Interstellar Adventures

So: I do not like the idea of TTRPGs making formal mechanics designed to incentivise ethical play.

But, to be honest, I do not like the idea of any single game pushing any particular formal mechanics about ethical play at all.

So here I am, trying to think through the reasons why, and proposing a solution. (Sort of. A procedure, really.)

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Assumptions:

1.

Some genres of game resist ethical play. A grand strategy game dehumanises people into census data. The fun of a shooter is violence. This is truest in videogames, but applies to tabletop games also.

Games can question their own ethics, to an extent. Terra Nil is an anti-city-builder. But it is a management game at heart, so may elide critiques of "efficiency = virtue".

Not all games should try to design for ethical play. I believe games that incentivise "bad" behaviour have a lot to teach us about those behaviours, if you approach them with eyes open.

2.

The systems that currently govern our real lives are terrible: oligarchy, profit motive; patriarchy, nation-states, ethno-centrisms. They fuel our problems: class and sectarian strife, destruction of climate and people, spiritual desertification.

They are so total that the aspiration to ethical behaviour is subsumed by their logics. See: social enterprise; corpos and occupying forces flying rainbow flags; etc.

Nowadays, when I hear "ethical", I don't hear "we remember to be decent". I hear "we must work to be better". Good ethics is radical transformation.

3.

If a videogame shooter crosses a line for you, your only real response is to stop playing. This is true for other mechanically-bounded games, like CCGs or boardgames.

In TTRPGs, players have the innate capability to act as their own referees. (even in GM-ed games adjudications are / should be by consensus.) If you don't like certain aspects of a game, you could avoid it---but also you could change it.

Only in TTRPGs can you ditch basic rules of the game and keep playing.

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So:

D&D's rules are an engine for accumulation: more levels, more power, more stuff, more numbers going up.

If you build a subsystem in D&D for egalitarian action, but have to quantify it in ways legible to the game's other mechanical parts---what does that mean? Is your radical aspiration feeding into / providing cover for the game's underlying logics of accumulation?

At the very least it feels unsatisfactory---"non-representative of what critique / revolution entails as a rupture," to quote Marcia, in conversations we've been having around this subject, over on Discord.

How do we imagine and represent rupture, to the extent that the word "revolution" evokes?

My proposal: we rupture the game.

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How To Play The Revolution

Over the course of play, your player-characters have decided to begin a revolution:

An armed struggle against an invader; overturning a feudal hierarchy; a community-wide decision to abandon the silver standard.

So:

Toss out your rule book and sheets.

And then:

Keep playing.

You already know who your characters are: how they prefer to act; what they are capable of; how well they might do at certain tasks; what their context is. You and your group are quite capable of improv-ing what happens next.

Of course, this might be unsatisfactory; you are here to play a TTRPG, after all. Structures are fun. Therefore:

Decide what the rules of your game will be, going forward.

Which rules you want to keep. Which you want to discard. Jury-rig different bits from different games. Shoe-horn a tarot deck into a map-making game---play that. Be as comprehensive or as freeform as you like. Patchwork and house-rule the mechanics of your new reality.

The god designer will not lead you to the revolution. You broke the tyranny of their design. You will lead yourself. You, as a group, together. The revolution is DIY.

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Notes:

This is mostly a thought experiment into a personal obsession. I am genuinely tempted to write a ruleset just so I can stick the above bit into it as a codified procedure.

I am tickled to imagine how the way this works may mirror the ways revolutions have played out in history.

A group might already have alternative ruleset in mind, that they want to replace the old ruleset with wholesale. A vanguard for their preferred system.

Things could happen piecemeal, progressively. Abandon fiat currency and a game's equipment price list. Adopt pacifism and replace the combat system with an alternative resolution mechanic. As contradictions pile up, do you continue, or revert?

Discover that the shift is too uncomfortable, too unpredictable, and default back to more familiar rules. The old order reacting, reasserting itself.

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I keep returning to this damn idea, of players crossing thresholds between rulesets through the course of play. The Revolution is a rupture of ethical reality like Faerie or the Zone is a rupture in geography.

But writing all this down is primarily spurred by this post from Sofinho talking about his game PARIAH and the idea that "switching games/systems mid-session" is an opportunity to explore different lives and ethics:

Granted this is not an original conceit (I'm not claiming to have done anything not already explored by Plato or Zhuangzi) but I think it's a fun possibility to present to your players: dropping into a parallel nightmare realm where their characters can lead different lives and chase different goals.

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Jay Dragon tells me she is already exploring this idea in a new game, Seven Part Pact:

"the game mechanics are downright oppressive but also present the capacity to sunder them utterly, so the only way to behave ethically is to reject the rules of the game and build something new."

VINDICATION! If other designers are also thinking along these lines this means the idea isn't dumb and I'm not alone!

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( Images:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-23-fronts-and-generals.1497106/

https://www.thestranger.com/race/2017/04/05/25059127/if-you-give-a-cop-a-pepsi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames

https://nobonzo.com/

Influential RPG adventure writer, artist, and video game creator Jennell Jaquays has died.

She was a founder of the Dungeoneer zine before it was sold to Judges Guild. Her D&D adventures Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia became classics, often studied as examples of adventure design. She also wrote and illustrated for TSR, Metagaming, Steve Jackson Games, and many other publishers. Her video game career included developing many of Coleco's titles in the 1980s and level design for the Quake sequels at id Software in the 90s, and she co-founded the SMU Guildhall video game program.

I'm so proud of the work we've done on Overpowered V3 (our first solo strategy game).

This new version is much more streamlined, far more satisfying, and compatible with even more adventures. Speedrun your favorite RPG modules FOR FREE!

Laserburn, sci-fi combat rules by Bryan Ansell (Tabletop Games, 1980), a miniature skirmish game intended for 15mm figures, 12-20 per side. (Edit to add: Cover art by Tony Yates)

Let's take Dungeons & Dragons as a popular example. Why does the common GM advice for D&D suck so much? The rules essentialist would argue that it's an inevitable outgrowth of some flaw in the structure of its mechanics (and certainly there are things that the mechanics of D&D could do differently, but that's a topic for another time), but that's overlooking a rather more obvious culprit.

Like many of its contemporaries, D&D often suffers from a culture of play that views one's choice of ruleset as an identity, and consequently tends to cast the GM as an evangelist whose responsibility is first and foremost to maximise the number of people playing D&D, and only secondarily to have a good time – a tendency that's only exacerbated by the fact that D&D is currently owned by the same multinational corporation that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony, and thus has a top-down editorial mandate to seek total market capture.

The upshot is that received wisdom about how to run Dungeons & Dragons – both the stuff that's communicated informally from player to player and the stuff that's printed in the official rulebooks – is obliged to take any solution that might result in fewer people playing D&D off the table. Fundamental disagreements about what a tabletop RPG is and how to engage with one have to be reframed as quirky aesthetic preferences which can be mollified by playing a different character class or buying the right supplement; or, failing that, as misbehaviour which it's the GM's responsibility to manage. Even intractable problems like a player actively disliking the game's framework of play get swept under the rug: it's better to insulate them from the stuff they don't care for by having the GM do all the heavy lifting than it is for them not to play at all. When maximising the number of people playing D&D becomes the goal, the GM necessarily becomes a babysitter.

Let's take a look at a part of generating Settlements:

The first step is figuring out how big the Settlement is by rolling 1d6. You'll probably notice that there's a result for if you roll a seven or higher. Now, unless you have a very special d6, you're not gonna get that result.

So what's the point of putting that result there in the first place? Well, how I'd interpret it at the table is that these City-States exist, but you're not going to be encountering them randomly while exploring the Wastes. Maybe there's another way to travel to these fabled City-States? Maybe that turns into the foundation for an adventure. Maybe the table actually decides that City-States don't exist anymore; something wiped them off the map. Maybe the table has come up with a way to get a bonus to that d6 roll based on the rulings they've been establishing. It could mean any number of things!

I think this works in this sort of game, partially because the rules are relatively minimal. And in a more minimal ruleset, sometimes you have to slow down and read between the lines and try and come to your own conclusions on how things work. This is, to me, very different from something being incomplete, but it could be a fine line.

If this were something like a Forged in the Dark game, this sort of absence might feel more like an oversight, but in the sorta-OSR sphere, expectations are a little different. It's interesting to think about.

The other example of this sort of idea crops up in the travel rules. There's three options for traveling the Wastes; by foot, by steam-crawler, and by airship.

Here are the rules for airship travel:

That's it. You know from reading that line that airships exist and people can use them to travel. But for whatever reason, getting passage on them is so far out of reach of the PCs that it may as well be impossible. It reveals something about the game's world, and how it operates.

Just like the City-State rule, airship travel could also spark adventures at the table. What would it take to get a ticket for an airship? What kind of people travel by airship?