I firmly believe there is a lot of value in reading a varied palette of role-playing games. I know some people will say plays the thing and reading isn’t where it’s at, but I disagree. I’m not discounting the value of actually playing, but reading itself has immense value alone as it’s entirely possible to ‘just play’ and never really encounter the design philosophy of the game and how the ‘understanding of the game’ is described in the book.
Reading lots of role-playing games enriches your understanding of how the medium can be constructed, described and framed, which is powerful.
The usual disclaimer applies to this blog; you can add a ‘for me’ to what I discuss here.
Role-Playing As A Conversation
I’ve recently been engaging with some Forged in the Dark and Powered By The Apocalypse games. While I’ve found myself comparing the two engines and also laying down how I see certain elements of Forged in the Dark being executed (interestingly, how free play should be viewed, which is related to ‘the conversation’ we get into here), the process has also done something else.
It has enhanced my role-playing game vocabulary.
Like many things, it’s not that it has introduced something I’ve not been doing; it gives you a way to articulate it. This new element to my vocabulary is on a scale of me encountering the term fiction first. It’s been a while since I’ve had a significant addition to my gaming vocabulary.
What am I talking about? The idea that play in a role-playing game is an ongoing conversation.
This is exactly what our best campaigns feel like. They are an ongoing conversation between the ‘GM’ and the ‘Players’, the dividing line not being the largest, in which events unfold, interesting things are added to the fabric of the game, scenes are played out, and the individuals and the rules are actively enriching the conversation to make it more enthralling.
These rich conversations in our games are how we used to do world-building!
I am down with the concept of role-playing games playing out as a conversation, and it’s all important – you should cherish it and make sure it’s interesting, involving and engaging. It should be the one thing everyone at the table, and all the tools you choose to implement are designed to enhance. You should not allow it to wither and die.
And this brings us to something I have found hard to describe and have made numerous attempts at.
The Actual Reason
Let’s face it: I’ve been circling an issue I’ve tried to describe in numerous ways. I don’t believe I’ve been wrong, but I have not found the best way to articulate it. I’ve hedged around it in my take on the challenges of online play, the concept of efficient GM advice being the key point here and dulled signals.
When I talk about the above two things, am I saying they are contributing to disrupting the quality and cutting across the concept of role-playing as rich conversation?
I’ve also discussed it in The Importance of Why and what can get in the way of layering the game with meaningful decisions and relationships. While I didn’t say it in the article, where do you think all this meaning is? In the damned conversation. I even talk about how information, understanding the what, the opportunity for great decisions and the important why interact to have positive and negative impacts.
I am talking about the quality of the conversation.
Across several articles expressing how gaming experiences deliver for me to different degrees, I’ve been trying to articulate that the conversation, the actual critical element of the game, is being disrupted, smothered or, at best, made harder to engage with and enrich.
Smothering The Conversation
I believe the difference between something average and great is the quality of the game as a conversation. The irony is that applying many modern tools, techniques and advice when applied in a certain way damages the critical success of this rich and layered ongoing conversation.
So, what are these things that smother the conversation? We can list some of them. None of these things has to damage the conversation (they’re supposed to facilitate it), but it’s becoming clear to me that they definitely can, depending on how they are utilised in running a game.
The process of play can severely squeeze out the conversation. Games with a significant, formalised process in their play model can supplant the conversation. They are meant to support and facilitate it but can squeeze it out and replace it. You can see this happening sometimes in Forged in the Dark games, with the rich conversation shrinking to get to the next heist, and then when you are in the heist, crazy events happen, but sometimes there is very little rich, meaningful conversation. The great thing about heists in actual fiction is the conversation between the characters, and the meaningful stuff still happens! We avoided this problem in our Blades in the Dark experience, but it can easily happen.
Aggressive editing can severely cut across the conversation. We all like editing techniques in our role-playing games. I am all for editing and gone are the rambling scenes that don’t go anywhere. Yet, if you edit too aggressively, you can completely remove the opportunity for a meaningful conversation. You remove the opportunities for an ‘in’. You jump from thing to thing and straight into it, and if you consciously force the time, you cut the conversation out of the play experience.
Skill challenges can render the conversation obsolete. I like skill challenges. They are awesome. I effectively used them myself. The key is to use them sparingly or ensure the skill challenges offer space for the conversation. If you don’t, you’re throwing a wrecking ball into what makes the game great. This is especially true when you have a lot of skill challenges, combine skills challenges as an overall toolkit along with aggressive editing and even if the game you’re playing does not have a process, you effectively create one (or co-opt one from another game). At this point, the danger is the rich conversation is replaced by the mechanical progress of making rolls.
Modern gaming advice can drag focus from the conversation. Look, modern GM gaming advice is stellar these days. It has helped thousands of people. It is by no means a bad thing. The maturity of some GM gaming advice is amazing. That is, until that advice does not account for gaming as a conversation. I am particularly wary of advice that makes prep a simple set of repeatable things. This is good advice, but it becomes bad when those simple sets of things become all there is at the table. They are meant to be a foundation to add to, not the whole house. A template gets applied that allows those experiencing it to see the template. That isn’t so bad as long as the conversation still happens, but the truth is that everyone becomes lazy and leans into the template, and as a result, the conversation whithers on the vine, replaced by a weird sort of checklist of a minimal viable product.
So, what am I saying?
Gaming as a conversation is everything; if you smother it, cut across it or disrupt it, it reduces the experience. This is because that is where the meaning is, where the world-building is, where the richness of the story is unfolding and being mutually created, and where the relationships are.
If the conversation doesn’t exist, then all that fades away.
I’ve speculated before that I have three goals should I run another campaign, and it should have intensity, passion and pace: –
- Intensity. I want things to be intense and meaningful, not just frivolous or mundane.
- Passion. There should be passion and emotion in the characters’ relationships with ideas, people and institutions, whatever those relations are.
- Pace. I want things to move at a pace, but importantly, not to the extent that we lose the intensity and the passion by cutting across the first two.
As well as throwing in playing the damned scene.
When I talk about the above, I realise I am talking about maintaining the quality of the conversation at the table, as that is a valuable aspect of the game. Everything else is in service to it.
And, Finally…
I love encountering role-playing material that allows me to articulate what I want to achieve or understand how I want things to be better.
Whether it’s how West End Games Star Wars and Fengshui finally allowed me to see role-playing games as the action stories I was playing with. Whether it be the discussions of The Forge and how it allowed me to articulate generally what I did and did not like and what I wanted to focus on. How Fate allowed me to see actual play as a full-on dramatic construct at a system level. Whether it was the concept of fiction first and how that allowed me to focus on how I wanted to deliver a game (better than the higher theory of The Forge, which served a different purpose). This list is not complete, but you get the idea.
The idea of a role-playing game as a conversation can be added to that list.
It’s a phenomenal new part of my vocabulary, and I fully believe it is the nature, quality and degree to which it is eroded that impacts my role-playing game experience and facilitating that conversation is the goal of what I run next should it even happen.