July 21, 2022 hex culture Uncategorized

building a better freak

Been reading / thinking about Choujin X and Chainsaw Man, and also Masks (the PbtA superhero game). I had a fun time playing it with my friends, but it felt a little overeager to steer us into the drama stuff and not as interested as I would have liked in the doing cool/gruesome shit (I’m not huge into cape comic stuff, but one of the compelling things to me about it is freakishness, which Masks feels like it shies away from even as it provides it as an option). The thing about mechanizing all of the conflict is that I’m not sure how much the mechanics are actually doing; if somebody is willing to lean into character beats and personal conflict, they’re probably going to do so regardless of how many Moves support it. I do like thespian club high drama bullshit, but I don’t like being led by the nose.

So anyway, I wrote this up with these things in mind: a light mechanical framework for a high-ick superhero-type game in the vein of Choujin X or Chainsaw Man that lets players jump into the genre emulation stuff if they want to. It’s not like…mechanically ingenious, but I suspect it will at least work for a few fun games with my players.

Concept

In the decades after the failed Apocalypse, the broken war machines and defeated soldiers of Heaven and Hell sublimated into the soil and water and air of Earth, leaching even into the bodies and blood of a busily (if miserably) rebuilding humanity. Some lucky few found themselves with influence over the world once reserved for the supernal and infernal: Decrees, the entitlement to govern worldly phenomena dispensed by Heaven to angels before the Fall.

Think: hyperindustrial near-future, an island-metropolis where you can find anything whether your want to or not, superpowered mercenaries who nonetheless have day jobs, the restoration of everyday life after many years of privation and destruction, scientists dissecting angels in government laboratories, smugglers with lead canisters full of demon hearts, old battlefields covered with salt statues of soldiers half-submerged in iridescent slicks of black metal, slowly drifting away from what is familiar and friendly in your life to something dark and unknown but perhaps not entirely undesirable

PCs are once-regular people who found themselves with Decrees living in the Autonomous City San Serafin, built after the Apocalypse and a place where all things converge.

Checks

When you do something difficult, risky, or unpredictable, roll 2d6. If the highest die is a 1-3, you fail. If it’s a 4-5, you succeed at a cost: your goals are only partially achieved, you pay a cost, or suffer a complication. If it’s a 6, you succeed.

You can roll an extra die if on the whole your characteristics and the situation are favorable. You must roll one fewer die if on the whole your characteristics and the situation are unfavorable. If it’s ambiguous, default to 2d6.

Using your Decree is always difficult, risky, or unpredictable.

Characteristics

Pick 2 from each list below. You can’t pick two characteristics in the same row, e.g. being perceptive and oblivious at the same time.

strong	weak
tough	frail
quick	slow
knowledgeable	ignorant
streetwise	naive
perceptive	oblivious
intimidating	wallflower
deceitful	guileless
persuasive	unlikable
reputable	irreputable
wealthy	impoverished

Pick 1 from the list below.

Waiter
construction worker
burglar
student
assassin
bureaucrat
farmer
hacker
actor
poet
journalist
carpenter
welder
doctor
nurse
EMT
painter

Resisting

When you resist something happening to you that you don’t want to happen, make a check like normal.

The GM doesn’t roll; players either avoid adverse situations or make Resist rolls against them.

Damage

By default, you can survive 8 Harm. Default damage you take is 2; it can be reduced to 1 or 0 by resist rolls or increase to 3 or 4 by difficult circumstances and strong enemies.

Similarly, default Harm you cause is 2; it can be reduced to 1 or 0 by tough enemies or increased to 3 or 4 by good plans.

Comebacks

If reduced to 0 Hits, make a Resist check. If you succeed, say something you found out about the nature of your Decree while you were so close to death, and regain half your hits.

If you fail, you’re taken out until your allies can get you to a safe place. If your whole team gets taken out, you wake up in a worse situation.

Divinity

Your Decree gives you power over…

Scissor
Mirror
Paper
Ink
Smoke
Dream
Snake
Fox
Octopus
Nightingale
Moth
Flower
Shadow
Ribbon
Needle
Moonlight
Bronze
Clay
Memory
Mirage

Your Decree works by means of…

Touch
Incantations
Gestures
Agonizing exertions of pure willpower
Summoned familiars
Symbols you write
Your body changing its shape
Tools, implements, or weapons
A being that inhabits your body
Your blood

It is your Decree’s nature to be…

(Roll once to determine a positive nature on the left, then pick any two negative natures that don’t share the row of the positive nature. Your power cannot be swift-acting and slow at the same time, for example).

(These don’t have precise mechanical effects but will come up as you use your powers, especially when you roll failures or partial successes).

1	Swift-acting	slow
2	Long-lasting	ephemeral
3	Potent	weak
4	Precise	uncontrollable
5	Mercurial	predictable
6	Sustainable	exhausting
7	Cooperative	malicious
8	Respectable	disturbing

Unfortunately, your power has complicated your everyday life by…

Permanently altering your body’s shape and/or appearance in some troubling or inconvenient way
Frightening or angering the people in your life or community
Attracting the attention of an organization that wants to use your talents for its own ends
Attracting the special attention of an organization that kills people with your talents
Requiring you to consume an unusual or illicit substance to survive
Killing someone significant, either to you personally or society at large, when it manifested

Example

The assumption is that we’re filling in the spaces a little, so if a Decree is NEEDLE and works by means of incantations and is slow and disturbing but potent, you could say that its owner can create needles that break through nearly anything, but they must clearly and precisely describe what they are trying to pierce. If they are gagged or unable to easily breathe, they can’t do anything out of the ordinary, but they could use their decree if bound or blinded.

Missions

Despite your ordinary day-to-day life, you are beholden to the Divinity School to carry out their dangerous business from time to time.

Location

The Spearyards – industrial district. factories, laboratories, foundries, with substantial abandoned areas
The Churchyards – historical and district, home to the University
Campo Greco – rich residential District
The Old Royal Park – huge park containing a small old-growth forest
Madrugados – working class residential district
The Esplanades – government district, as well as museums, theaters, cultural institutions

Duty

Protect object
Protect VIP
Kidnap enemy
Retrieve object
Retrieve VIP
Assassinate enemy
Destroy object
Surveil VIP
Surveil enemy
Surveil object

Object examples: flash drive of research data, briefcase of cash, demon heart, etc
VIP/ Enemy examples: company president, potential Divinity, ambassador, witness, etc

Rival

Killy, whose decree is JAW. Disheveled young man with very sharp teeth in an oversized sweater; wears crime scene tape around his neck like a scarf. He can inflict a bite wounds of nearly any size on whatever he touches, and by tracing a line with his finger on something can make a mouth appear on it that bites what he wants and can speak for him if he wills it to.
Traumerai, whose Decree is NIGHTMARE. Wears ruffled pinafores and big ribbon ties and vents monsters out of the gill slits on her temples, which usually take the form of wolfish stuffed animals with pitbull jaws, bat wings, and button eyes.
Ursula, whose decree is CURSE. Always expressionless, with straight black hair and sensible black clothes. Attended by her familiars, Gog (black-clad, with a white mask) and Magog (white clad, with a black mask). If someone hears a condition stated by Gog and a consequence stated by Magog, it will come true for them and remain true indefinitely or the terms of the curse are met.
Bellamy, whose Decree is NIGHTJAR. A sensible and politely brutal middle-aged man who dresses in suits and ties. Fights with incomprehensible speed and allegedly drinks blood.

Complication

The job involves overcoming inordinately intense security
The job involves infiltrating a high society event
The job must not attract the attention of the general public
The job must be done in a very short amount of time
The job involves some serious law-breaking
Multiple Divinities will be working to stop you

Advancement

When you have encountered three more reasons to become more than what you are such as encountering the true nature of your power while on the cusp of death, eating a demon heart, defeating an enemy who vastly outmatched you, making a true friendship, or radically changing the way you see the world under doubt and duress, you gain a Raise.

A Raise lets you use your Decree to do something truly marvelous and grotesque: become an unstoppable monster, summon a god-slaying spear from the heavens, banish a city block to the Moon, whatever. You don’t need to roll to make it happen or do what you want, but it does have to be an outrageous display of power. You can use a Raise at any time, though doing so wantonly may attract hostile attention.

When you use a Raise, at the end of the session, talk with the GM and the other players about how your character has changed, and how they can use their Decree in ways they previously did not know were possible.

After the first Raise, it takes four reasons, after the second it takes five, and so on.

July 7, 2022July 8, 2022 hex culture Uncategorized

Situational Narrative Design in Tabletop Games

Saw Sean and Chris and Richard talking about incorporating setting details into player-facing components of the game that actually matter. Like, how do you do that thing that Dark Souls does that everybody loves so much but in a tabletop game? It’s easy to think of examples (there were three genius blacksmiths with unique styles and all magic swords worth anything visibly conform to one of the three, and each of a particular affinity for an alignment or whatever; in some dungeon there’s a bas relief of the Nightingale Demon being stabbed by the Rowan Angel and now players can guess that nightingale monsters take extra damage from rowan weapons etc etc), but I think grabbing it’s very easy to spit out these examples en masse but harder to relate them to each other in a meaningful way or to build a setting from the ground up around the player being able to form compelling interpretations of the world.

I think situational game design is actually a handy tool for solving this problem. Situational game design is a generally useful framework that is very useful for thinking about games in general and tabletop games in particular. It’s informed a lot of the game prep and writing I’ve been doing recently, and I think it would be very helpful for tabletop game designers at large. It’s not necessarily a perfectly total ideology of play, but it has helped me ask interesting questions and generate useful answers. The rundown I am going to give is extremely brief, and if you can get your hands on the book I’d really recommend it. Anyway.

Situational Game Design In Brief

Situational Game Design is a book by Brian Upton that proposes a methodology for designing and understanding games. Brian Upton is a video game developer, but the book addresses games of all kinds, and I think it can be usefully applied to tabletop roleplaying games.

Situational design centers the player and pays special attention to play that takes place when the player isn’t interacting with the game or isn’t trying to win the game. To be clear, situational game design takes non-interaction and non-pursuit of victory into account, but it does not ignore other aspects or forms of play. This more expansive attitude towards play is useful when thinking about rpgs. Most popular rpgs don’t have game-terminating win conditions, and a lot of enjoyment players derive from them aren’t strictly manipulating figures on the board, or even agents in a narrative. As Upton says,

In situational design, the nexus of play lies not in the interface between the player and the game, but inside the player’s mind (Figure 1.2). Some of the moves the player makes will affect the external state of the game, but others will affect their internal understanding of the game, or even their understanding of themselves and the world at large.
pg 6

I have miserably reproduced figure 1.2 below

A diagram that simply reinforces the quote above. It indicates that "the game" encapsulates part of the player and the rules, that "play" occurs within the player and within the game, and that there is interaction between rules and the player.

Things encapsulated by this definition of play that might escape our intuition or other formal definitions: making notes on character sheets about in-game events, naming an adopted pet, deciding you don’t like the Baron’s mustachioed butler, realizing that the Baron has been replaced by a simulacrum, perversely selecting Stone to Flesh instead of Flesh to Stone as your spell for this level, choosing on how to deal with your rebellious retainer after everyone has packed up and you’re driving home from game night.

Vitally, these are just as much play, and just as important to the situational designer, as deciding which kobold to attack or electing to do something in the fiction that triggers a PbtA move. Situational design doesn’t really elevate certain kinds of play over others.

To full understand play in the sense of situational design, we need to look at three concepts Upton lays out: situations, constraints, and moves.

We will start with situations. Upton’s definition is simple.

A situation is an interval of play that contains a choice.
pg 11

This is any interval of play and any choice, as suggested by my examples of play above. Situations can happen rapidly or continuously; deciding to fire a rifle at the alien soldier with an ice gun vs the alien soldier with a flamethrower and then immediately being faced with a choice between fighting the survivor or ducking for cover, with a series of choices after that, is the sort of the think you might expect in a typical video game. Situations can also happen in clear sequence as in chess, where you might decide which piece of yours to move or which piece of your opponent’s to capture, and then face a new situation once they have taken their turn.

Upton has a lot more to say about situations (naturally enough, in a book titled Situational Game Design) but this is a brief gloss, so we’ll stop here.

The next element is constraints. Upton explains them as follows.

When we’re within a situation we’re offered a range of moves to choose from. The constraints that structure a situation determine which moves we’re allowed to make, and therefore what choices it offers us.
pg 12

Upton offers rules as the most obvious kinds of constraints: in baseball, you can’t keep swinging after your third strike; in chess, you win if you take your opponents king and pawns can’t move four spaces diagonally. They can also be physics (balls move a certain way through the air when struck) or simulations of such (you want to lead your shots against a fast target in an FPS, or you can’t move through representations of solid objects in a platformer). There are also “soft constraints”, things players won’t or shouldn’t do. I can move my king out into the open in chess as soon as possible in chess, but soft strategic constraints will generally prevent an experienced player from doing so. In tabletop games, you might theoretically be able to kick a puppy or steal from your party members, but many players have constraints around how they want to express themselves in the game.

A key distinction is active constraints and potential constraints. While it’s true that you get to walk to first base after your fourth ball, that doesn’t matter to a player on third, and it matters even less to a player sitting in the dugout (I know very little about baseball, so I’m not sure why I’m leaning on it so hard for examples here). Constraints switch from potential and active all of the time, which leads us to the final core piece of situational game design:

Moves, which Upton mentions in his explanation of constraints.

A move is anything that the player does to change the game’s active constraints.
pg 15

This is a big deal, because Upton means anything. One of the examples of a move that he provides is doing nothing in a video game; if the game continues to proceed and your active constraints change, then doing nothing is a move. It can of course mean moving 30 feet closer to the kobold or running to second base, but it can also include “coming to like the Duke’s imperious secretary”, or “beginning to suspect the King is a simulacra” or “discovering the Church of Light’s god is actually a huge bug”. As long as it changes the constraints on the players’ behavior (maybe we don’t trust the Photonic Pope anymore on account of that bug thing), it’s a move.

Upton calls these “interpretive moves” and elaborates on them below

When we make an interpretive move, we’re not changing the state of the game, we’re changing our attitude toward it.
What this means is that play is not limited to situations that offer choices between competing actions; it also occurs in situations that offer competing interpretations. “What should I do?” is a playful choice, but so are “What’s happening?” and, “What does this mean?” These interpretive moves may be directed towards the past (“What caused this?” or towards the future (“What’s going to happen?”). They can even be directed towards ourselves (“Who am I?” or “Why am I doing this?”). If properly structured, these internal interpretive choices can be just as playful as choices that change the game’s external state.
pg 22

This also means that play (as Upton defines it) is happening in all kinds of places–the aforementioned car ride home from a D&D game, during character creation, while you’re standing in the shower thinking about how to solve a puzzle. It also means that there’s not a clean delineation between the crispy crunchy mechanical parts of the game that traditionally get a lot of attention (Reaction rolls, combat, skill check) and the more ephemeral parts less traditionally mechanized in the old school scene (setting, lore, building relations with NPCs). It’s just moves, constraints, and situations structuring and flowing into one another; the move of determining the God of Light is a bug leads to the situations in which you fight him; once he extends his glistening ovipositor, you’re likely making interpretive moves about him even in the heat of combat.

Okay, so that was a lot of preamble, and a lot of it I think is a really exciting way to think about games, but this blog post is titled Situational Narrative Design in Tabletop Games, so let’s move on to that part.

The Narrative / Setting Stuff

So if we’re thinking about that initial problem: how do you write a setting that is well suited for players interpreting and thinking about? How do you write a setting that provides them information they can act on? I think a possible way is to structure it around interpretive moves.

The way that I did this is sketch out a setting in terms of brief clauses and phrases linked with one of the following conjunctions:

but: for two facts that exist in conflict with each other, either conceptually (The king said he did this BUT actually did this instead.) or in terms of actual forces (The Good Guy Army marched into the desert BUT the Bad Guy Army stopped them)
so: for facts that have a causal relationship (The hunter killed the dragon SO it would stop preying on his people
and: for facts that occur concurrently (He founded a Kingdom AND gave gifts to his new supports)

I included the rough Situation Map of this below. This isn’t complete and is a proof of concept; it’s also a setting I only had a rough idea about before I started. Each fact should be pretty interesting and important to the setting at large; you don’t have to be too granular about it. Also if I were to do this again, I would probably include arrows to show which direction the “so”s and “but”s are going but it’s fine I guess.

wordpress absolutely refuses to let me make this image big enough to comfortably read

You’ll note that there are letters associated with each fact. I used these to cross-reference the facts with details in the setting; for each fact I tried to come up with a handful of ways that fact impacted the actual world in terms that players would notice, like so:

A The hero Luin slayed a great Dragon in his old age

Everyone knows: Orma Luin, the divine Dragon King, founded the empire whose ruins we all live in.
Many dungeons are his fortresses and palaces, which depict his victory over the monstrous and gluttonous Dragon

B So he could stop its predations on his people

Even know, there are tracts of desert and scrub winding their way through forest and meadow, wastes where the dragon’s fiery breathe scorched even the fertility from the soil.

C The dragon’s death voided the pacts it had made with the Courts of demons and the dead, allowing them to enter the Lands of the Living

Everyone believes: WIth its dying breath, the Dragon spitefully unleashed all manner of wicked spirit into the Lands of the Living
Many dungeons are the haunts and shrines of the Demons and the Dead
Many people out in the hinterlands swear fealty to a Greater Corpse or Demon rather than a human lord

D He secretly drank its blood, in violation of the great taboo

Everyone knows: sorcerers drinking an animal’s blood is forbidden, as is magic that lets one assume their shape
Most mayors or elders will offer significant bounties for the heads of nearby witches who violate the taboo
Hunter Knights will go to great lengths to capture or kill witches

E He could live eternally, with the might and vigor of a dragon

Everyone believes: The gods blessed Orma Luin with his youth and divinity for slaying the wicked Dragon.
Orma Luin still nominally rules the ruins of his empire from his Isle Palace.
Orma Luin is and was an army unto himself

F All manner of dangerous spirit began preying on humanity once again

Hunter Knights and Clerics do the constant work of keeping humanity safe from Demons and the Dead
Many dungeons are the haunts and shrines of the Demons and the Dead
Many people out in the hinterlands swear fealty to a Greater Corpse or Demon rather than a human lord
If you learn the lawful tongue of the Dead or the chaotic speech of the Demons, they will tell you all manner of things about Orma Luin that the Hunter Knights would kill you for repeating.

The full situation map key isn’t complete, but you get the idea (probably, I hope).

The next step is to go through the key and pull out things you need to put in your setting. What we have here includes

Multiple dungeons that depict Orma Luin defeating a dragon
Narrow, geographically improbable stretches of wasteland, scrub, and desert in otherwise fertile areas of the map
Multiple dungeons themed around demons or the undead
Remote settlements governed by demons or the dead
Settlements that offer bounties for shapeshifting witches
The ability for players to become shapeshifting witches (if they don’t mind the scrutiny of witch-hunters)
Hunter Knights on encounter tables
A really nasty dungeon with a really nasty Dragon King inside
A couple locations that are old battlefields where the Dragon King wasted an army by himself
Possible Hunter Knight class
NPCs expecting clerics to help them hunt undead and demons
Alignment languages let you learn things from the Dead and Demons
Rumors, secrets, and lies Demons and the Dead will tell you, including and especially things that contradict the “everybody believes” entries in the key.
And so on and so on.

That’s a pretty good list to go off of considering I’m working off of a half-finished proof of concept based on a setting I didn’t know much about when I started. The blacksmith entry would be the impetus for magic weapons in the setting, and their rarity would be tied to the fact that one demidivine blacksmith had to make them; they might all have her maker’s mark and be illegal to own and technically property of the Dragon King. The node about Seti (I believe item G) could give you insight into Clerics and Magic-users and how they’re trained and treated.

This process ensures that most things the players encounter tie back to the core narrative we mapped out at the start, while also not forcing them to think about it too much if they don’t want to. Since the conjunctions that link the nodes are implicit or unstated, players are allowed to use their own interpretations to interrelate pieces of information. For example, Node M (He sired many demi-divine heirs, who varied greatly in their character and cruelty) could yield grotesque pleasure-palaces belonging to princes and princesses as dungeons in setting. If players only encountered setting details associated with Orma Luin being a great king, they could decide if he was a noble person who had bad kids or if the apples didn’t fall very far from the tree.

Each node is sort of the foundation of an interpretive situation. The situation will vary player to player, and even playgroup to playgroup (assuming multiple people are playing the setting) because individual players bring their own assumptions and preferences, and different tables will naturally encounter the information in different orders.

Anyway, this has been a little meandering, but that’s all about I have for today– a possible way to make settings with capital letter Lore tie into player-facing elements of the game. If you can, read Situational Game Design; it’s great and Brian Upton explains it way better than I do here.