The Workshop

My sum total work this week is deciding that I want to use lightly fictionalized crops for Project: Greenbriar. I have this idea for taking stock images of vegetables and applying a color filter over them. Okay, I also did some small research into crop rotation to decide that I want legumes as one of the crops, and also I’m probably going to do flowers as another one. There’s a method to it that I’ll get into next week.

I’ve also been thinking about one recurring piece of feedback from my playtests. Every group enjoyed the presence of the outline for the narrative. A couple of the paragraphs were more difficult than others, but that can be worked on and massaged a little bit still. It’s noteworthy to me, though, that this overall restriction of creative freedom led to greater approachability of the subject. It’s an insight that I believe is widely applicable to TTRPGs, and one that often gets ignored in the face of the seeming infinite possibilities of the medium. There’s a blog post in that, somewhere.

It Came From Cohost

I like to think of TTRPGs as "beautiful machines." This is to say that they are works of art onto themselves, and there is a value in their aesthetic qualities purely as aesthetic qualities. This much I think is fairly self-evident to those working in TTRPG design and those likely to stumble across this cohost post (copost). That said, I'm willing to expand if necessary.

Perhaps more controversial is the nature of TTRPGs as machines. They have an utility function, they turn inputs into outputs, and it is important that they work in achieving their function. This post from Ru's Roleplaying Rants is a great look at the nature of TTRPG as machine. Each game has its own function, which I may have been misrepresenting in the past as the idea of designer intention. Thinking in terms of function, I believe, will yield better results for designers.

The most common function of TTRPGs, I'd say, is providing tools for the players to create their own art. They may have additional functions, but let's narrow down on this one here. In providing tools to help create art, TTRPGs can be seen as paint or brushes or canvases. While a layperson might not see the impact of different brushes or canvases on a work of art (can't a painter paint whatever they desire regardless of their tools?) my understanding is that different tools can lead to very different outcomes. The sheer materiality of them impacts the creation.

I would go so far as to say that the content of games (as opposed to its formal elements) provide templates to things that could be created. D&D presents a different variety of potential creations compared to Apocalypse World. The formal elements of the game then, theoretically, should provide guidance to creating the things that the content points towards. They shouldn't show how to draw a circle and then ask the players to draw the rest of the owl.

That said, an experienced artist can use the tools to do things that outside of their expected function. A painter can use watercolors like oil, to yield interesting and unexpected results, though it will likely require a lot of labor and experimentation on their part. Following the expected function of a TTRPG, in contrast, should yield the expected results consistently and relatively easily. The player has paid for it, after all, and deserves their money's worth.

Ludography

I’m going to do something a little different this week and talk about the games that I played at Metatopia, and what I’ve learned from them. The games varied wildly in terms of how done they were, which is not a bad thing. Different games at different levels of development all have different playtest needs. When I talk about the issues I have with a game, it’s in the sake of making the games better, and making our practice of games better. All three games did have good seeds to grow from.

Turn Your Back was the most complete game from my experience. The focus on this particular playtest was on character creation, and the designer really wanted to push for a more emotive process rather than the more analytical sort of character creation and bonds creation that fuels a lot of modern design. To that extent, the game leaned into strangrification and self-alienation. The characters became defined more by their relationship to this shared house than to each other, and the ways that house had changed their lives in various ways. There was a lot of really cool sensory stuff and a mechanic where one player puts forth something to be changed, another player says what changed in a positive way, and a third player twists that change and adds a negative element. All in all, it’s very playable and I’m looking forward to it coming out.

Mystic Aether was the middle child of the three games. The game had its start as a 5e game, but the designer has taken it farther apace since then, in ways that are honestly quite interesting. The remaining 5e DNA is the least interesting part to me, but maybe that simplicity and familiarity will help newer players to latch on. It’s also clear, to me, that the game was designed as a larp first, so there is a large amount of focus on setting, on character factions, on character aesthetics that does not directly translate as well into tabletop, but also isn’t disagreeable.

The real power in my experience came from the way that it enables easy drop-in/drop-out play, with easy character connection prompts. In addition, each scenario can be roughly determined via an oracle deck, and then each character rolls a connection to the scenario, which really draws players into the specific action of the play. In addition, there’s a power system called Wields, which are sort of like stunts from Fate, but they can be upgraded with xp to be more efficacious and to have a wider variety of effects, which feels really cool. Wields are also tied into the Energy system, which serves more as a spotlight management tool than a traditional stamina system, which is also really cool!

Level was the final game I played and definitely the least polished of the three. Those that know me well know that I love the LitRPG genre, and it’s kind of my personal mission to see a good one made. I’m very dubious about the Renegade Studios Dungeon Crawler Carl, since I feel like trying to push the expansive world of that series into a d20-shaped hole is a bad idea. What I’ve said in the past is that the best system for a LitRPG would be Fate. Characters having wildly divergent power sets while still maintaining a heroic position within the narrative is a cornerstone of LitRPG, but very difficult to replicate in most systems. Fate, however, is uniquely suited for the task. Which is why I’m super-psyched to see that Level is based off of Fate! It’s got a lot of work to go to get finished, but its secret sauce is the way that powers can combine into newer and stranger abilities as the characters level up. I’m very interested in seeing where this one goes!