGs are based on, and the concept I am trying to explain simply does not make sense to them because they think D&D is the default.

So in the very first post I made about gleeblor it acted as a shorthand for "RPG fact that is self-evident to me but sounds bizarre to someone with a narrow experience with RPGs" and for the alienation I felt with my audience having to explain the fact that. Not all RPGs are D&D. Literally, I described it as feeling like I was an alien explaining a concept that made no sense to humans.

Anyway, things that have been gleeblor to people in my notes:

The idea that an RPG does not necessarily need to have Encounters (this is what started it all and. The incredulity people expressed at the idea that things could even happen in a game if it didn't have Encounters.)

The fact that there are textually queer RPGs out there besides just Thirsty Sword Lesbians

That a game supporting romance is not just a table issue but can in fact be a factor in the actual rules and structure of a game

That a game does not need to have an "adventuring party" structure of the player characters being united in going against adversity together

[greyplainsttrpg]

My most memorable "gleeblor" experience during the early development of my game my was centered around inventory abstraction.

Early on in Greyplains, there weren't any equipment tables at all. Objects had properties, and the idea was that it was up to the player and the GM to understand what objects they wanted aligned to what properties.

For example, weapons have Size, Type (as per damage) and Name. Your character is some amount skilled in large weapons and blades weapons, they would be synergistically skilled with a large blade. They could then become extra proficient with a specific large blade weapon, up to the player and GM to determine.

However, early players, and my cowriter, couldn't grasp what this meant. Like, "okay, but what is a large blade?" type of questions. It is a blade that is large in size (both defined in the book). Like what the fuck do you mean "what is a large blade?" It's a large blade. "Yeah, but is a longsword a large blade?"

I don't want to list every weapon ever developed by every culture that possibly matches the possible description of "large" and "blade." A large blade is whatever matches the description of large and blade. "I think you need examples."

The same thing happened with the Value Tier Table. I define a range of value for things based on the amount of labor required to trade for it based on the estimated wages of a skilled medieval laborer (like masons or teamsters). This outputs a GP range for the good/service, but this way any monetary or barter system could be used to understand what things are worth using the game. It is then up to the GM and the players to discuss the finer details of the price based on the context of where, who, and why they are buying the item.

But no. "Okay, but what is a 'Large Blade' worth?" It is worth whatever the GM believes is an appropriate amount of time from their universe's equivalent to skilled labor to earn to purchase or trade for that product, and the exact amount is based on whoever is selling it and what their relationship to your character is. "Okay but that isn't a number."

I lost, and now people tell me that there is too much equipment. Or they still criticize me that "but X isn't in the tables, does it exist?" Fucking kill me.

I'm not sure if I should have ever capitulated to this. I think it makes the game fundamentally worse because it makes it narrowed to my own perception of reality as opposed to methods for GMs and players to construct their own realities. However, it undeniably makes the game more accessible.

I'm not sure who or what is to blame for this mentality. It was so shocking that people did not understand where I was coming from. Like, a longsword isn't real or platonic. The true longsword isn't divined by the ancients in a world of platonic forms and then laser beamed into your character's hands and belt-strap. It's an arbitrary object manifested via a combination of work, perceived value, relationships, skill, shape, and time. A longsword, like anything else, is a product of the mind and of culture. And instead all people wanted was "but give me simple to understand number... eww that's too many numbers."

GLEEBLOR!

[whinnylikeahorse]

new levels of ttrpg discourse happening on reddit rn

[shoutyourporpoise]

I read that post about the D&D Warhammer podcast to Andrew (who I assumed would be on the same page as I am, being a Warhammer enthusiast who introduced me to TTRPGs via Rogue Trader), and he said “oh yeah I know indie RPGs hate D&D 5e for some reason?”

Ah. You have activated my trap card. “So it’s not that people HATE D&D it’s more that games have opinions on how you should play them and…”

[mino2aur]

wait what the fuck is gleeblor

[squid-in-the-tardis]

Complaining about gleeblor and the problems caused by 5e's monolithic impact on the ttrpg space is fun, but you know what would be more fun? Actually playing a ttrpg.

*sighs wistfully*

[forlorn-plushie]

gleeblor real

[hifi-walkman]

@thydungeongal having lots of discourse about dungeon games and queerness in rules may or may not have inspired me to try and explore queer shit through dungeon crawling mechanics. (also the "is D&D queer discourse" has resulted in some of the most insightful posts on RPG design and rules as story I've seen in a while on this site, even if you have to cut through a lot of gleeblor-ing first)

[thydungeongal]

I 100% agree with this. In many cases one-page RPGs can actually be extremely daunting for newer players, because their economy of words means they simply can't provide players with a lot of the support that fully-fledged RPGs provide. To understand how a one-page RPG runs you kind of have to know of other RPGs, but more importantly, to really understand how a lot of one-pagers work you kind of have to be literate in the very specific language of specific types of RPGs.

Like, for better and for worse, most TTRPG players end up entering the hobby through very "trad" RPGs like D&D, Pathfinder, the 40k RPGs, what have you. These RPGs are often very crunchy but for those parts of the game that these games are most opinionated about you have this formula of "thing happens -> make a roll -> mechanical consequences." Your character loses hit points, the enemy is stunned, they get a +5 to gleeblor, whatever. Now introduce players who are used to this type of play to a game where consequences are rarely reflected mechanically and boil almost entirely to your character's position and situation in the fiction changing.

And none of that is to say that the type of play that one-page RPGs represent is bad or anything, and in fact a lot of one-page RPGs kick so much ass. But they are not easier games to run or play simply by virtue of having less text, because they actually require being literate in a very particular type of TTRPG to fully wrap one's head around, which is usually not the type of TTRPG that most people have started gaming with.

Sort of a Pet Peeve I tend to have with something that people in the indie TTRPG community do sometimes:

I LOVE one-page RPGs, but I often notice a lot of people tend to recommend them to folks who are just starting out with RPGs, or to folks with no TTRPG experience outside of D&D to convince them that branching out of D&D doesn’t have to be a massive investment of money and time, but honestly I think in msot cases one-page RPG are not a particularly good starting point to start exploring the medium. 

And like… I get the logic of recommending them because shorter = easier and less intimidating to get through, and the rhetorical utility of being able to take a D&D-only gamer who keeps insisting that playing another system would be too costly and take too long and be like “NO LOOK NOT EVERY RPG IS THREE BOOKS LONG AND COSTS 90 DOLLARS SOME LITERALLY FIT IN A SINGLE PAGE LOOK!”, but I think that one-page RPGs function best when all (or at least SOME) of the people participating are already familiar with the medium and have some prior experience with more mechanically complex systems, and the reason they are able to be that minimal and short in the first place is because they sorta piggyback off of a lot of intuitive knowledge that they assume from the players and gm (if there is one).

Gonna be speaking primarily from the point of view as a GM because that’s mainly what I am, so sorry if I sorta neglect GMless games or solo journaling games or stuff like that here. Most one page RPGs that follow the traditional format of “group of players + GM” tend to be like. A few short steps for character creation, a simple core resolution mechanic, a description of the flow of the game, and usually nothing (or very very little) in terms of GM tools (at best a few GM principles and a couple of random oracles/tables). And like. Yeah, that’s more than enough to run and play a game, but IMO it’s probably not enough FOR A GROUP OF NEWBIES to run and play a game, because this level of extreme abstraction and mechanical minimalism it’s not inherently more newbie-friendly than the other extreme of high-crunch mechanical density. 

The way I conceptualize mechanics, they are a tool to delegate decisions and rulings from the players and GM to the game system. Like, some games have HP so that the GM doesn’t have to decide and rule through pure narrative and logic how much violence everyone involved in a combat is able to withstand, etc. So like, obviously, less mechanics means the game takes less time to read, learn and remember, but there also comes a point where less mechanics means more specific, situational decisions piled onto the GM (or in case of GMless games, spread among the players) to attempt to rule fairly, consistently, and satisfyingly, and being able to make this kind of ruling is a skill that takes practice to develop. If you hand me a piece of paper that says the typical “The GM describes the situation, the players describe how they react and what actions they take, the GM describes how the situation changes in response. When the outcome of the players’ actions is uncertain or there are interesting consequences for failure, then [insert core resolution mechanic here]” I would probably be able to run a game off of that combined with my current GM skills, but if you had handed me that when I was just stating to dip my toe into RPGs, I would have probably be almost as intimidated as I’d have been if you handed me something dense and rules-heavy like Shadowrun.

Just some thoughts, idk. 

[anim-ttrpgs]

Big gleeblor: It isn’t and shouldn’t be the GM’s job to tell you a story and continually override rules and dice rolls to ensure that story goes in a particular direction and follows a perfect movie three-act structure D&D5e and Critical Roll play culture has turned GMing into a performance, an unpaid magic slight-of-hand act, instead of a dude who plays the game from the other side of the screen. This isn’t an entirely new problem, the seeds were planted for it all the way in the 90s, but recent market forces in the past 10 years have accelerated it by like 10,000%

[thydungeongal]

One of the funnier manifestations of gleeblor is Pathfinder players: I'll make a post about how D&D will color people's expectations of what RPGs can be like and create a very narrow set of expectations about the medium, and inevitably some Pathfinder player will be like "haha yeah those D&D players should really broaden their horizons, Pathfinder fixes all of their issues," and my friend. I'm sorry to say this but you are not immune to gleeblor and in many regards where it comes to expectations of playstyle created by the game, your favorite game is in fact just another company copying D&D's homework and slightly altering the wording.

[greyplainsttrpg]

Why You Should Play Greyplains:

Or

How I Gave Up and Embraced the Tao

Part 1: The Philosophy of Greyplains

When thinking about Hasbro's: Wizards of the Coast's: Dungeons and Dragons (2014), I can't help but wonder, "you know, I wonder what Lao Tzu would say about this." That's not true. Actually, I am much more interested in what Zhuang Zhou (originally introduced to me spelled as Chuang Tzu; I am not Chinese nor do I speak Mandarin I don't know how or why these letters were selected don't @ me). Hasbro's: Wizards of the Coast's: Dungeons and Dragons (2014) is a pretty weird game that makes me pretty angry, as per my 5e Villain Arc jamboree might imply. My quest to understand and resolve these problems led to some very interesting philosophy that is built into the bones of Greyplains. This is the last time in this post that I will mention Hasbro's: Wizards of the Coast's: Dungeons and Dragons (2014).

You might be asking yourself, "why Taoism?" It seems a bizarre place to gather inspiration for a tabletop roleplaying game, but Toaism is very important to my fundamental being. My father, in his own quest that (now that I'm writing this, I'm beginning to realize parallels my own) created his own martial arts system with Kenpo as the basis but incorporating the philosophy of its traditional Chinese (and in this case, Taoist) origins. This isn't to say that the fighting style is more esoteric and Wu Shu adjacent. No. It is actually more practical and straightforward than its basis in American Kenpo Karate AND more philosophical in its intent. I grew up entrenched in this. It has resulted in a pretty unique perspective.

This origin gave me two major points of contact with TTRPGs that are outside the typical space of most players, GMs, and designers:

1. I know how to fight. I know how to fight with my hands and with weapons. I know how to fight unarmed against weapons (don't, if you can).

2. I am weirdly familiar with Taoism. This provides frameworks that most people around me simply don't have (I have to do a lot of explaining to get to points that are kind of a gleeblor for me in my real life as well as in game design).

Starting with point 2, one of the central axes of Taoism is "inclusive paradoxes." If you've read any of the Tao Te Ching, then you'll know what I'm talking about. "A is the opposite of B; therefore A and B are related to each other; therefore A and B are the same thing; embrace the Tao." Massive over simplification, but that's kind of the Tao Te Ching for 81 poems. Zhuang Zhou, Lao's most famous pupil/person that probably doesn't exist but is instead the adopted name of a Lao's students, is much more interesting. Instead of esoteric poetry explaining the Tao, Zhuang tells stories that illustrate the Tao. Greyplains is designed, from the ground up, to tell perplexing, thematically exclusive themed adventures in the tradition of Zhuang Zhou. However, that is intended to occur AFTER the game has finished. Stories are future-perfect. In the process, the gameplay itself is much more like fighting.

Fighting is one of the most granular, observation-heavy things a person can do. You have to completely shift how you perceive reality. You can't look at your opponent, you have to look THROUGH them. You can't focus on details, you have to concentrate on waiting to notice details that will become important — and exploitable. You have to constantly be aware of the environment or risk being stuck in a corner, lose your balance, or fall to the ground; you need to find ways to use the environment against your opponent. There is so much information you have to entertain at the same time that you cannot possibly focus on everything AND all the things about yourself that you need to be aware of (breath, balance, guard, personal reach, etc).

This is the thing that most people don't understand about the Yin Yang. There's a white part and a black part, and in the white a black spot and in the black a white spot, we all know. But the Yin Yang has two other properties that are actually very important: the dividing curve and the containing circle. The universe is contained and pivots around the same fundamental force. That fundamental force IS the Tao. The part that seems to be the least obvious is the most important part, yet it is locked away to being a mathematical technicality. The line between Yin and Yang is a negative aspect in that it is defined by what it is not. It is only something that it is not. To be in Tao is to be without, philosophically speaking. That is the essence of Taoist "non-being" and "non-action." Being nothing, you do nothing. Things simply occur around you.

That is what is required to be a good fighter. You have to be without. In order to perceive everything, you must learn to perceive nothing. This is the essential approach to gameplay in Greyplains.

I have a lot more to say, but I will get to them when I get to them in their own sections. For now, the first reason you should play Greyplains is that it is actually a Taoist game masquerading as a standard "vanilla" fantasy adventure TTRPG.

[uhuh100]

it's all gleeblor.....

It's great entertainment watching you have to explain concepts such as 'doors', 'reflections', 'hills', and 'houses'. I swear half of this website must have been raised in a featureless concrete box.

I don't understand the problems, I feel like I'm trying to explain what a chair is to an alien.

[thydungeongal]

No but seriously sometimes I feel like I'm an alien trying to communicate concepts like gleeblor to humans the way people sometimes react when I say things that are self-evident to me. Like since the whole discussion about how modern D&D basically has an ethos of Encounters being something that are crafted beforehand and specifically with party level being taken into consideration, there have been some incredulous reactions like "But like if there's no Encounters then what even happens in the game? You have to design Encounters because otherwise there's nothing? And if you don't take party level into account while designing those Encounters then how will they beat it? Hello? What is gleeblor?!"

[epicscizor]

I'm not sufficiently proficient in Japanese to get that on my own, so Google translate helpfully tells me this is a phonetic transcription of gleeblor

Meanwhile in Japan, gamers are trying to hack their favourite roleplaying game into a dungeon crawler and often becoming convinced that it just can’t work on the tabletop. A blogger feels that trying to convince people that not all table-talk RPGs have to be super lethal and have sanity mechanics is like being an alien trying to explain a completely foreign concept like グリーボロル to humans.