Last column I explained why I would not follow in RuneQuests path on how to handle action results. Before I work out my own approach I need to place a more fundamental question, though: What are results for? What do they represent and what's their function in the game system? The answer is actually quite simple: the result of an action (or unintended event) is either a change in the status quo or the avoidance of a change to the same. Which begs the question, what's the status quo?
Consider the next two situations: There's a storm going on; Character X is driving his car back home in the middle of the storm. The storm is an unintended event while what character X is doing is an action. In the context of an rpg both the event and the action happen in the setting and both are changes in the status quo (the storm is a change in weather patterns, there’s snow coming down, wind blowing, etc.; driving takes the character from point A to point B). This means that anything that happens in the setting changes the status quo.
Yet, the changes in the status quo that we have in mind when desiging a rpg system are not supposed to be just anything that happens. We are focusing on those changes that are meaningful from the perspective of the characters and that may influence their action as dictated by the players. Anything else is just interesting filler that has no impact on roleplay.
Furthermore we need to take into account that changes in the status quo may happen at two levels: The setting level and the game system level. In fact, the purpose of rpg rules is precisely to allow players to manage those changes that are meaningful in roleplaying terms. Yet the relationship between setting and system is not one-to-one.
For a start, not all changes that happen in the setting call for the intervention of game mechanics, in fact there are games that make a point of leaving whole possible sets of events freeform, without game mechanics to back them. This is especialy true about personality and psychological issues: just consider the never-ending discussion about the usefulness of intelectual or emotional stats.
On the other hand, game systems may include things that are there only for game purposes and that don’t belong to the setting. Experience points are an obvious example. Another is the many iterations of "action points", "stunt points" and similar devices. The bottom line is that when considering what are the relevant changes in the status quo we need to keep in mind that there is not one status quo, there are two in fact: The setting status quo and the game system status quo (the meta-setting level).
The most critical issue for any game system is thus to ensure that there is consistency between the two levels at which the game is played, and to ensure that the changes at one level have a correspondence with the changes at the other level. This matching is critical. If the game system has concepts that don’t have a correspondent at the setting level, those concepts are a needless complexity that either burdens the game, distorts the setting or is ignored by the players (remember the magic system in Middle Earth Role Playing?). If the setting has elements that are not represented in the system and that thus cannot be played "by the book", the players are left unguided.
Often the most enjoyable part of a game system are those nuggets where the game designer found the rules that match a particularly tricky setting (the examples I still enjoy the most are Call of Cthulhu's SAN, Prince Valiant's "heroes don't die, they just fall down" and Toon's "Illogical logic" rules).
Of course, the balance has to take into account the fact that ultimately rpgs are games played by real people. The key decider on the success of the matching is not the character in the setting, it's the player playing him and each player has his own tastes. A lot of players are more focused on the game system and the "gaming" than on the setting and its internal consistency. Others enjoy exactly the oposite.
Why all this babble? Because I need to define what aspects of the status quo are relevant in Rough Quests and how they must be handled in setting and in game system terms. I need to do it because what I decide will shape what the players can experience while playing the game. I'll start with the setting level because, as I said long ago in another column, I'm in the school of thought that defends that rules follow setting. But that's for next column.
For now let's try to specify a little more what status quo means in the context of a roleplaying game. Literaly "status quo" means "the current state": how things are now. In this sense what's on the character sheet is a presentation of the "status quo" of the character (provided the character sheet has updated data on him).
Yes, the data on the character sheet is part of the status quo of the game as a whole but our present concern is not the whole, but the part that is relevant for the game situation at hand, the one where the characters have to act now. There are plenty of things in the character sheet that may be relevant at this level but there are also many more that are not relevant at all. Our concern are the things that change in the short and medium term, in other words, the things that change in the course of the game session. So far in this column I didn't deal with these. I dealt with attributes, characteristics, experience, skills and other stats that are stable for the life of the character or, at least, for long periods in that life.
Let me provide some analogies: The part of the character sheet that contains the stable stats is the roleplaying equivalent of the balance sheet in a financial statement. The balance sheet is a valuable piece of information but it is not the core information for the management of the daily operations of a business. The manager is concerned with other data, information that reflects short term changes that have a direct impact in his managerial decisions, things like a cash flow statement, for instance.
Likewise any of us may like to have a balance of all our assets and liabilities but in daily life what we want to know is how much we have in our bank account, how muck we have in our pocket, how much food is there in the fridge and whether the car has petrol or not because this is what tells us if we need to go to the supermarket to buy more pizza and beer or if we can stop at the rpg store to buy that book we have been longing for the last couple of weeks.
When I think about the status quo I'm thinking about the roleplaying equivalents of such information. My point of view is that action resolution is all about changes to the descriptors of this short term concerns, descriptors that are relevant in the context of the setting and that are represented in the game system. Neeldess to say, just like in accounting there must be a clear relation between the short term concerns and the long term shape of the company, in roleplaying there must be a functional linkage between the stable stats and the changing status quo descriptors. It this set of issues that will be at the core of the coming columns.
