Scribbles and Horrors

Dear reader, I am not someone who believes the be all end all of tabletop games is player agency. I subscribe to a different idea, that games are social and material processes which are fruitful in themselves; the mere application of rules to a gamestate–even when that application is choiceless and tedious–is worthwhile to me. Monopoly is good, actually.

However, I found myself making an argument about player agency and I’d like to explore it here. For the sake of this post, then, I will take up the position that agency is King: the point of making and playing games is for players to be able to make cool moves. Say this is true.

I argue that, sometimes, character creation reduces player agency. Decision-paralysis and the pressure to make “good” character creation choices can reduce players’ abilities to make cool moves in play at the table.

The argument isn’t very complicated, just that energy and inspiration are components to agency—finite resources—and that choosing to expend them while in the adventure rather than before can be a better idea.

“How can I make this photographer that my Ref handed me useful in this fight against a bugbear?!” is a more interesting and fruitful choice (a cooler move, more agency) than “Should I put my skill points into Tact or Righteousness?”

You could say that allowing the player to choose the photographer in the first place gives them two cool moves instead of the one, and thus that character creation still increases agency. This might be so if we had unlimited time and unending energy, but I think the effort necessary to choose a photographer lessens the coolness of the photographer’s bugbear actions. It feels less efficient to me.

Besides, if that were the case, then we could increase agency infinitely by letting players choose what classes are available, what rules to use, and so on. This would be fun, but in the infinite series of increasing agency the game sort of disappears.

My basic claim is just that often “here’s the situation, make do with the pieces you have to achieve some desired outcome” can indeed enable agency in a way “here are building blocks, assemble them so that you can be prepared for some situations, and then we will have you go into some situations” does not.

Now this is a focus thing, right, like if you’re playing The Character Creation Game, where the goal is to build the best character, obviously eschewing character creation only reduces agency. In the games I generally play the focus is on what one does with the character, so prioritizing player time for doing is what will increase agency.

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Again, though, my real thoughts are that agency isn’t really the most important part of these games, that process is. From a process perspective, character creation is great.

“Prep scenarios, not plots” is a big ole’ touchstone for playing dungeon or field games in my circles. The idea is that it’s not the referee’s job to plan out players’ adventures for them.

What you should do instead is come up with a situation you find interesting and plop it in front of ‘em. Trust your friends who you’re playing with to take your idea seriously and explore it earnestly—and if you’re playing a Fantasy Roleplaying Game with someone you should be at minimum friendly because otherwise what are you even doing?

It’s a trust thing, right, you have to be willing to risk an imperfect game experience in the hopes that your game companions will put in their own kind of investment and make something with you that none of you could do on your own.

So far so good: eager referees are taking notes down for How To Play D&D.

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Okay but I have another DM Advice I wanna throw out there in the same vein: when writing or drawing stuff, it’s not your job to make it playable.

In the same way it’s the players’ job to make an adventure out of a scenario, it’s the at-the-table referee’s job to make the map/key into a game.

The writer, on the other hand—the version of yourself who that draws the maps and writes the keys and publishes the rules you run? They shouldn’t worry about playability, or even intelligibility. Their job is just to make something inspiring for the oracular art of playing a board game.

High trust is the way. At each stage of the hobby, you have to have faith that those operating the next stage will pick up what you’re putting down, or at least find something worthwhile and run with it.

Don’t worry about making something that’s effective or principled or in accordance with expectations: make something that’s beautiful and engaging to you right now. Life is too short, and play-time is even shorter, to bother with anxiety about whether your near-future hypothetical self will find your work fun.

its all made up anyway

When simulations fail, we lay our hopes at the feet of metaphor.

And metaphor is no thing at all, only an illusion peddled by foolish people lacking the stamina to see things as they are.

To metaphor we sacrifice perceptions out of vain conviction they will be reborn as truths. We slay substance for effervescence, mistaken for essence. Metaphor is all sparkle, only glimmer, mere gleam–gold paint slopped carelessly upon delicate reality. Ostensibly of course done to protect reality—to emphasize its salient aspects—but everyone knows metaphor is garish and spiritually bleak. Only out of fear, fear of true meaning do we cling to the notion.

To gaze upon the face of the world is to gaze into the face of God: infinite and almighty Being. Doing so will ruin us. We know it will ruin us, which is why we invented philosophy and science to cushion the blow: measuring out truth in drips and drams ‘til we work up a tolerance.

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The problem with metaphor is not that it claims too much, but that it accounts for too little.

Metaphor-mongers insist there is revelation in the differences between similar objects. But to do this they must hold apart pieces of the world, claiming the world as incommensurable with itself, maintaining artificial dichotomies. For metaphor to work you have to deny the fabric of the world, and this is too great a sacrifice.

The hard reality is that things are indeed literally other things. Mathematicians know this. Poets know it, too. Beauty is sharp-edged and ungainly, terrifying beyond belief.

And so the metaphorists try to soften the world, make jelly of human experience. They sneer at absurdities as only illustrating a point. Their toothless arguments they celebrate for the sake of being simulacra. Their aesthetic senses are gooey, murky messes. They applaud seeming as delightfully untrue, and refuse to consider the scary possibility that it might really be. As if shadows were the things worth thinking about.

What a bunch of hogwash. Discard it. The metaphorical is a bankrupt concept: useless, saccharine, and ugly.

When you no longer believe in metaphor, all that’s left is simulation.

When you no longer believe in metaphor, all that’s left is simulation.

What happens when the sparkles of clever allusion grow dim, when resonance tends shallow, and the waters of shared cultural familiarity show signs of drought? How can we proceed through the desert, for who knows how long, until we reach the oasis of the next shared cultural moment?

To persevere through such perils games have developed Simulationism, a method for carrying on despite madness and incoherence, maugre flagging zeal, irrespective of creative famine. A simulation continues to tell you what happens next long after excitement has let out its last gasp.

Simulation sustains faith that an imagined place can correspond to a real one. It justifies the experience of wonder we sometimes get in glimmers and glances. Simulation lets us maintain our toys without having to moor them so directly to our psyche, protected from hurricanes of moodiness and earthquakes of self-doubt.

But simulation comes at a cost. It is a simple cost, no more than is fitting. The cost of simulation is making the imaginary real through time and labor. The debt can be paid in one of two ways: Counting or Scale.

To counting belong dice and statistics, models, maps, and scientific expertise. To scale belong big groups of players, swathes of literature, and so on. Expenses pile up, and have a knack of compounding with interest.

Physical and mental limitations will conspire against simulations eventually, not because there is too little, but because there is too much. There is only so far simulation can take us before collapsing under the weight of its own success into burnout.

We must hope, then, that before this happens a new oasis will have been found, another wellspring of spontaneous connective fantasy delight.

When simulations fail, we lay our hopes at the feet of metaphor.

Anyone who talks to me about games hears about Nomic sooner or later. I bring it up all over the place, in any conversation having to do with rules as such. My excitement over Nomic—this zeal for letting people know about Peter Suber’s fabulous little game—approaches proselytism, even. I make Nomic zines and leave them places to be found like religious tracts.

What’s so special about Appendix 3 of a dreary philosophy book which navel-gazingly investigates paradoxical legal self-reference? How do those 5 pages of awkward and stringent voting rules relate to the OSR, a movement which, famously, likes to keep things loose?

Nomic presents a conception of games which I find convincing and beautiful. It seems to teach that games are fundamentally procedural and necessarily material, even (or especially) those which rely upon imagination and goodwill to function.

I have seen Nomic inspire investment in its participants more immediately and intensely than in any other game. This is fun to experience, of course, but it is also instructive about what play is and can be. Frankly, Nomic is easier to play than D&D. It has no prep, requires fewer assumptions, and gets interesting more quickly.

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On first glance Nomic is a “play however you want” sort of game: the purest implementation of that unbounded and limitless creative freedom which we say we appreciate in tabletop game spaces. Like D&D, anything can be achieved in Nomic. There is no hard limit to player agency. We all like those kinds of games, at least in principle. But Nomic is more than this.

The short-form description of Nomic most commonly deployed, “A game where players vote on what the rules should be” is not inaccurate, but it can be misleading. Nomic is not a game where players decide upon the rules, but one where players must follow rules procedures to change them.

Initially, for instance, even unanimous agreement is insufficient to make arbitrary changes to the Nomic ruleset. At least two separate unanimous votes spread across two turns are necessary to amend most rules. And unanimous consent is difficult to secure even for popular rule-change proposals, even for players disposed towards friendship: the most points are awarded to players who vote against winning proposals. Very often players want very badly for a proposal to pass, campaign for it, promise they will vote for it, and then vote against it anyway.

Rather than the limitless freedom of full malleability, Nomic gives players the experience of rebuilding a plane while they are flying it – the players are stuck within its structure and must work together against the ruleset to get anywhere at all.

Players win by achieving 100 points. Since each turn a player is compelled to submit a proposal, and each time a proposal fails they are penalized 10 points, players must propose popular rule-changes to make any progress. Nomic is strange in that it is an extraordinarily low trust game which also depends upon rule mutability.

Of course, the players could fairly easily decide to abandon the low trust aspects, doing away with winning entirely. With enough political will anything is possible. What’s key here, though, it that that decision would be a play decision: it would already be a series of moves within the game. All that convincing, the calling upon shared trust, the promises of creative flourishing without threats of victory, all of these actions would be playing Nomic, as strategic and defined by the rules as any other moves.

The gameplay of Nomic takes place entirely within the real world. Immersion comes from investment in things players are actually doing. So much of the game is discussing — through the medium of the game — what the game should be. It is constantly “almost there”, just about in a state where the main problems are fixed and play can continue smoothly. The solutions are always one or two turns away.

Invariably things drag. Players come to the table with different goals which must be sorted out and negotiated. The process of actually writing up sensible rules-text is a task all its own, vulnerable to all sorts of oversights, errors, and vagaries. Actually voting is, as I’ve said, subject to incentive structures and other procedural hangups.

So patient struggle is the substance of Nomic: being in a space with my fellow players trying to negotiate ourselves out of the present situation. The possibilities are endless and delightful, not because of frictionless liberty, but because of the elaborate friction-full texture that emerges from written procedures, physical realities, and human minds all trying to operate at tension with one another.

The boundaries that make Nomic a game are emergent from the situation at hand. Nomic shows that play happens in the fringes between possibility and activity. Games are a substantive gamestate and processes for altering this gamestate.

I have found myself paying closer attention to the actual physical and social processes going on in other games. I enjoy them more. The ordinary procedures like taking out the board and setting up the pieces, parsing a poorly written rules-passage, waiting for a late player to arrive–all of these things are play, all already the game. This activity is about process and the surprises that come from taking ridiculous processes seriously.

So anyway you should play Nomic. I may set up a game soon.