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Sculpting Broken Masterpieces in Realis

My latest essay is on Austin Walker's "Realis!" My read on the game is that it's essentially custom built to find interesting tensions that both set your characters up for conflict, as well push you to discover what happens after your narrative arc ends.

Transcript here.

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Once I figure out how to avoid falling into research rabbit holes that never resolve I'll be able to make some killer tumblr posts.

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After playing a short campaign, I don't think that Beats are great way to tell compelling stories in a TTRPG, BUT they are great at setting expectations and giving players the practice to make stories of their own. The best scenes in the game weren't Beats, but I doubt they would have happened as smoothly as they did without Beats setting the precedent.

Have you played/read Slugblaster? I saw the Quinns Quest review of it and the Beats system looks super interesting

I actually have the boxed set! Haven't had a chance to play it yet, but it is up there on the list of games I really need to get a chance to play. It just appeals to the nineties kid in me something fierce.

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Making the Werewolf: The Forsaken/Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist situation worse on purpose by running a game jam whose only rule is that each submission's title must abbreviate to "WTF".

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"A player optimized a character in my tabletop system for maximum horse girl and not only did it work it has terrifying implications for the meta."

-real dangers that can happen to you

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Plumbing the Depths: Aesthetic Goals and Tastes

My post yesterday was a little more, uh... hostile... than was necessary or helpful, so I wanted to circle back and come at it without the weird pretence of sarcasm.

Almost all RPGs – including the RPGs that the folks from the thread claim to enjoy – use attack rolls to automate the blow-by-blow of a fight, but the player is expected to handle the broader tactical decisions. If we were to create analogous gameplay for "solving a mystery", then we'd use investigation rolls to automate finding evidence and interrogating suspects, while leaving the broader task of drawing inferences and following leads to be handled by the player.

For good or ill, that is exactly how mainstream RPGs handle mystery play. But for the folks in that thread, the analogous mechanics were not acceptable: the moment-to-moment clue-finding should also be the responsibility of the player, they argued. And fair enough – why not? But, if we follow that logic, then by analogy, you'd want to do the same for attack rolls, surely. You'd want a system where players describe how their characters are attacking and parrying, and have the GM rule on the effectiveness of those actions according to context.

I can't tell if that sounds like I'm trying to present an absurd case, to show that "these jokers didn't think it through". But in fact, I remain terribly disappointed that there has never been even a single published OSR system that works this way. So much that, a few years back, I personally designed and tested a prototype of this very combat system. The play-testers all thought it was great fun, even.

Next, let's take a look at the opposite idea: what if we automated the higher-level "tactics" through a dice roll? In one fork of that thread where the joke fell apart, one of the authors confessed that they thought the idea of a "tactics" skill was "a ridiculous proposition and not viable at all". But not only is it totally viable – it's been tested, proven, and become an enormous influence on indie RPG design ever since.

Here are some of the tactical "moves" from Apocalypse World. Check the image alt text if you want clarifications about the significance of each.

The saddest thing to me is that one of the thread authors claims to have played Apocalypse World – so that person, at least, knows that this is not some absurd joke.

So here is the point I actually wanted to make yesterday, but didn't: both of these extremes result in fun, internally-consistent designs that are, of course, chasing extremely different aesthetic goals. But the folks who wrote the joke thread were not interested in exploring the possibilities of RPG design. They were reacting to a disagreement over tastes by presenting their personal preference (i.e., for a typical OSR game that inconsistently employs dice without regard for whether they are actually helping to support its focal gameplay) as a kind of objectively superior form of play, while framing folks who might want anything else as delusional (i.e., wanting supposedly non-viable systems), a poseur (i.e., attending RPG sessions just to scroll TikTok instead of play), or both.

Hopefully I've demonstrated, by example, that this presentation is incorrect, and we can skip the boilerplate lectures about gatekeeping and "wrongbadfun".

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I've seen a bunch of complaints about the spell goodberry, all based on it ruining the DM's wilderness survival adventure because it can completely sidestep the need for gathering food. And let me tell you some wisdom: that's nonsense.

First of all, it's debatable whether D&D is actually good for running that kind of game, but we'll accept the premise for now.

DMs, here's one weird trick that your players don't want you to know about: if you want to have your campaign revolve around roughing it out in the wilderness, it is absolutely within your power and privilege to not allow the class that's magically good at circumventing that. Don't ban goodberry, ban the druid.

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You could just make magic as tedious and time consuming as it is in the old myths, and then play with time a bit. Take a page from Blades in the Dark and allow magic users to flash back to the intricate magical ritual that blesses the hero's sword or curses the monster or whatnot. The magic user doesn't even need to step on to the battlefield to make a vital impact (and if I'm not wrong, magic users from those stories rarely do).

The focus on tactical combat in many TTRPGs has conditioned us to think of magic as a martial art, something that you can use to kill someone in the same way you could use a sword, but that is a very recent invention that will clash with the kind of bronze age storytelling that you are going for. So you either have to give in to the TTRPG convention of quick magic, find a place for magic beyond martial arts, or bar the direct use of magic from player characters (or a secret fourth option that I haven't thought of).

current conundrum: what does it look like for spell components to matter in a game that is unconcerned with inventory management broadly (i.e. no currency, no encumbrance, no action cost for switching what's in your hands)

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I didn't notice the sword in the Greyplains cover before, but when I ran Greyplains I did make a room in a dungeon have nothing but a rock that kills you when you touch it, so like to think the message was sent regardless.

Why the Greyplains: Core Guidebook cover is important

The cover to the Greyplains: Core Guidebook is a very designed product that is intended to express the themes of the game as quickly as possible. It also a weirdly dense piece (because of its nature as design) despite depicting relatively few key elements. The art is made by the marvelous Mirel Crumb.

This is a full/earlier sketch of what is now on the cover. The same image wraps from the front of the book to the back, crossing the spine (you will see pictures of this later).

You'll notice a couple of things here that are distinct from most other TTRPGs:

1. The background of the book is white and the composition is pencil. There are other books that do this, but it is not the majority at all.

2. There are no people or monsters in this composition.

3. The only elements in the scene are environmental and a single object, a sword, which is centered to the bottom and very small.

I can explain each of these points (and why they are important).

1. It will stand out on a TTRPG bookshelf. It stands out on my bookshelf (please excuse the books on my shelf, it is mostly D&D I promise I play other games).

2. The piece is a first person perspective of a character entering a scene, and that's why you don't see any characters depicted in the cover. I want you, the player reading this book, to feel like you are in the adventure. This matches the intended tone of the gameplay.

3. The scale also communicates the scope of the game's rules as well as the tone (more naturalistic within fantasy). Ultimately, this is a landscape with fantasy elements, and that's what the game is like.

Let's look at how the book manifests in its final, printed form.

This is the intended way that a person is meant to view the piece. They get about half of it from the front, half of it from the back, and the rest on the spine. While, yes, that does in fact literally describe the cover of every book (I get that), the piece plays into this design structure. The intended engagement is that a player is placed at a table with the book in front of them, they open it and use it to make a character and/or play the game. They might flip the book over to read the summary, but they probably won't. They won't really understand the whole piece and its context without seeing the spine, and at that point, the player might own the book. The structure of the book makes you want to investigate it. It has a natural flow that encourages the player to search the environment. By holding the book, you are emulating the experience of playing the game.

The opposite perspective is that somebody sees the game on a shelf at a store. The spine being part of a larger piece is intended to entice the viewer to pick it up and see the rest of the art. The image cannot be conveniently understood by just looking at the spine; you have to actually pick the thing up and look around to get the "whole picture."

The sword on the spine comes from the Greyplains main campaign. The encounter is presented pretty much exactly like this, and the sword is sitting there on a piece of scorched earth just chilling. It is begging for someone to try and pull it out, however this is a terrible idea (obviously). Touching the handle kills the target and sucks their entire life essence and flesh into the sword leaving behind only the person's skeleton, which then sinks into the ground. It's an obvious trap. You can't "I disarm it" on the sword. You can't dispel the effect (unless you come back with much better magic). It just gets to sit there, menacingly. The only way to solve the sword encounter is to accept "you know, I don't understand this situation, and I don't really have to play along." On the onset, it seems like just a dick move (and it is), but by the end of the adventure, the party encounters several other of these swords and can begin to understand what they do, how they work, why they are here, and how they can be sundered. The point is "you don't have to understand everything, now, the more you engage with the game, the more things make sense." And that is also what I'm getting at with the book.

The juxtaposition between the forest landscape and the unnerving crag is also part of the themes of the game. Much of Greyplains is, what I would consider to be, a pretty familiar, "vanilla" TTRPG experience. However there is also a throughline of strangeness that intentionally makes the book, as a whole, feel both familiar and alien to the average TTRPG reader. The cover is designed to feel familiar and alien at the same time to a viewer.

Anyway, those are my immediate thoughts. Speaking in favor of my game is something that I've always struggled with. But I am working to get past that and speak more in favor of what Greyplains does well and why you should play it. This is inspired by @anim-ttrpgs for making their, "why you should play EUREKA" posts.

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Counterpoint to your Goblin criticism: Doing controller things and then letting your striker capitalize on it immediately is very fun.

You know I glaze Lancer a lot but I really gotta say there are some design issues I feel certain frames have and I should talk about them sometime

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In retrospect skill challenges were kind of the worst part of D&D 4e and it's actually kind of a blessing that they sucked.

Like I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea of out-of-combat minigames, but the model of "players narrate things their characters do and roll checks that make an abstract meter go up and once the meter fills they win" isn't actually the way to make out-of-combat activities feel engaging. And it's ironic that the devs of 4e doubled down on needing to have skill challenges be the framework under which out-of-combat activities worked in 4e, because D&D 4e had in its very first Player's Handbook a perfectly serviceable set of skills with codified uses and interactions that in and of themselves provided enough of a toolkit for the DM to build interesting challenges that allowed for expressions of system mastery using those tools. They could've simply done more with them.

Anyway I like it when a game tells me "with an Athletics check of this DC your character jumps THIS MANY feet" because then it makes me go "how do I optimize my character for jumping"

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I didn't realize how much this trope bothered me until Of The Devil decided to not do that.

The whole "ooooh, be careful with cyberware or it will turn you into a psycho killer" thing is not only stupid in isolation, but it overshadows a far more interesting conflict.

Like, hey man, you just chopped off your arm to be better at your job, how do you feel about that? What kind of things did your organic arm do better than your metal arm? How hard is it to maintain? How do the corps make it harder?

You don't have to make body modification inherently evil to make it interesting.

you know what else im gonna be a hater about. cyberpsychosis. essence loss. i had to read and watch so much cyberpunk for 10kdays and so many people are just pointlessly scared to drop it

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you know what else im gonna be a hater about. cyberpsychosis. essence loss. i had to read and watch so much cyberpunk for 10kdays and so many people are just pointlessly scared to drop it

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of the Devil is finally gonna be good.

"Meet your newest client, Counselor."

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You may have heard of simulationist gaming, but have you tried simulacrumist gaming?

Over the years I have come to appreciate D&D as the dungeon game: a game that is ultimately agnostic about trying to produce an epic narrative and just about some assholes trying to make it rich in a dungeon or dying at it. D&D 3e was my introduction to D&D and while that edition was supposed to be a return to the dungeon, the playstyle associated with modern D&D (characterized by five-room dungeons that are mostly linear gauntlets of challenges instead of little playgrounds for player expression and exploration) developed during 3e days and was the one me and my group gravitated towards.

D&D 4e is on the other hand an almost comprehensive rejection of the "D&D as a dungeon game" playstyle and specifically laser-focused on the "D&D as a game of fantasy heroics" playstyle, which is the one I in general don't really enjoy anymore. I mean that's likely to change, it's very likely I'll find a love for the playstyle again at some point.

Now, it may surprise you, that in spite of the fact that 4e basically embodies a playstyle I don't really care for, it's still my favorite WotC edition of D&D. Because both 3e and 5e kind of suck as dungeon games. 3e kind of does cook if you approach it almost like an immersive sim. But you also gotta accept that it's one of those early immersive sims where the devs were really rushed and didn't have time to do proper QA so sometimes the physics engine kind of shits itself and you can accidentally speedrun the game with glitches without even trying.

5e is kind of like D&D playing on an emulator.

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Always

Hey, my X loyal mutuals. I'm working on a big stupid rant about GMing culture, and I was wondering if you all would actually be interested in it.

That is all. That is the post.

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my ideology common senseism is about constantly applying common sense to situations to figure out the best path forward. what do you mean the very idea of common sense is both culturally relative and not necessarily without issues? that's stupid anyway hey we should all get really scared about this monster i thought up it's fucking terrifying