The Innocent Marine Fauna of My Personal Sense of Well-Being
Behold! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by the abyss-wading Jim Rossignol and the heaven-storming Marsh Davies. This is a newsletter about table-top role-playing games: our own—that we’re publishing over here and also here —as well as interviews, links, and general noodling about many others. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
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Hello, you. (And then I just go off on one about game design.)
Links!
There is no 3. this time. Sorry.
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Hello, you.
Summer — morbid and hot and filled with global anxieties — has been an unexpectedly chaotic one here at Rossignol Towers. Even if I ignore, for a moment, the backdrop of war, economic catastrophe, environmental catastrophe and witless fascist trumpeting, I have found myself caught in a net of responsibilities and obligations that entraps the innocent marine fauna of my personal sense of well-being like water-vapour in a stillsuit.
(And let us never say that Jim Rossignol does not mix a mean metaphor. After all, it’s likely that this cocktail of inflated verbiage and syntax-mangling once, long ago, led you to his byline in the first place…)
Anyway, there are always sizeable fissures where the light gets in, and serious bouts of tabletop gaming*, reading, writing, research, and videos have all left me brimming with good cheer. Dice are pooled and reality is ignored. Escapism: a universal human good. TTRPGs aren’t universal yet, but perhaps they should be. In fact, yesterday’s “How to get into Tabletop RPGs” video by Shut Up & Sit Down founder Quintin Smith was so enthusiastic and exultant of our hobby that it made me a little tearful. And after I had wept and wiped away those big boy tears it made me ponder about what I get out of this thing we spend so much time upon.
Quinns made some comments about TTRPG design being a most interesting and exciting area of game design, even when compared to its higher-profile cousins in video and board games. I was inclined to agree. Being someone who not only indulges heavily in all three mediums, but also works in video games while having a sideline in TTRPG production, I can say that I too experience that sense of excitement. It’s growing. Many of the best ideas are here. Many of the best ideas about narrative are here. The thrilling momentum of it increases.
Over the summer I have noted that thrill while reading large hardback manuals (Conan, Dune), playing small-form PDF things (listed throughout numerous prior newsletters), and in preparing campaign ideas for use later in the year (I nearly typed the big idea out, but it’s too good to just give away in a throwaway newsletter mention!) Most significantly, perhaps, I have also noted the excitement aroused by new waves of RPG design while actively working on video game designs as my day job. Spending more time with TTPRGs has, undoubtedly, made me a better game designer.
Reader, I am keen and happy to report that the big meta-game loop I’m now intending to bring into a digital game represents a sort of logical translation/evolution of some of the systems I am most interested in from the TTRPG world. It’s a little like finding ways to make the web of responsibilities from real life more enticing that everything else…
To first rewind a little: when writing a digital game pitch a while back I saw some advice that suggested that a key thing that designers often miss (particularly those wanting to sound mature and rational in their pitching), is how the game is supposed to make the player feel. It sounds obvious, but adding this into a video game pitch, and doing it explicitly in the way that I would for a TTRPG, is the most important single improvement I have made in several years of game design and writing about game design. Even then, if we do write about how a player is supposed to feel, then it’s all too often focused on how they are supposed to feel during the “immersive” bits of the game, where they are sneaking past guards, bribing aliens, or pulling the trigger on a Springfield 1866. There’s more to it than that.
That the mechanics of a tabletop RPG are about codifying the feeling that a designer intends to evoke in the players into tangible and comprehensible systems should be a given. We’ve talked about systems supporting a fiction before. But I think what I have been realising over the past few months is that it’s the tertiary, supporting or “house-keeping” systems that often lend the most weight to that sense of feeling.
The most acute example of this, probably, is (once again) in Blades In The Dark’s downtime mechanics, where a large part of the game is about stress management, long-term projects, entanglements with various factions, and the narrative pressure of “heat” generated by your behaviour in the action-oriented ‘Score’ part of the game. Often, in my experience, the most consequential decisions get made during that phase, and have delivered some of the most dramatic moments I or my players have ever experienced. Not only that, but the overall long-term sense of pressure building up comes from the systems which are engaged in that phase: the danger of going to war with other factions, the opportunities and threats opened up from trying to progress your gang, claiming turf and making enemies. It is this maintenance and ticking off of errands in the game systems that end up underpinning the action bits with meaning and value.
Linking this back to video games, I find myself thinking about the time we spent in Eve Online. One of the reasons that occasional bursts of frantic combat action felt so weighty was the sense that they had been set up by hours of logistical activity, often docked, flicking through menus, in the intervening hours. We had invested in it and built something in that world. It gave us a stake that mere action could not.
When I started working on this particular edition of the newsletter — which was actually before the last one we put out — Comrade Marsh suggested that I should attempt to connect the huge amount time we sunk into Crytek’s Hunt: Showdown to the work we have done on our TEETH rpgs, and particularly the main book that we are completing right now.
I think Marsh was right to ask this, because actually it did expose some things to me, but they were more about what Hunt was lacking than what it ended up inspiring in our tabletop design. Of course, there are similarities in the gangs-of-antiquated-hunters-fighting-monsters aspect of play, but actually the bits of TEETH that were most challenging and most interesting, are the bits of game that Hunt lacks. What does it mean to operate a roster of murderous monster hunters? What do they actually want? How will their long-term grudges and alliances produce consequences? How does it feel to travel in the wilderness when you know the place you are heading to is even more bleak? Should you really hire this stranger with a gun? How do they recover after the contract?
It’s this sense, the idea that your house-keeping in the menus or UI should be as much a part of setting up a feeling of pressure, tension, threat, or excitement, as any of the “action” sequences of a game, that has really come home to me.
I feel like this trend has echoed across TTRPG design, consciously or unconsciously, because both the game I am currently playing — Trophy Gold (more on which next time) — and the game I am planning to run in the near future, Mothership 1E, both have extensive new rules for making that space between the missions more interesting and consequential. It’s a recognition, I think, that the bit of time you spend “in the menus” matters as much as the top-of-the-bill action sequence.
Taking the time to also work out how plotting a route on a map, or making logistical decisions between missions is supposed to make the players feel, is a crucial (and for me, missing) part of the full picture. How those decisions end up being interesting ones, and set up what players end up feeling about the game when they come away from it, seems, on the face of it, like finding a way to be excited about the net of obligations and responsibilities that trap us in the everyday.
Yeah. This is like inventing a trick that makes you excited about completing paperwork or tidying up the house. Making a player as excited to get back to the menu as they are to launch out into the game’s immersive action world really does seem, to me, like the missing piece I’ve been looking for.
*Featuring mostly my and other people’s backlog of boardgames, including: Roll For The Galaxy, thanks to the always-ready-to-purchase-more-games Dan Puzey, Dune (as we already discussed), Dominion in both its free-to-play digital format and physical boardgame format, My City played as a legacy game with my family, Quacks of Quedlinberg, Marvel Champions for some reason, Cosmic Encounter, Mysterium Park, Root, and doubtless others that I have forgotten or skipped over. The highlight of all of these was teaching my 12 year old son Dominion, only to have him beat me 41 to -2 on his second game. All I can say is that Witch, like Bandit, is OP.
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(OTHER) LINKS!
What kind of RPGs would the people of the TEETH world have been playing? Well, assuming they lived another twenty or thirty years, they might have enjoyed these early role-playing parlour games from the start of the 19th century (as highlighted by writer and game designer Holly Gramazio).
DOGS, the Dice pool and mOral predicament based Generic roleplaying System. I have no idea how useful this is (although I have heard positive things via a discussion between Mr Gardiner of Failbetter Games and our friend Kieron Gillen, based on how DOGS has been abstracted from classic narrativist Blades/PBtA forerunner game, Dogs In The Vineyard), I just like the laboured acronym. Also, I have to mention that I interrupted the discussion of that important early narrativist design by saying “I had a dream about a dragon that breathed out people instead of fire.” So that’s about my level of contribution to such things. I really should know when to be quiet around my betters.
Speaking of conversations about consequence and import, those I’ve had with artists and creators this year have often been dominated by the implications of AI-generated art boom, and especially its rapid progress via Midjourney. It is clearly going to have some tsunami-sized ripples in the creative industries, but in the near term we can already see game creators using these AI tools to illustrate their work. Itch.io and DriveThruRPG are already full of examples, and while there are some fascinating and improbable uses — look at this cover which uses a painting that looks glancingly like the inside of a fantasy inn while nonetheless being an essentially abstract computer dreaming — other uses are more convincing. The uncanny nature of the images made them perfect for the eerie subject matter of Maskwitches Of Doggerland, for example. I wonder, now, whether improvements in AI algorithms that end up losing the fundamental weirdness of these generated images will result in removing the thing that was most interesting about them in the first place.
I don’t often spend time with solo RPGs, but I backed Notorious on Kickstarter, because I do so love spaceport bounty-hunter fictions. Being Greedo and actually nailing that smarmy son of a bitch Solo, that’s the fantasy.
I also backed Sunderwald, and you have a few hours left to do so, too, depending on when you are reading this. I backed it because it brings legacy-style mechanics to an RPG: “It is also a legacy tabletop roleplaying game. During play, you will physically and permanently modify this book.” I visibly flinched at Quinns using a highlighter on his copy of Spire, so this will be an interesting experience for me.
Unexpected Downsizing is about being fired and having fifteen minutes left before the end of your last shift.
Fall of Magic is an extraordinarily lavishly-produced RPG played across an actual scroll like from the olden days.
I can’t remember if we talked about the idea of bring narrative elements from RPS to tabletop combat games, but Lo! Thy Dread Empire does a bit of that. The Kickstarter has concluded, but it might be worth keeping an eye on if you like a whiff of the narrative side of wargames.
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POLITE ADVERTISEMENT: TEETH GAMES ARE NOW AVAILABLE ON DRIVETHRURPG.COM!
Hello, yes, the TEETH games aren’t just on itch.io now, they’re also on the mighty DriveThruRPG, so if that’s your portal of choice then you can collect our games over there!
STRANGER & STRANGER, a 63-page, campaign-length adventure in which a group of hapless bumpkins attempt to save their village from abomination, while undergoing a series of grimly amusing mutations.
BLOOD COTILLION, a 45-page one-shot in which assassins dress-up in fluttering petticoats, attempt to infiltrate a society ball and murder the cultists therein. Think: Pride & Terminate with Extreme Prejudice.
NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, a 23-page one-shot in which an assortment of travellers are forced to flee a massive horde of monstrous pig-creatures. It's name-your-own-price, so you can dive in without onerous financial risk!
They're all low prep, rules-lite and easy to get into. Hogmen is particularly ideal for newcomers! Please do check them out, and, if you are interested in supporting our exploits, please buy on itch, or now on DriveThruRPG!
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More soon! x