Just Some Rad Tabletop

Permission granted to archive offsite for posterity. Permission granted to share with credit to author Julian Coker, as well as to remix however you choose.

So, to be clear, WTF was written mostly in a spirit of mischief.

People spent all this time on rpg.net debating whether my work was easy or impossible to comprehend, and if it was impossible, whether that was because I was a bad writer, putting on airs, or simply had it out for them personally.

And I felt like ...

It is very easy for a writer whose clarity is a matter of debate to start hedging every paragraph with extra words to head off misunderstandings. This complicates the text and increases its length. People become confused by the complexity. In the extra words, they find new opportunities to become lost. They wail about how a bad writer putting on airs has set out to confuse them.

I did not want that kind of thing to happen to me.

So in good part WTF was me playing directly into that reputation. It was self-parody, and a deliberate effort not to be approachable, and most of all the decadent-feeling pleasure of writing the kind of stuff that I enjoy writing most without putting in the work to get there in a grounded fashion.

The opening line, for instance, "reality is an illusion."

It was a very Jenna Moran line, and I'm sure it didn't surprise a single critic or fan. But normally I'd be using it to explain something. Normally, I would never dare to write that in a book for people to read if the point weren't---

"The reason this mechanic or setting element doesn't treat reality as solid is that this game is leaning on the known flaws in the commonsense picture of reality. The reason this thing that you're reading works is because the reality we live in is arguably a construct of our minds, arguably a construct of our senses. This phenomenon I want to write about lives between that and reality."

But occasionally you'd get posts from people who thought I was just babbling about half-understood metaphysics (I'll cop to the half-understood part, but not to the babbling) in some kind of fugue, or that perhaps I was throwing stuff like that in to seem smart. People who'd expect me to just walk up to them, if I ever met them in real life, look them in the eye, and say "Reality is an illusion. Please give me a shiny brass apple."

And that given, starting the intro like that was a form of play for me. Every piece of the introduction was the kind of thing I might say, but instead of assembling it to get to or support a point, I just wrote it to tease.

**

The core conceit of the game is that fatalists concern themselves with setting; theurgists with rules; wishers with play.

The core joke of the game was that settings do not exist. That rules are dead. That play has no intrinsic relationship to the text.

That's not terribly deep.

It's actually obvious.

... but it's also vexatious and the more traditional one's vision of play, the more elaborately developed one's thoughts on traditional play, the more it's an annoyingly pedantic observation that has no place in the game.

That's why I found it hilarious to center it in the game and make it inextricable. It's not that my vision of gaming is avant garde. I'm traditional enough that I don't have an answer to all of this either. But for exactly that reason having those awkward truths buzzing like tiny little saws in the heart of the game tickled me to death.

(As saws do.)

**

I don't know whether I started writing an unapproachable self-parody first and stumbled into the splats early on, or if I thought of the WTF triad first and decided it wouldn't work if I took myself at all seriously when I wrote.

But that was the intended heart of the game:

A section on fatalism, or, being expert on the lore and setting of the game, which fundamentally does nothing because the setting does not really exist and has no power to make the rules or the process of play do anything. (At the time people usually talked about this in terms of system-setting mismatch, with the idea that a system is "supposed" to produce setting-compatible play.)

A section on theurgy, on knowing how to manipulate the rules, which fundamentally operates on a higher level than setting but also fundamentally does nothing because players can ignore the rules. And,

a section on harmony/wishing, on the actual play of the game. I am deeply suspicious towards harmony but my thoughts here were mostly less interesting. Taking the premise seriously meant that good play had to create a good game. There was space to poke at what exactly "good play" is, and the gap between play and actual life, and the way that high harmony numbers on a character sheet have nothing to do with being a good player .. but because I was writing in a spirit of mischief and not cynicism, i couldn't go anywhere near as hard.

**

The attributes section was a bit of a hack. The whole creatures/law/self stuff. I mean, it was fine. But it wasn't inspired.

I did not want to get mired down in a game I was writing for fun, so I could not spend too long on alternatives. It was fine.

The breakdown of Truth, Valence, and Mechanical Support for gifts reiterated the premise. It was kind of weak, too, and I'm not actually sure why, because the premise is strong and was an interesting thing to write at the time.

Still: a bit weak.

**

We arrive, then, at a discussion of what it means to roll Knowledge. (Or, "fatalism.")

This discussion had two key questions to answer:

"what does it mean to succeed at knowing the setting?" ... it means being "right," which will never matter again.

"when can I attempt to be right?" ... the setting chapter of an RPG is probably not the right part of the book to ask?

That last answer was comparatively weak too, I think, because I don't think I'd realized yet that part of the joke was that even the best fatalists can only ever think they know the setting.

Like, the real world equivalent to fatalism includes being a natural scientist who spends your whole life studying the world, but it also includes being the kind of person who is unshakeably confident that they know what's what and does not.

I didn't systematically embed that idea in the game. It just crept in here and there because I am personally heavily influenced by knowing that most people who think they know what's what, don't.

(Do I think I know what's what? ... uh, moving on ...)

There is something interesting in the idea of a setting that does tell you when you get to be right about it, and I could have maybe done more with that instead of just dismissing the question.

... but also, like, even then, it's just setting content. Even if the setting features the concept that those who know the word "style" are correct about things in the world, regardless of whether they're in that world or, e.g., playing outside it, it's still all just ... words. Just a statement about the setting.

Dead words, like, extra-dead words, deader than dead words we'll talk about later, telling us nothing at all.

**

The "planets and stars" bit is one of my favorite things.

It's been too long. I can only speculate as to what was going on there. Part of it was that it was already a trope that every RPG has its "what is an RPG?" section. And part of it was that resolute desire to lean heavily into some combination of "me, cranked to 11" and "the kind of thing some people think I write."

Most of all, I think (but I don't know for sure), I was trying to explain how fatalism works, how you come to know about a setting, how to come to know about a setting, because that was both an important part of the fatalism section of the book and because the idea of explaining that was hilarious, and like---

Telling people how they learn about a setting as an essay seems kind of laborious, but breaking it down into bite-sized bits and adding little diagrams made it fun.'

Or at least fun for me!

The only things I specifically remember about this part of the book is that the talk about prameya and danda was deliberately unnecessary and that having "RIGHT" not fit properly in the GM star made me laugh. Because there is this phenomenon that happens (less these days, and much less in indie games, but even there and now) where a GM tries to escalate from running the game to being an authority, and from being an authority to being right, and I enjoy laughing at that because it's the same thing as every other attempt to claim authority by planting a flag somewhere and claim correctness by having authority.

I am not actually particularly bothered about GMs who do this; the only GM I've ever had who did this is a friend and ran a fun game. But, I am a tiny bit infuriated sometimes by people who do this in more serious contexts and it kind of bleeds through?

The point is, ultimately, while some of the later diagrams got a bit wacky, these diagrams, the ones in the fatalism section, are mostly just me being a bit over the top and having fun with it while presenting more or less accurate concepts.

**

The setting ...

It's a little embarrassing, I think.

So you have Tin 'An, this city of aristocratic vampires* and trains at the center of the world, metaphorically sucking the life out of the world by the roads, surrounded by surrounded by an ever-poorer, ever-less-real, ever-less-habitable periphery. And I could be wrong, but I don't think I knew I was talking about London, much less the whole concept cluster of empire, colonialism, capitalism, the industrial revolution, and the West.

That may be part of why the question of "is the rule of law important here?" is so anemic, though honestly most of that is that I keep reifying personal traumas and large-scale cultural horrors as jerks on thrones (in my games) and then not knowing what someone's supposed to do about them; the normal solutions to a jerk on a throne don't actually address trauma or large-scale cultural horrors at all!

Moving outwards a bit, you have the bit I'm actually embarrassed about, the Savage Lands. I'm about 90% sure I called them that because the local hegemony does and that a core point of that bit is that that hegemony doesn't really know what it's talking about ...

But I still walked into a couple ugly tropes and trying to salvage them by changing the arc of the story was a bit like painstakingly sieving a sick person's sneeze out of soup.

It is correct that the PCs should interact at this stage of the story with a nomadic culture, a difficult environment, and possibly the difficult choices that environment forces, so probably the fix is just starting from a personal or nautical metaphor?

I have nothing to say on the fairies, really. The writeup is not really inspired but it basically works.

Procedurally, I'm pretty sure I scribbled very loose notes on the setting in the first draft and then came back later to fill them in after writing the story stuff later. Not totally sure, though.

I like the morally fraught sixth cardinal direction, beith. It broke down an assumption, made no practical sense (which fit my goals for the project), and is just kind of cool.

But mostly it was just a silly little thing.

And that's the fatalist book!

**

In the initial vision for the game, I didn't have an amazing core joke for theurgy like I did for fatalism.

Here's the best I've got:

Once upon a time, Jenna came upon a player living alone in the forest. "Have you read the rules?" she asked. "Every last one!" the player affirmed. "... but, you don't have a copy of the game?" The player looked left. The player looked right. "There's no rule," the player said, "that says that's required."

**

Many people who play RPGs, particularly traditional RPGs, believe in a special extra rule, "rule zero," that they can bring into play if the rules they have do not satisfy them. That rule, originally coined by Isaac Asimov, of course being:

A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Hypothetically, this "rule zero" overrides all the other rules and tells you, basically, that you don't need to abide by them if you don't think you should.

See, the thing is:

Rules are very bad at telling you when to apply rules, because if you don't apply the rules the rules don't apply.

Rules are very bad at telling you how the rules should be read. (ibid)

In the final analysis, rules are pretty much meaningless and you couldn't play by the rules even if you tried really hard.

That's the joke.

It's a pretty solid joke if you go by humor content, honestly. It's just that you have to do all that long and awkward build-up to get there, so the humor per minute is low.

This is one reason why the basic rules on rolling theurgy are so incredibly fussy about when to roll theurgy, and yet in the final analysis jut kind of ... punt?

The other reason is that the idea of players who love the rules and want to use the rules winding up in conflict with the GM because they think a given rule, or rules-mediated play, is appropriate right then and the GM doesn't think it's appropriate right then ... that was, and probably still is, a vibrant RPG culture meme.

And, like, that goes back to the same thing, doesn't it?

Does a given rule apply right now? What does it say happens? What if someone else doesn't think so?

When I was a kid I wrote stories about people from the stories coming out and resolving certain stuff in my life. This did not happen, presumably because of a hardline GM declaring that I couldn't apply my "this happens next" writing ability to the real world even if that was the thing that happened next.

**

This is catnip to me.

You have to understand. The impossibility of describing the world with any sort of formal system is catnip to me. The fact that no matter how many words we throw at things they just slip around above the glassy surface of reality is just ... like ... chef's kiss.

Though in fact chef kisses probably do not actually reach reality either.

**

So, in sum, the rules don't matter, and can't matter, and that's why WTF never actually says how to make a non-fatalism/theurgy/wishing dice roll, and that's also why when I had to write the actual rules---

You know, the rules that weren't the higher-level how to use the rules stuff you see theurgists and arguably the other two types doing---

I couldn't exactly?

Like, how could I write all that stuff about the futility of rules---mostly in this post, but it was all there in WTF in one form or another---and then provide a bunch of rules that tell you to do certain things, or tell you how to do certain things?

So I provided the rules toys instead.

Since the rules cannot possibly have any actual power, they are clearly fun things to look at and fidget with, instead.

(Sometimes people suggest that I write my games more for people to read than to play, which is a little silly, because reading is what you do with text. I don't have the publishing resources to add a bunch of buttons and things to spin and mechanisms to slide the text around, much less wheels to roll around the book with and have it race other games.

I haven't reread the wishing section yet, but, frankly, given the trend here with the setting and rules, I'm guessing we're going to find out that playing an RPG is impossible anyway.)

**

The details of the rules donuts sort of depress me.

Like, I grew up on RPGs, so my foundational understanding of RPGs features this assumption that the tables and systems and game content matters.

... but any time I dig down under the hood there's just "satisfy yourself," "satisfy the GM," and various non-terminal nodes like "change some numbers, but you can't end the process with that."

It's really, as a designer, quite bleak.

The idea of creating persistent rules and setting objects with mathematical properties sounds like a great possible alternative, except that there's no such thing as a persistent rules or setting object.

The idea of injecting information patterns into a player-featuring situation and effectuating miscellaneous results through various feedback cycles is ... well ... possible, and achieves the desired objective, but is not exactly as simple as I may have just made it sound.

So you wind up with, like,

tactical toy: the player says something. Mechanics do whatever. The Weaver (GM) describes a result.

outcome toy: the player says something. Then they dance for the GM in some fashion or other in the hopes of satisfying them. The Weaver (GM) describes the result.

... so depressing!

**

What if We Disagree About Whether I Can Make a Harmony Roll? How are they planning to stop you?

**

And here we are at the wishing book. It's actually pretty fun, so when I thought it wound up weak I must have been thinking of a really early draft?

I don't know.

We're at the wishing book, and reading what's ... well, one of the better lines, but also very mechanically solid.

How are they planning to stop you?

At its base, see, a Harmony roll is "here's how I think we should play."

The text pretends that fatalism is about "what is." That theurgy is about "what should be." That wishing is about "what the text supports."

But if you dig a little deeper, fatalism is about the setting. Theurgy about the rules. And wishing/Harmony is about what you think you're supposed to be doing there at the table.

What if someone thinks you don't have a voice in that? That you don't get to contribute to deciding what you're doing there at the table? Uh ...

**

What if I am Physically Prevented from Rolling?

Please your captors in whatever fashion your conscience can bear until you find an opportunity to escape.

**

I think that's a good mechanic, anyway---though I'm being a little WTF-style silly calling it a mechanic:

Let's just say that nobody has any game-mediated authority to tell you anything until you are already playing, which only happens once you decide how that works and should work.

**

The fact that Harmony touches on actual player experience and not just game stuff is why the section on how to roll Harmony ends like it does.

See, there was this one loophole left after all the rules were set up. What if someone disagrees with the idea that they don't have rules-mediated authority yet, and tries to consult the rules to decide how others play?

And like ...

It's pretty obvious, even if we hadn't already talked it through, that dead rules are fundamentally unable to exert control over living play.

Except uh

That's text. You can look up a few lines and it's there. Text.

"Dead rules are fundamentally unable to exert control over living play."

That's a dead rule, you know. Right there. On its own.

Maybe that exact formulation isn't, being part of a tumblr post, but like ...

In the book, which covers the same concept, it's part of the text of the harmony rules. Which, obviously, being text, being rules, can't tell you how to play.

That's what I mean when I call this a loophole:

As obvious and absolute and important as it is, that play overrides rules---

It's impossible to tell someone that in any meaningful way. They have to experience it for themselves.

If they're, like, a rock or something, they won't get it at all!

Why does play override rules? What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to a person? What does it mean to experience the world, instead of just being a mechanism mindlessly affecting to consciousness?

The answer is not found in the mechanism but the consciousness.

Way up above, I said that "reality is an illusion" is exactly the kind of thing I write, but that I wouldn't usually let myself write that without having a reason. That's what's happening now:

I am writing about consciousness now, I am having to write about consciousness now, even though it's ridiculous to bring that into a discussion of games, because actually being there and experiencing the moment is how actual play diverges from the structure of the rules.

I checked before posting and philosophers still hadn't adequately explained what it is to actually be there.

(Or at least Google's AI results didn't think so, and like, if anyone ever does figure out how to bootstrap from formal systems to consciousness you'd assume generative AI would be the first thing to know.)

It's a punchline of its own, but an RPG fundamentally has to answer the question of what reality is and what we're all doing here and the way we should be living or it's basically just cadaveric spasms;

And so, the Harmony rules end with a koan.

**

UPDATE: