The Verbs of Power
Behold! You are reading the TEETH newsletter, written and compiled by the space-pope Jim Rossignol and bog-inquisitor 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. Want us to see your work? Get in touch!
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Hello, you
Combat, as a treat
Links!
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Hello, you.
Marsh and I had a little chat about action systems in RPGs. You can read that banter below!
But first I also wanted to be all topical and mention The Rings Of Power, an exciting new television series which I watched the first two episodes of over the weekend. I sort of wish, now, that it was an animated show with character design from Mark Bradley, but sadly it isn’t, and we shall have to accept that. I won’t spoil it for those of you not planning to boycott Bezos’ behemoth, but I wanted to comment on how it left me feeling. And it’s a good feeling! If a longing for escapist activity can be said to be good. I haven’t been the only person to mention this, but it really did just make me want to play a fantasy RPG (which, thankfully, I am, because Gillen is running the phenomenal Trophy Gold, more on which in a couple of weeks time).
That feeling was all the more exacerbated by watching a Lord Of The Rings story that I didn’t know anything about. I mean, perhaps all fantasy writing since the 1960s is Tolkien fan fiction by some measure, but this gets to use the Actual Names and New Zealand and things. And obviously we know the overall drift towards chucking some jewlery into a volcano, and it’s pretty obvious who certain “mysterious” characters are, but we don’t know the beats. The iconic scenes don’t exist yet. Will they do a big siege against a cliff? Is there a weird little sing-song man? We do no know, and there’s space for new things. And that’s a weirdly tantalising feeling.
Elves remain pretty fucking excruciating, of course, and dwarves will never be treated with the respect they deserve, but that’s besides the point. The point, if I have one, is that Rings Of Power made me think of how I run our campaigns in these fantasy worlds: I might have a big name NPC wander into a scene here and there, but really we are taking this context and just finding our own story in it, creating paths ahead of us into places that might have been trod by books or movies, but are nevertheless being explored for the first time. I am not saying I envy the Rings Of Power writers, no sir, I would not touch that particular unexploded bomb, but their efforts did make me want to do some of my own fantasy galavanting. The series made me think, more than anything, about how we run campaigns in worlds created by others.
(My personal predeliction when playing games in these kinds of settings is always to head off in the wrong direction, avoid the canon events, and see the sights that the setting implied, but never depicted, which is essentially what the TV show is doing here. Indeed, when reading the Dune RPG recently I was taken with the idea of setting the game in some earlier era, in the centuries before the book and movie, or even during the great war against the computers (a war which is surely at hand in our own timeline). And so it sat right with me that Rings Of Power did roll its own in the thousands of years of worldbuilding that the setting they are working with has to offer. They have such a huge canvas, and they’re using it. Imagine if, instead, the Rings Of Power persons had “filled in the gaps” between Hobbit and LotR movies, as the Star Wars movies attempted to do! Horrible. Wrong.)
It could all go bad, of course, and it probably already has, but what I am saying is, as of episode 2, Rings Of Power had me eyeing up Lord Of The Rings RPG hardbacks, and that’s nothing to be sniffed at. After all, why not!?
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Combat and the load-bearing GM
Marsh: A few days ago, Evil Hat co-founder Rob Donoghue wrote an interesting thread on Twitter, as he does seemingly every hour of the day. During a single week, the man has had more provocative and deep thoughts about RPGs than I have had, about anything, in my entire life. In this particular thread, he invites GMs to try a D&D session without combat, and suggests that this will give them an appreciation for how combat weighs on the GM differently from other sorts of roleplay. In D&D, Donoghue says, it is actually a moment for the GM to relax: things play out mechanically, driven by player actions, with comparatively little intervention on the GM's part. Does that stack up with your experiences as a D&D GM and how do other systems compare? I'd think that Blades would be more uniformly demanding of a GM, because combat requires them to improvise consequences.
Jim: Yeah, I mean, it does require them to improvise consequences, but the freeing thing is that responsibility can also be shared with the players. Blades, and games like it, are all slanted towards getting everyone around the table to suggest a consequence or a Devil’s Bargain, or discuss really anything else that comes up. It’s on the player to say what they want to do, and I feel like there’s less work in improvising some fun ways that can go wrong than there is in running a sheet of hit points and initiative positions. I definitely found D&D and non-narrative RPGs have a greater cognitive burden overall, but I think that’s because of the amount of planning and stat-checking involved in them. And so much of that has to be done by the GM! In other games I can get players to take on a lot more of it. I have to say that my own experience of running combat in D&D is not really that of downtime, not only because I have to keep checking what abilities an elite Basilisk has or whatever, but because I had to plan that encounter and balance it against the players in the first place. Maybe that’s lack of practice, but I would say that the narrative games we’ve played are definitely less burdensome in that way, with just a clock or two to track progress and lots of making it up as we go.
However I think Mr D’s point was slightly more subtle here in that he’s asking GMs to look at how they lean on specific systems in games, and how games can play differently if you don’t find yourself asking players to look down at their stats ten minutes into tabletime. If you do combat a lot then not doing it shines a light on your play. I have definitely had experience of doing what he’s talking about, which is leaning on combat as a session-filler, and I think it’s also a factor of how a group approaches their game. I have played games where filling a session with social chatter and role-play has been easy, and I have played with groups where that’s a grind and everyone would rather be punching a beholder and ticking off spell use on their binder of character abilities.
However, to take a step back here, I feel like noting that our background, Marsh, is predominantly in videogames. I feel like what Donoghue is getting at here is a cousin to the “why are games always about combat” issue that we get in discussions of videogames. The primary systems are so often about combat that gamers are primed to interact with a game world by fighting it. And if you provide the tools then that’s how the player will interact with it. My feeling is the same is true of D&D: your players are geared up and positioned to fight, so they’re going to. Only the difference here is that the straightjacket isn’t real. In Doom you may not talk to the monsters, but in TTRPGs…
Marsh: You're absolutely right - Donoghue explicitly advocates going combat-free for a session simply because it is illuminating to do so - and because being challenged by constraints is often what helps us to grow. But, in developing TEETH, a game with a bunch of distinct phases, I'm really interested in the notion of how different kinds of roleplaying tasks feel, how differently they weigh cognitively, for players and GM.
Maybe the sense of relief that Donoghue ascribes to combat isn't necessarily because of a reduction of cognitive load, but a change in the kind of mental work required: from imagination to administration, in the case of tracking hit points and checking rules. And I think that switch - which is also experienced by players to a different degree - is often a necessary refreshment even if the new task isn't exactly easier.
Big D says in the thread that players sometimes express disappointment that D&D's social challenges aren't as mechanically robust or propulsive as combat - but I wonder, if social stuff were as systematised or emphasised by the rules, whether it would offer the same refreshing contrast with combat? Maybe the lack of social crunchiness in D&D is not a void to be filled with mechanics, but intentionally left blank so as to compel a different kind of engagement - though, as you suggest, whether that is an opportunity or a burden depends on the group and whether or not they stay in the straightjacket of the rules, believing that to be the totality of the game.
Do you think there's that differentiation between textures of play in Blades? Or indeed in TEETH? There are distinct phases, but I wonder if the kind of mental work you are performing in each is actually relatively similar, by contrast with D&D's bigger improv/combat dichotomy.
Jim: I guess it’s down to what you were talking about the other day: how the rules free the verbs. The way that “checking against a stat” in a D&D or other traditional game works versus the way it works as a “move” or “action” in a more narrative game decides how free for improvisation and invention the verbs the game use end up being. That, say, the actions in a Forged In The Dark game explicitly overlap is not about “is this wisdom or intelligence stat check” but rather “can I make an argument for, or can I describe, how this action will function in this situation? Or is this completely different action the one that better fits the narrative, my character, and the situation?” They’re jumping off points, they’re prompts for play. In D&D you get a lot of prompts for how to approach combat, but comparably few for how to approach making yourself the centre of attention during a court drama scene, or impressing a band of street urchins. (I always thinking about how in D2 Modern, which obviously shares a strong lineage with D&D, there’s a skill for wealth. You can become better at wealth, and there’s no explicit tracking of money. That’s a systemisation of a non-combat system that is super interesting, because you can use that ability in all kinds of situations. Characters get to be The Wealthy One, paying for the escape yacht, or successfully bribing the billionaire’s bodyguard. I feel like that shows you can systematise social-based challenges in an interesting and rewarding way.)
Anyway, in narrative games those lines of imaginative play get sketched ahead of time because they’re a sort of possibility space based on the character. It’s immediately less about the number you need to test against and more about whether you can imagine how something might play out. This means the mechanics extend in all directions, and the social stuff is just as mechanised as fighting, because moves and actions are about starting point prompts for role-play, rather than stat-driven codifications of physical and mental limits. You could make an argument, in some very specific situation, for a fighting skill being used in a debate, I should imagine. I can remember you guys making a huge range of actions, and arguing their relevance, when improvising a stage show to amuse Lord Scurlock in his manor, and it was fucking incredible. That’s not to say that D&D doesn’t support this stuff - it can if you make it, and the advantage/disadvantage rules have made D&D more flexible than ever - I just don’t think it goes far enough to make players feel like it really extends to a formalised mechanisation of the social stuff that feels fun to run with.
I think there’s sometimes this sense that the narrative-led games are somehow “rules lite” compared to D&D or its ilk, but that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Blades In The Dark is hugely complex, with all the various phases supporting the central motif of the score. The same has ended up being true of Teeth, of course, and I think part of that lends itself to thinking about how the game functions as a social ruleset. How do you deal with your contacts? How do you deal with each other? What do the characters want and how is that dealt with outside of combat? There are rules for all this stuff, and it makes for a big, complex system, even when it’s not predicated on combat.
It’s interesting, I think, that our group, even players who have never played D&D together, although we have individually, seem to instinctively understand this difference? I sometimes wonder if I should run a new D&D campaign for contrast, if just as an educational exercise?
Marsh: Bring it on. I enjoyed my time as a manic tiefling apostate the last time we played. If I recall correctly, my character would get embarrassingly tumescent when filled with the spirit of righteousness. I don't think you ever attached a dice roll to this: perhaps there are some social challenges best left unmechanised.
Jim: A tiefling who was horny in more ways than one.
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LINKS
Martian Chess is apparently a thing. I cannot say for certain if it’s actually from Mars, but let’s assume that it is, and not actually based on a boardgame concept called Looney Pyramids.
In related Martian news HOLY BUSINESS look Look, LOOK! at As The Sun Forever Sets, which is a Forged In The Dark “survival horror hexcrawl”. Comrade Gardiner brought this to my attention mere moments ago, and what a blessed man he is for doing so. It is about surviving the Martian invasion of Victorian England, with lots of granular bits and pieces on playbook and “shelter sheet” and oh my I am very much going to run this. I purchased it without hestitation, and I am working through it already. It has my full attention, and should probably have yours, too.
This system-agonistic murder-mystery detectiving zine looks really very appealing, and frankly like a useful tool for all kinds of games. “In Line of Enquiry, the focus is on players solving the mystery by examining clues and chasing leads, as opposed to abstraction through character sheets, meta currencies and dice rolls. Taking inspiration from investigation board games like Consulting Detective, Line of Enquiry seeks to take that player first investigation style and inject into it roleplay drama. You follow the leads, you examine the clues, you question the suspects and you solve the murder.”
There’s been a wave of space cowboy games lately, and I can understand why: now is clearly the time for stetsons in orbit. However, I really do like the aesthetic choices of Dead Belt.
A few quid for almost all of the 2D20 Mutant Chronicles PDFs.
If I felt like dwarves were hard done by in the Rings Of Power, then I was happier with their treatment of late by our beloved overlords at Games Workshop, who have brought squats (albeit with a funny new name) back to the table in my lifetime. They said it would never happen, and yet look at that chonky exo-armour. Perhaps slightly awkward now that Space Wolves are also now space vikings, but let’s just skip around that.
We spent a lot of time this week looking at very fancy TTRPG accoutrements, for some reason. The winner, though, was this set of dice with little flowers in. Aw.
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More soon*! x
(*this was actually true last time, and will be again)