Teleporting into Your Living Room
Howdy!
This newsletter will have: an essay on my philosophy of game rules/design, a tiny 2-player epistolary TTRPG release announcement, a random piece of art, a FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions), and a FOX pic from South Korea.
If there's a topic you'd like to hear about (writing, games/game design, and music composition are always fair game), please email deuceofgearsart@gmail.com. :3
Teleporting into Your Living Room
Recently a friend and I were discussing a roleplaying game that includes prohibitions of the form "you must never do XYZ while playing this game because the designer is against it philosophically; if you want to do that, you can't play the game at all."
I won't get into the specifics of the prohibitions, which would be identifying, other than to say that I see where the designer comes from in terms of intent, and also...how on earth does the designer expect to enforce this?
One of the most useful classes I took for my M.A. in secondary math education was Classroom Management. It was incredibly practical and oriented to surviving life in a real-world classroom. And one of the principles we learned was, Don't make rules that you can't enforce. That's a one-way trip to hell: some kid will break the rule, you can't enforce it, your authority is eroded, classroom norms are eroded. Ideally, you only make rules that benefit the classroom and that can be enforced. (In the real world, one deals with the administration, district/state requirements, etc., but that's another conversation.) Admittedly, nothing bad (?) will happen if a board game or TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) designer writes an unenforceable rule of that type.
For another angle on this: my household played Gloomhaven during 2020. The "your characters can't collaborate openly when deciding their moves, you must decide secretly and simultaneously" rule made my husband miserable. I finally told him, "Let's throw it out. The rule makes the game miserable for us. It's not going to break the game to throw it out (and so what if it did?). Isaac Childres, the game designer, isn't going to teleport into our living room, watch us play Gloomhaven 'wrong,' and yell at us for Doing It Wrong."
Listen, any game with enough of a playerbase is going to have hacks, mods, and house rules?
Monopoly? The Free Parking house rule.
Dwaves aren't allowed to dual-class? Someone's going to hack this. (AD&D 2nd ed.)
Female characters can't attain the 18/00 highest Strength stat? Someone's going to hack this. (AD&D some edition or other.)
Your game only allows advancement to Level 20? Someone's going to hack this. (AD&D 2nd ed.)
Paladins are only allowed to be Lawful Good? Someone's going to hack this. (AD&D 2nd ed.)
Red dragons are Always Evil? Someone's going to hack this. (AD&D 2nd ed.)
80% of this game's rules by volume are about combat but people want to play intrigue and courtly romance and not have fights at all? Someone's going to hack this. (Too many to list.)
This game requires you to pursue romantic relationships with other player characters for your character to progress? Someone's going to hack this. (Monsterhearts, the first edition. I believe the second edition amended this.)
This game takes place in fantasy feudal East Asia rather than future outer space Asia? Someone's going to hack this. (Legend of the Five Rings.)
It's not that establishing rules/norms for a game is without value, it's literally that you can establish those rules/norms based on your design goals and/or values, and also, you really literally have no power to teleport into the players' living room and make them stop Doing It Wrong.
Recently my household played Sidney Icarus's sci-fi narrative game Decaying Orbit (my review here), which is about telling the story of a doomed space station. While Icarus isn't restrictive about it in the written rules, it's pretty clear that this was intended as elegiac tragedy.
When it hit my household, it went straight to Hilarity with Murderous Sentient Cats. (That's my fault, but in general, my household is incapable of taking a serious/tragic/poetic game and NOT turning it into camp comedy.)
Jeremy Holcomb makes an interesting point regarding this in The White Box Essays on game design. There does not exist ANY written rules framework that can 100% protect your game from bad-faith players or bad-faith play. So you might as well proceed as though your rules will be interpreted in more-or-less good faith, and not waste pagecount trying to prevent, uh, murderous sentient cats; some creative player is going to think of something you could never have anticipated anyway.
In a situation like tournament chess among grandmasters, sure, there are referees and so on. But for most of us playing this kind of game recreationally in our living rooms? The game designer can't teleport into the living room and prevent us from hacking the game. And that's generally a good thing.
I had cause to be thinking about this when designing the forthcoming Ninefox Gambit TTRPG. A couple of the playtesters (THANK YOU!) came back with requested additions if possible: (a) a playable Liozh faction, (b) playable servitor characters, (c) playable voidmoth characters. I added (a) in an appendix and declined (b) and (c), mainly because I favor very focused designs; (b) and (c) would have required massively rejiggering the rules set and its intent. The game is about being a faction member and navigating your complicity: do you rebel? do you assimilate? do you burn the system down? do you try to reform it? My stance is that servitors and voidmoths are generally victims of the system, rather than being willingly complicit in it, so they don't fit the written rules for player characters.
But you know, I'm also aware that if anyone plays this game, someone's going to hack the rules for servitors, voidmoths, non-faction citizens, foreigners, whatever. That's not only fine, that's encouraged.
Honestly, my unpopular opinion is that if it's adults playing mutually consensually in the privacy of their living room in a reasonable way (e.g. without sacrificing gerbils), I don't care about the content of their campaign! Even if it's something that might horrify me! It's none of my business.
(Meanwhile, if what someone wants is "resistance against oppressors," I'd suggest starting with something else, like Liam Liwanag Burke's Dog Eat Dog.)
So, I may have committed a tiny TTRPG last year and then failed to remember to release it...
Your characters are investigators specializing in occult texts. Unfortunately, the texts fight back.
Cracktastic tiny 2-player epistolary TTRPG for anyone who delights in terribad fonts. :)
You can get it here for pay-what-you-want, including FREE.
Random art:
[a monochrome sketch of a teenage girl with a handgun firing the Chinese character for 'Heaven' and a hellspark in her right eye]
If you're wondering about the whitespace at the top compositionally, this was a fake cover image for a small project I was working on so I was leaving space for the "title." I like doing fake covers to motivate myself. :3
FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions)
What are you working on?
The same as before: drafting Lancers #2. I'm hoping to wrap up the rough draft in the next month or so, and then rest for a bit before first-pass revisions.
How's your health?
One day at a time, one day at a time.
What's one thing that you're reading right now?
I recently read Kaveh Bassiri's poetry chapbook 99 Names of Exile from Newfound and it knocked my socks off:
For example, from the prose poem "Alarm":
The answering machine wakes me with my father's summon: "They have taken your sister. We don't know where she is." He is talking to God again. A snapshot of him in a medical uniform watches over my apartment in San Jose. Our conversations have turned into product placements for war and revolution. Reports of celestial bodies contaminate the silent sky bridging over us. (30)
You can get it here.
What are you listening to lately?
I discovered Antti Martikainen's epic instrumental music recently. My favorite is "Wild Iron" (c'mon), but it's all wonderful. I love this music for writing to!
What's a game you're playing lately?
I recently played the visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club on the Switch. It's horror ('ware the content notes!) and I went in largely unspoiled other than having to click through a zillion "Are you SURE you consent to play this? Are you SURE you're old enough?" warnings. Really fun, although I have to say due to the nature of the storyline, this probably shouldn't be one's very second VN! (My first was the m/m romance VN Coming Out on Top, which I enjoyed a lot but in a completely different way—that one isn't horror.)
Who's an artist you're enjoying lately?
I recently picked up some comics and art books by Shilin Huang, and am really enjoying them, especially the pages that show the sketches, thumbnails, process stuff in general. I'm guessing the art style is manga-inspired? But I'm not an expert. Really beautiful and dynamic compositions.
What happened to The Candlevine Gardener and Other Stories?
I'd delisted it for a while for reasons that aren't worth getting into, but it's now available again on itch.io here. It's pay-what-you-want, including FREE. :) For the curious, this is a collection of flash fairy tales.
What is your favorite/most creative time of day?
I'm a slow starter with a completely messed up sleep schedule (I tend to be nocturnal). Despite caffeine, I'm only really awake and rolling in the afternoons/evenings. That said, there is something nice about waking up at 9 or 10 a.m. (early for me given that I sometimes don't fall asleep until 5 a.m.) and then getting all my work done for the day before noon! So it really varies.
I have a foxy question you haven't answered here!
Sure, please email deuceofgearsart@gmail.com and I'll get back to you!
So, last year when I was in South Korea for SIWF (Seoul International Writers' Festival), fellow guest/writer Naomi Kritzer, her husband, and I ventured to a well-run animal café/petting zoo in Hongdae (Hongik University district, downtown Seoul). There I met the beautiful young vixen Ruby!
