This is my first post on this new collaborative blog all about being "edgy rebellious iconoclasts unafraid of turning people off" (paraphrasing an actual conversation) so I figure I'll come out of the gate swinging*.
*With a quick preface that I've been asked this by plenty of people who I do like and respect, and have also been guilty of asking this or questions like it myself on occasion, so if you think this is personal, I promise you it's not.
Before I turn too many people off, first, a little about myself. I've been writing the weird worldbuilding and tabletop RPG blog Weird & Wonderful Worlds since 2018, and have published the game Maximum Recursion Depth, or Sometimes the Only Way to Win is to Stop Playing: The Karmapunk RPG, available in print+pdf or pdf on exalted funeral, and pdf only on drivethrurpg and itch.io and am currently working on the second book in that series. I am a machine learning engineer, and before that I was in academia studying the cognitive neuroscience of language, and before that I thought of myself as more of a philosophy/humanities type. I'm interested in a lot of disparate things, and finding the connections between them. Understanding that they all exist as part of dynamic interacting systems and not in vacuums, informs me creatively and intellectually and basically on every other level as well.
The title alone should give you a sense what I'm about. Check out the description or buy the book. If it doesn't resonate with you, there's a good chance neither will this blog post. Or, if this post does resonate with you, there's a good chance so will my book.
Tabletop RPGs are among the most unconstrained mediums of Games, yet whether it's system, or setting, or aesthetics, it is endlessly frustrating to me how people seem so perfectly content to just keep chipping away at the same handful of principles, to just create or consume repackaged versions of shit they've already seen a million times spoon-fed to them.
There is absolutely an art and skill to making a more refined version of a thing, I do acknowledge that, but when the overwhelming majority of what I see is doing basically just that, where even the slightest deviation is perceived as some grand statement, it's like if every ice cream shop insisted on only making the best version of vanilla, and then one day somebody introduces chocolate and everyone is like "omfg this is blowing my mind!" and meanwhile there's like one shop doing new flavors every week like olive oil and miso and parmesan, and maybe some of them don't work, but others are absolutely mind-blowing if you have the fucking imagination to think even marginally abstractly; to think beyond vanilla and chocolate.
"...but how would that work?"
I dunno... fucking think about it. Figure it out. Just try.
Orcs and Elves aren't real things believe it or not. Someone had to make that shit up. They borrowed or adapted from various mythological sources that someone else also had to make up. Sure, it's annoying when somebody just renames their Orcs and Elves Schmorkums and Elialords or whatever, but at some point you internalized those proper nouns, like you do the name of new friends or streets when you move to a new town, or whatever else. As long as they're not just Schmorkums and Elialords, they deserve proper names because they are properly distinct concepts. If the MCU can make billions of dollars for over a decade in an interconnected cinematic multiverse full of exotically named superheroes and supervillians and aliens and magical beings and abstract fictional concepts, we can figure this out.
The history of Science Fiction and Fantasy is fraught with debate over meaningless distinctions that got codified for arbitrary reasons over the decades in ways that clearly don't hold up under any amount of scrutiny. For a long time, and I suspect in many cases still, there have been people who somehow can't even stomach the idea of Science Fantasy.
And then even as the concept of Science Fantasy becomes more mainstream... it has been so thoroughly codified and homogenized that when I say "Science Fantasy" I am reasonably confident you have a very specific mental model of what that means, and it probably looks a lot like mine; we're just pulling from the same handful of touchstones. And that sucks.
I don't want fucking touchstones. If there are touchstones, that means it's already been done before and frankly probably done better. Give me something Weird, that I've never seen before. That challenges me. That actually requires me to fucking think about it, to figure it out, maybe to have to make it my own. Something that seems impossible.
"...but how would that work?"
Human cognition is a flawed thing full of bias, dissonance, heuristics, hardwired psychophysical tooling that breaks under unique circumstances creating perceptual illusions, food and drugs and exercise and sleep can also mess with our heads in profound and often unconscious ways... we are over-optimized pattern-recognition machines who literally cannot function without ignoring or embracing impossible and nonsensical things all the time.
So lean into that. We can watch looney tunes and see Wiley Coyote walk off a cliff and keep walking on the air and not fall until he realizes what's happened. We can watch him draw a tunnel through a mountain, Road Runner can run through this painted tunnel, and then Wiley Coyote can attempt to do likewise and crash into the mountain. We can see this impossible and seemingly inconsistent thing and reconcile it. Children do it. Are you less capable of abstract reasoning than a child?
I'm sick of RPGs that feel like videogames, but I'm also sick of RPGs that feel like X genre, or feel like "the experience of D&D". Where the fuck are the games that feel like Looney Tunes or David Lynch or Grant Morrison? Or rather, the games that challenge me in unique ways, like those aforementioned. Why is it that everyone wants to talk about XP rules for the fucking millionth time and only like five people want to talk about this?
"...but how would that work?"
I don't know, yet, and that's the fucking point.
This is a fascinating post. It definitely says a lot about Max and the way you approach games. It's funny that I was just pondering a post I thought I might call: "I don't want to be a revolutionary." Or something along those lines essentially expressing the opposite sentiment. I think the most compelling argument to me is that even the wildest ideas have some kind of cultural touchstone. Everything emerges from something. I try to be original but I also don't mind and accept that ultimately my imagination is largely a product of my cultural soup. That could be disturbing to some but I still think wonderful things can be done that build on what has already been done. And there is a risk if you try to leap too far off into open space that you create something that simply falls flat. I don't think we should stop taking risks like that, per day, but I also think there is wisdom in accepting our place as part of something greater.
ReplyDelete> I think the most compelling argument to me is that even the wildest ideas have some kind of cultural touchstone. Everything emerges from something.
DeleteIn the post I take a more monolithic-sounding stance than I really believe, and I don't disagree with this, but when that is what like 99.99% of people are already doing, I just can't help but feel like, wouldn't it be cool if even a fraction of the number of people who did that, actually tried to do something "new"? Like by all means I support you if you want to make that post or do that, but I'm pretty sure you'd be preaching to the entire choir except maybe me lol.
> And there is a risk if you try to leap too far off into open space that you create something that simply falls flat.
Like I said in the post wrt the ice cream shop analogy, sometimes when you do these experiments they don't work, but I'd take an interesting idea that doesn't quite work over a played-out idea that's executed just well enough- I mean there's a line in both directions of course, but if we're afraid to fail then we're never going to do anything interesting.
> but I also think there is wisdom in accepting our place as part of something greater.
Imo the best way to do that is to actually make something new. Like ya you can refine and refine and refine, but again that's already being done to death, and if you're just going to make a repackaged version of shit that's already been done, then the best it can be is more of the same. Honor the people who made interesting things that inspired you, by making interesting things that inspire others, not just slightly more refined things that those people already did.
I can vibe with that. I guess I don't value innovation as much, including the refinement of systems that some people seem to love so much. I don't really care about systems as much at all and increasingly feel that way. I create things often based off things that have inspired me and wear those inspirations on my sleeve, but as you said, I do think that the thing to do to honor what has inspired me is to make something new that can inspire others.
DeleteOh ya I definitely mean more so about worldbuilding; tbh I'm pretty set in my ways when it comes to systems and mechanics and stuff at this point as well haha. I mean I still get excited about it when it's doing something really interesting that facilitates my kind of play style, like Weirdways or Concept Crafting (or MRD lolol), but for the most part I basically know how to make a game do what I want it to do.
DeleteI can respect the craft of game design, but to me it's really more a means to an end than something I find especially interesting in itself. That end being, creating weird worlds that defy preconceived genre conventions, and exploring them with people, and creating the kinds of awe-inducing or sublime moments that can only come from experiencing something new and intellectually challenging.
That said, game design in itself seems to be where most of the action wrt RPG community discussions seems to be, at least in my anecdotal experience, where either a setting rooted in preconceived genre conventions is defaulted to intentionally because it's just a means to an end for them and it's easier that way, or because the system is specifically intended to emulate a genre, both of which are kind of antithetical to what I want to do. Whereas there are very few people I've found who are specifically trying to build new kinds of settings that aren't deeply rooted in those preconceived genre conventions.
Genre based play has an advantage in getting players on the same page with regards to the logic of the game world, and helps avoid the friction that arises when different players have drastically different understandings of what should or has happened, at least in my experience. At the same time, most of my favourite media has been novel (at least to me) and full of exciting ideas, rather than remixes of known tropes. I'm not sure I have the confidence to run games like this, but I am excited to see what they might look like.
ReplyDelete(Also, what are Weirdways and Concept Crafting?)
I've been discussing this with my players in my current campaign, where we're only a couple sessions in, about how to deal with roleplaying in weird worlds that have fewer of those touchstones or preconceived notions. I tend to take the approach of just leaning into that ambiguity, rather than being afraid of it.
DeleteLike, not that I won't have puzzles in the traditional sense as well, but often the "puzzle" or "challenge" of a given situation is just them having to figure out how to even interface with it. So I might explain this really weird space that they're in, and they'll say "is it like X or Y? Can I try A?" and so we sort of collaboratively figure these things out together.
Sure, sometimes I'll say "Aah actually no I think you're misunderstanding, X won't work because of Z", but more often than not I'll go "Ok, so what is it that you're actually hoping to accomplish? Oh, that? Ok ya, so here's how I think it could go... what do you think about that?" And basically, as long as we're consistent about how we go from there, it generally works out well.
So I'm not saying it's not tricky in its own ways, but I think once you realize it's just a different kind of challenge, and learn how to communicate that and engage with that, it's no more difficult than anything else.
As far as your questions:
Weirdways is from the blog Sheep & Sorcery: https://sheepandsorcery.blogspot.com/2021/04/weirdways-low-road-trip-across-weird.html
And I've been having a lot of fun playing in Mike's campaign. Like with my own game Maximum Recursion Depth, it takes place nominally in the real world, but with a lot of really fantastical elements, but where the fantastical elements are really about metaphors for dealing with real world issues.
Concept Crafting is from the blog Tarsos Theorem: https://tarsostheorem.blogspot.com/2020/05/crafting-with-concepts-1-system.html
And has become one of my favorite newer game mechanics. In fact, I'm working on a sequel to Maximum Recursion Depth: https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2022/05/maximum-recursion-depth-2-or-sometimes.html
Where the Mecha Gear system is based on Concept Crafting:
https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2022/01/mecha-gear-with-tarsos-theorem-crafting.html
Also, the play report for the second session of that MRD2 campaign which I will probably be posting in the next few days, I have various design notes in there where I discuss exactly what I was saying at the beginning of this reply, about how the Players had to navigate this really weird space and how we figured it out together.
This play report I just posted includes some of those design notes I was mentioning in that comment above: https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2022/05/mrd2-campaign-pr-2-this-time-with-golem.html
DeleteThank you for the links!
DeleteConcept crafting is remarkably similar to an emotion based crafting system I was working on for a 5e game based loosely on a post about mood fuelled magic, Control (video game), and another post about the issues with traditional crafting systems. The comments on that post and the ideas in your golems post look like they'll be useful.
The session report was fun to read, and I feel like it's definitely given me a good idea of what you meant in this post.
I've had several conversations with people who have said they've also been thinking of systems similar to Concept Crafting, seems like one of those verge of a zeitgeist kind of things, but we'll see. I've been using it in my new campaign (thanks for checking that out :)) and tried it out a bit even towards the end of my previous campaign. It takes some getting used to, but I really think it has the potential to be one of my favorite mechanics.
DeleteI'm glad to hear that the ideas in this post come through in that play report. I mentioned in a comment in that post as well, I acknowledge that at a certain point it is useful to have pictures or media references as touchstones, if the particular idea is something where a touchstone can apply. But the sum of the touchstones should be something transcendent of its parts, and to the extent that the touchstones get in the way of that by grounding the ideas in preconceived notions, they should be avoided.
No idea can exist totally in a vacuum and "nothing is original", but while that may be true of individual units of ideas, ideas are combinatorial and the combination of these ideas can be original, but only if we let them, and that can only happen if we free the scope of our imaginations from the limitations of touchstones.