Scribbles and Horrors

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.

The aim of D&D -1 is to never quite get around to playing D&D. Rather than eschewing Session 0, D&D -1 is composed entirely of Session 0s.

Here’s how to play:

The first few meetups should consist of detailed discussions about which edition of D&D to play, or whether it would be better to use another system entirely. Rulesets should be compared and contrasted and preferences about the kind of play desired should be taken into consideration.

When a consensus has been reached, a short course on the history of the chosen edition would be in order, perhaps with guest speakers. The group should read through the ruleset paragraph by paragraph or, (if there is time) sentence by sentence, pausing to discuss unclear or confusing elements as needed. No more than a handful of meetings will be necessary here.

It will be a good idea at this point to work out resolution procedures for rules-questions. Even in games where the referee has “final say”, there are many edge cases and social considerations which should be considered.

Once the foundations of the ruleset are firmly covered, the group could move on to a study of various safety tools. Group bonding exercises could be used to get everybody used to one another, and several meetings can be had about safety expectations for the game. Some themes or topics might be explicitly forbidden, although most probably won’t be. Likewise, certain behaviors (bullying, overturning tables, etc.) will be preemptively prohibited or assigned boundaries. Set aside at least three meetings for this.

After this, review could be made of various kinds of roleplaying playstyles. Reading lists could be developed to give an overview of common cultures of play. One might be picked, and the ramifications of that particular style upon the chosen ruleset should be noted.

It may be worth it at this point to write up some sort of play agreement or pledge to ensure that everyone is on the same page about playstyles and safety. This agreement should include a provision for amendment. While it can’t really be binding, it should be thorough.

A club charter for the group could be set up, and, depending on the scope expected, it might be worth setting up as a 501(c)3 in your state.

A method of scheduling which works for everyone should be settled upon, along with expectations for attendance, taking time off and so on. Schedule at least 2 meetings to nail it down.

After all this, you can start thinking about character creation. Careful study should be made of each character class and attribute, going over the options and their implications. (Don’t be afraid to review the chosen ruleset, or perhaps choose a new one!) It’s important to connect through discussion the various character options and the play philosophy of the group.

Characters should be rolled up strictly according to the rules agreed upon, and if there’s any confusion about these they must be discussed and revised using the resolution procedures worked out earlier. If these procedures fail to achieve a desired result, they should be revisited.

Backstories for the characters should be written—set aside at least half a dozen meetings for this—drafts should be presented and read aloud, notes given and taken, making sure to treat each character fully. It may happen that the story of a character leads them to their death; if this happens, the process will have to begin again. Like any creative process, it’s important not to rush things. Allow the character backstories to develop as they will and the characters will be better for it.

Once the characters are ready, it will be necessary to develop relationships between them and the world at large. It may be useful to write and perform scenes of the characters growing their relationships with each other, after thorough drafting of course.

Next is precepts for the world (because surely the referee hasn’t begun writing up the adventure—not yet!). Conversations about the sorts of things that are desirable and undesirable should be had. Here D&D -1 really opens up. The referee can begin a series of sessions setting the stage for the world. This will include lectures about its history, of course, but also scenes, readings, exams, etc. naturally, if there is consternation about any element of the world (or potential consternation about how a certain element might appear in play) this must be discussed and worked out according to the group-decided procedures for this kind of thing. If these procedures cause confusion, several meetings should be spent revising them. A dozen or more meetings might be necessary to fully flesh out the imaginary world.

If your group has gotten this far you’ve done something wrong, but you may as well switch to playing D&D. A short one-shot is appropriate, preferably one which you suspend halfway through and never get around to scheduling the second session of.

The End.

Epilogue

My point in writing this is to think about how what counts as “play” depends a great deal on one’s perspective, and how in many instances, from the outside, a “play” activity and a “not-quite-yet play” activity look pretty much the same.

Play is about process. Goals are important as the aim of processes, but the process is the point. For many games it does not matter too much whether those goals are actually achieved, only that the players tried to achieve them.

This is why losing is an acceptable component in many games—the loser has participated in a game just as much as the winner.

What of games where there are no winners? The teleology of roleplaying games is frequently infinity. How many OD&D campaigns close their doors long before players start building strongholds? How many dungeons sit unexplored, hexes untouched, characters dormant, etc.?

OD&D is Chainmail -1.

Each session of Redux begins with 45 minutes of paperwork. Here’s a rough list of things which have to be worked out before the party can leave town.

1. The week in which the adventure takes place has to be picked (usually it’s the week after the previous one, but not always.)
2. A lead must be chosen to pursue from the Active Lead pool
3. Each player must select which eligible character will go on the expedition (often the choice of character depends on the lead chosen)
4. Characters have to be “brought up to time”, using non-expeditionary activity tables week-by-week (downtime). Occasionally this will result in the chosen character being unable to go on the expedition (injury, illness, etc.) and so another will have to be selected and brought up.
5. Characters who have levelled up since the previous session have to be updated.
6. If hirelings are to be hired, these must be selected, contracts must be negotiated, signed, and co-signed.
7. Equipment must be purchased for players and hirelings. Loans may be issued between player characters as desired.
8. New characters may have certain paperwork to fill out such as a Writ of Free Arms or a Letter of Release.
9. Each player character “signs in” on the Expedition Sheet, including their level and xp total, which serves as the main record of the session.
10. Each character needs to get a little cube with their name on it for a miniature. I should just have them all pre-written, but I never do, so I’m constantly fiddling with these.

To set up the game, I pull out the Index card character sheet box, the Active Leads folder, the Player Notes folder, the Expeditions Winter 1026 folder (to catch people up on sessions they missed), the Blank Forms folder, the Calendar folder, equipment and spell and level advancement zines, and several other folders and forms in sequence as I need and/or forget them. I’m usually there to begin the session around 6:15 pm, and it’s almost always past 7 pm when the party actually sets foot outside of town.

I have set up my game this way despite being someone who finds the idea of character creation taking more than 30 seconds absolutely intolerable. I am someone who thinks even OD&D’s speedy alternate combat system is infuriating and tedious, replacing it with a d6 system that resolves most combats in less than two minutes. I routinely leave rooms in my dungeons entirely empty so the party doesn’t waste time looking at the scenery. So much of the way I chose to run D&D seems to be aimed at quickness, at a certain kind of time efficiency, and yet a full third of Redux playtime is spent calculating xp and filling out forms. What’s up with that?

One might argue that I have chosen to focus on tedious things which are interesting to the exclusion of tedious things that aren’t. Discussing with your friends about which treasure to go after today, they might claim, is more fun than carefully choosing between two nearly-but-not-quite-identical feats. What I’ve done is be decisive about the way I manage time to more effectively tell the stories I want to.

I’m not so sure this is the case. Redux has a lot of time-consuming paperwork only because I had a lot of cool-seeming ideas requiring paperwork I haven’t given up trying out. It happened this way because of how my tastes intersect with my play modality. There’s no reason it should be this way other than that it is, and there’s no reason to change it unless distressing problems develop.

In some ways, it’s a beautiful thing. During the first part of the session I as Referee mostly need only sit back and listen to the discussions and negotiations, occasionally answering questions or handing out papers. It sets a relaxed tone to the whole affair, the act of preparing for an expedition, first by gathering everyone together, then choosing what to do and how to do it, assembling equipment and making sure one’s affairs are in order. Immediately during a session of Redux the players have to make decisions together about how to approach play. This is a good thing.

Still, every once in a while, when it’s 7:30 and the adventure hasn’t even reached the dungeon, I get a pang of worry. Am I doing a good job? Are people having fun? Are my friends being sufficiently entertained by the show I’m putting on?

This blog post has no conclusion.

Abandoned missile silos and bunkers are particularly dungeon-like places. Beyond just being big underground complexes with lots of empty space, they are places into which vast resources, technology, and people have been poured, while their purpose and functions remain almost mystically incoherent.

A missile silo is a subterranean structure intentionally built in the middle of nowhere whose sole purpose is to be able to completely obliterate some as-yet-unchosen corner of the world, because maintaining this installation somehow means cataclysmic war is supposedly less likely. Their logic is twisted and insane. As fundamentally evil as they are cleverly built.

It is time for another combative theory shitpost upstream from play.

Dungeons and Dragons is not improv theater. I call it a wargame because that’s sort of what it calls itself and others call it a roleplaying game which is fine, but D&D is not improv theater and it’s not group storytelling in the way that writing a novel is personal storytelling. D&D is a game: a game is a structure of rules and conventions in which participants take playful action.

It would be quite reasonable for you to @ me with complaints that my playstyle isn’t everyone’s, or that the way some people play D&D actually does resemble improv. I won’t dispute that there are many different ways to understand games, and I have absolutely no interest in telling people that they are playing a game wrong. When I say Dungeons and Dragons I just mean what Dungeons and Dragons is to me as I’ve experienced it.

The term “Yes, and” seems to come from improv theater, and my vague understanding of it is that it’s a method for getting actors all on the same page during a scene. “Yes, and” is a solution to two problems during spontaneous performance.

1) Yes there’s no time to discuss what the reality of the scene is, so the actors agree to take what’s been given as accurate. Whatever performance a scene partner gives, whatever facts or implications are presented, that’s Yes. It’s already existent in the scene, and we just gotta go with it.

2) , and the thing about scenes in theater is that stuff happens in them. There has to be action of some kind, otherwise the characters are likely to hang around listlessly. To prevent a situation of passive “yes”s, the “, and” insists that a performer pushes the situation beyond what it was before. It’s not enough to confirm your partner’s reality; you must also move that reality along.

This framework is great for performances on stage or in living rooms. It’s fun to do in practice, and it makes for entertaining shows. I don’t, however, think it is a very good way to think about what a referee does in the game Dungeons and Dragons.

Yes

Firstly, D&D is asymmetric. Unlike improv, the players and ref have different roles with vastly different relationships to the imaginary world. “Yes, and” makes sense between equals co-creating a scene, but in D&D, where the ref has binders full of secret places and pages of hidden rules the “yes” principle doesn’t hold.

At best a referee “Yes” in the mode of “Yes, and” is somewhat condescending and one-sided. Can a player “Yes, and” a ruling the referee makes? Certainly not in the same way! Really what’s being presented is something like permission: the referee deigns to give permission for players to take some novel action or do some cool thing. Framing such rulings as “Yes, and…” puts the referee in the uncomfortable position of constantly having to dispense narrative control when players ask for it, or, worse, sometimes deciding not to.

I think a better way to approach this is for players to have narrative power from the start. Not delegated by the referee, not affirmed by them, but simply there, in the rules. Players can take game actions without the referee’s permission. On what authority can they take these actions? Why, the rules! Sure, the referee is here in the precarious role of making decisions about the rules and how to apply them reasonably–this takes sensitivity, kindness, and common sense–but in my opinion it’s a lot more honest to the situation and fair to the participants. The rules mediate between the referee and the players.

Narrative power is inherently vested in the players through the actions they can take; there is no need for the referee to mete out control to players in an attempt to acquiesce to the “Yes, and…” principle. I hope I’m making the distinction I see here clear.

, and…

Secondly, D&D is a game, not a performance. Obviously there are performative aspects to D&D–its very worth it to do funny voices in front of your friends–but even this kind of affect is distinct from anything onstage with an observing-only audience.

It is okay, for instance, for games to be boring or tedious. It’s okay for not much to happen, or for much of what happens to be banal discussion. The process of playing a game is far more important than whatever stories come out of it. A game is more akin to rehearsal than performance: there is no audience.

Framing the referee as an entertainer is a mistake, I think, because that robs players of their agency in a game situation. The dungeon is not a show the referee is putting on; it’s a game space full of interesting things which the player characters can inhabit. The pressure to “, and…” anything in service of some kind of entertainment ideal can push the referee to avoid otherwise fruitful scenarios. Sometimes an empty room is just an empty room, and it’s important to allow players to feel the full weight of that reality, with all its implications and incongruity.

“Yes, and…” frames the whole affair as an improv experience aimed solely at being exciting to viewers, and I just don’t think that’s what pen-and-paper games are good at.

This post was directly inspired by Permissiveness in RPGs, a post which I entirely agree with I think.