Tales from the Rocket House
This has been of particular interest to me lately, as I have been working on distilling the Tarafore System down to its barest essence, seeing how much I can pare it down and have it still be the Tarafore System. I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve been able to cut it down, and how short I’ve been able to make the core rules document.
But I’ve also been surprised at how much “unwritten” material is absolutely vital. By “unwritten,” I mean two things: reasons why certain decisions were made, and how to change things if you want to make things run differently (like using exploding d6’s instead of d10’s), and, more importantly, more detailed description of how to run the game, how to use the system, what the goals of the game are.
Even though I can pare the mechanical description down to four pages pretty easily (central mechanics, defining the traits and trait levels, combat, and character creation), those documents are really only useful for someone who already knows what they’re doing.
But that is a tale for another column (perhaps next month?). This month, we look at the nature of mechanics themselves.
In the Beginning?
I’ve been reading up on the “Old School Renaissance,” and some of the posts of old-school players seem to indicate that they played Immersive Stance pretty heavily, although I would argue that most of the GMing styles were Gamist, rather than Simulationist.Now, we’re looking at a limited set of game types, essentially the old school dungeon crawl, but players often searched rooms through conversation, did virtually all social interactions through conversation, and so on. There was little separation between player and character, with the only real differences being in the “wargamey” stats the characters had (their combat abilities, saving throws, equipment, and magic).
You might call this Gamist-Immersive Roleplaying, in which the player’s skills are challenged, and anything that can be handled through direct interaction is. The dice are just there to handle things that you can’t easily talk out (like combat).
It’s interesting to see how deep the immersive-stance roots go.
Game Mechanics and RPG Theory
While both the r.g.f.a Threefold model and Ron Edwards’ GNS model attempt to describe player and GM decision making processes, and do not directly refer to game mechanics, this has always been at best a partial truth. RPG theory arose out of “GURPS vs. D&D” flamewars in rec.games.rpg.misc that got “banished” to rec.games.frp.advocacy (that’s what advocacy groups were used for in the early days, as dumping-grounds for flamewars). Within r.g.f.a, people started asking questions about why people liked the games they liked, and formulating theories about play styles … but those theories arose out of game system flame wars. “GURPS vs. D&D” was the Mitochondrial Eve of roleplaying theory. And there has never been a time when theory and game mechanics were really, truly separate.And so I feel it is not only appropriate, but necessary, that I address the kinds of mechanics that can aid or inhibit Simulationist-Immersive Roleplaying.
In Simulationist-Immersive Roleplaying, the game system serves as the physics of the game world.
If something can’t happen in the mechanics, it won’t happen in play, period. That should be obvious. It should also be obvious that the players will notice this. If the mechanics return results that are ridiculous, jarring, or inconsistent, the players will notice.
Immersive-Stance players will notice everything their characters notice, clearly. But the opposite is also true: the players’ perceptions can’t help but bleed back into the character. If asked to “well, pretend it works like the real world, even though the mechanics say the opposite,” the players may well go along, but their immersive stance and their enjoyment may be compromised.
For example: in some games, jumping off a fifth story building causes only minor injuries. So, why not jump off, if it’s the only way to catch the bad guy? Clearly, no sane person would do that because a five story drop is really dangerous. But if a (completely human, non-superhero) character can shrug it off, it drags the player right out of the immersive stance.
Things can go in the other direction, if things are too deadly. Three words: cats. versus. commoners.
The Mechanics Themselves
Even putting aside immersion-breaking meta-mechanics like Hero Points, the game system itself can either be a help or a hindrance for immersive players. The game mechanics should be simple enough to allow the players to stay in character and still act, but not so simple as to need constant interpretation of the results. To use extreme examples, Phoenix Command will be too complex for most players to stay immersed, while FU is too simple.It isn’t just a matter of resolution mechanics; a game with too many tactical options can constantly drag the player out of character unless those tactical options map very closely to things that the character herself can quickly conceptualize (‘called shots’ to the head or hand or leg are one thing, ‘I’ll take -3 to hit, add +2 of it to my defense, and +1 to my initiative,’ is quite another).
On the other hand, game mechanics should have realistic enough outcomes that the things that can happen according to the dice make sense from the perspective of the character. If there is no way that any normal handheld weapon will kill a PC in one shot, or even three or four shots, then that PC will have very different perceptions of what violence is than the player – or the player will have to break character and “play scared,” reacting as if an impossible outcome were possible. Likewise, holding someone at gunpoint is kind of useless if the gun does “2d6 damage” versus 40 hit points.
If I talk at length about combat systems, it’s because violence is so often sanitized and comic-book-ized in RPGs, and that makes immersion/deep-IC virtually difficult, unless the PC is playing a superhero (at which the combat system would still need to treat normal people as reasonably fragile. It’s fine if that handgun can’t kill Thor, or even Spider Man, but if it takes four shots, minimum, to kill Aunt May, there’s a problem). The system doesn’t need to have a high likelihood of instant death, because having to switch characters rapidly leads to disengagement. But the chance needs to be there.
Detail Optional
That said, the combat system can be either abstract or detailed. You don’t need 100 different entries on handguns, with slight differentiations for each model, but you can have that if you want. A lot of simulationist-oriented roleplaying games to go into great detail, both in the mechanics and the gear descriptions (GURPS being the famous example).A couple of handgun entries (maybe one for concealment guns, one for full-sized handguns, and either separate entries for snub nosed and full sized revolvers, or notations in the concealment and full sized entries for the differences between revolvers and pistols) will do, so long as those handguns have the capacity to kill a human in one shot, aren’t wands of death that kill in one hit all of the time, and have reasonable ranges (and the ranges can be abstract, so long as concealment pistols have shorter ranges than full sized pistols, which in turn have much shorter ranges than rifles).
I personally like decoupling stopping power (or “stun”) from wounding, because that allows a badly hurt character to keep coming, even while in the process of bleeding out. This has happened enough in real life that police-issue .38 caliber round-nose lead bullets were given the name “widow makers,” not because they made the criminals’ wives into widows, but because they could deliver an eventually-fatal wound to a perpetrator without incapacitating him, giving him time to kill the man who shot him. It was the police spouses who were being widowed because of the rounds’ poor performance, even though the criminals often died of their injuries later on. Mortally wounded people who continue fighting appear in medieval and ancient writings as well, and although those are somewhat fictionalized or mythologized, it’s pretty clear the same thing can happen with ancient weapons.
Balancing simplicity with credibility (I really hate to use the word “realism”) allows for a pretty wide range of crunchiness (I’ll discuss this in more detail in a future column). Our group has shown a preference for a medium-low level of crunch. Obviously, other groups will have different preferences.
So, How DO You Do Social Mechanics?
Well, this is a tough one. To some degree, I’m tempted to use the OD&D method, which is to just leave them out altogether. However, I don’t think that’s necessarily the best option. I have social-oriented Traits, and they can be used for various Performance Tests and Opposed Tests like any other Trait … so that’s available.But there will be no “social combat system” with tactical rhetorical maneuvers, Points to spend, and enforced outcomes. I’ve never met anyone who could play Immersively when one of those things was running; it’s like trying to practice piano six feet from a running jackhammer.
The advice I have in this situation is for the GM to have copies of the PCs’ character sheets, and to run everything conversationally, but keep an eye on the respective characters’ social Traits (Negotiate, Deceit vs. Human Perception, etc…), possibly even rolling some dice in secret. Use those numbers to color the NPCs’ reactions, but don’t just resolve things with a roll or series of rolls unless you’re looking to save time and bypass the long conversation.
Summing Up
Looking back at my ramblings, I think the following principles are most important:1) The game system is the game world’s physics. Make sure the results the characters (and thus the players) are seeing make sense. If players know their characters can’t be killed in one shot by anything less than an anti-tank gun, that will either greatly affect how those characters act, and/or greatly distract immersive-stance players, who have to pretend it isn’t true.
2) The mechanical complexity (or ‘weight’ of the system) should be comfortable to the group, so that mechanical resolution flows quickly and does not drag the players out of immersion. Gimmick mechanics are generally a poor fit.
3) Too many tactical options can drag a player out of immersive stance as quickly as spending FATE points. Some tactical options are fine, so long as they are things the character would think of or understand, and so long as they don’t draw the player’s attention out of the character’s mindset.
4) Abstraction is fine, especially in gear write-ups. Whether you have a dozen assault rifle write-ups or one is a matter of taste, orthogonal to Simulationist-Immersive Roleplaying.
5) Anything that can be handled through conversation probably should be, but it never hurts to let the characters’ Trait numbers guide that conversation.
