D&D 5E [+] Explain RPG theory without using jargon

[Hussar]

I’m running a game of Torchbearer for @AbdulAlhazred , @kenada , and @niklinna presently. Its an example of one of the most unique games ever on the market because of its deep and intentional love affair with incoherency. It sits there at every moment of play threatening to be the most incoherent play experience possible. How and why does it do this? And why is it unique? I’m glad you asked:

* Is is the most unabashedly and most brutally Gamist engine you have ever experienced. The game is ridiculously demanding in every moment of play for the players to play skillfully and in extremely intricate and interlocking ways. If they don’t play well continuously (guts, guile, tactics, strategy, sacrifice, and some 4d chess to thread thematic needles), the extreme feedback loops will catch up to them and Grind (capital G) underfoot.

* However…you have to willingly punish your PC…willingly lose…and endure that experience as a player…in order to advance and win. You cannot win without skillfully and thematically losing…a lot. You have to advocate for your character’s ethos (Goal, Belief, Creed), save your Friends, confront your (much more powerful than you) Enemies in order to access crucial resources that enable short term success and long term advancement. And you have to manage to avoid getting swept up in the moment and throwing yourself headlong into terrible (highly likely mortal) danger for the sake of Story Now priorities which will likely kill you…but you won’t (avoid getting swept up) because either it’s irresistible or you’re exhausted and your guard is down…and that is the point of play.

* The game features a Town phase that manages intense resource economy demands with Story Now play (through procedural generation of content and PC declared actions and resultant Twists that are often centered around what the PC cares about; relationships and ethos). Things can go sideways quickly.

* The game also features a Journey phase, a Camp phase, and an Adventure phase where every moment is governed deeply by Gamist priorities…but…there are intentionally lurking Story Now priorities to tempt you…to reward you…to maybe sweep you up in the moment so you do something incredibly rash despite your meticulous planning and intricate management of your intensely demanding decision-space in each situation + a huge host of resources (Turns, Light, Food/water, Nature, Instincts, Gear/Supplies/Tools/Kit, equipped weapons and armor and their perks for varying Conflicts, Checks, Fate, Persona, Disposition, Cohorts) + a hugely demanding inventory system + PC build suites + marshaled dice pools + deft uses of Wises to Help but insulate yourself from failed Test fallout.

* Twists in all phases often bring in Story Now priorities to find out what and who you’ll fight for. Are your Beliefs and Creeds real things to fight and die for or will your PC handle them with a shrewd expeditious eye. Will you tax your Nature to nothing and walk away from this life?

* The game is all conventions for play, all Gamist trappings, with deeply lurking Story Now priorities that (a) you must commit to willfully (and the GM must frame them into play) to advance and (b) you’ve got to resist or throw yourself at with wild abandon because your guard is down due to the endless struggle of play. But this designed in incoherency is the point. And the extremely unique thing about Torchbearer?

It leaves this out in the open, table-facing and on purpose.

Instead of the GM secretly resolving these moments of incoherency, it’s up for the players to resolve them and they do so openly.

Because of this orientation to play, this complete preoccupation at every moment, because of the overwhelming contrivances, it doesn’t have an Sim bone in its meticulously-designed body. There are no instances of play possessed of a quality marked by being lost in a moment of “I’m here…in this place…experiencing and exploring this world…pushing and prodding and poking to examine its causal relationships…to see how it works…to focus on characterization and ‘smelling of roses’ and benign/conflict-neutral interactions with tavern-goers and innkeeps and peddlers”…not even incidental ones.


The game is a ruthlessly Gamist grind with Story Now seduction and phantoms lurking all over the place. The Story Now moments are probably 1 out of every 9 moments of play. But despite that small ratio and despite the intensity of the Gamism, those few Story Now moments (where we get to find out about these lowly characters and be completely surprised by their grit, their merit…their undoing) often ultimately define the through line of a Town or Adventure phase and then deeply reverberate into the future.

Ok, if for nothing else, this has to be one of the best posts I've ever seen in any thread anywhere. A complete love affair description of something without a single reference to another game. Absolutely 100% gushing love for a game that REALLY makes me want to play it. Well done you!

 

[Aldarc]

Nevermind.

 

[Charlaquin]

Did you really think it was appropriate to belittle my help?

I… Didn’t intend to belittle your help, I apologize if that was what it seemed like I was doing. I’ve just never found “follow the fiction” to be particularly helpful or meaningful advice.

 

[Malmuria]

And yet, you can intentionally design for incoherence. @Manbearcat has a stellar post on how Torchbearer leans into incoherence in a open way. So... yeah, still seems to be you bringing the negative.

Unfortunately, I cannot take credit for how the English language works in every day usage nor its historical development. What I can do is point out that “incoherence” as term gets in the way of discussing the ideas at stake due to its denotative and connotative resonances (Language Matters?). Whether Edwards & co just accidentally chose such a word for this particular concept (games with multiple agendas) or if it reflects an implicit criticism is unclear, but given what I know of his criticisms of Vampire etc I would think the latter. Perhaps it evolved from criticism to theory.

Btw, earlier you said incoherence was when we are unsure of which agenda the game is addressing. From @Manbearcat ’s description, it sounds like Torchbearer is very sure about the agenda(s) it is addressing and that it is part of it’s design. So maybe we should add a new term to talk about games that address multiple agendas in an intentional, organized way? Like, “multimodal design”?

 

[Hussar]

You can have a session of 5e that's basically a tactical miniatures combat game followed by one solely roleplay that never touches a die and is about the characters confronting a mentor who let them down

Now, I do agree that we can do that. That's absolutely true. But, how is 5e as a system, helping you in the second case? If you have a session that is solely role-play without a single instance of engaging the mechanics, I'd argue that you aren't actually playing 5e D&D at that point. You're not playing any system at all. You could have FATAL on the table and it would make no difference. ((I'm trying to make a funny here ))

Which does get back to the point of characterizing and labeling. If a system doesn't do something, you can't really claim that that system is good for that thing. Imagine a different system where you have all sorts of mechanics for dealing with social interaction. Flashback mechanics, Plot Point mechanics, stuff like Aspects from FATE, that sort of thing. When you switch from the tactical miniatures game to a role-play sessions, suddenly the experience is very different than what you would get from free forming.

If you have a preference of one type of play or the other, then system is going to be very important. If both types of play are important, then a system that addresses both types of play might be a better fit. Sure, gamers ignore the game all the time, mostly because we're trained to do so. We slip into free-form gaming from the incredibly crunchy system of 5e because that's all we've been taught to do. And players who can't make the switch from one to the other tend to self-select out of the hobby or find groups of like minded players who don't switch from style to style.

My recent group absolutely would never, ever accept a session of role play. It would be three hours of no one saying anything. Any time role play came up, it was the most minimal engagement that could be gotten away with. They absolutely were not interested in the slightest. So, it was all combat, all the time. Which, well, D&D does in spades. But, if I tried to do, say, an 80:20 split of role-play and combat? Not a chance. It wouldn't work. Not with that group.

So, one has to really be aware of the difficulty in trying to apply the labels too broadly or too narrowly, if you get what I mean. They're labels. And, effectively, they're genre labels, which make them very broad, very porous and very vague. They define the centers, not the edges. The edges go on forever. There's no end to edge cases where it might be one thing or another. But, we can generally agree on the centers. I think where the larger disagreement comes is in not recognizing that something is more of an edge case than a center and so, yup, can be interpreted in multiple ways in the same framework. It's no different than "Is Star Wars science fiction or fantasy?" You can absolutely make the argument (and many do!) either way and support that argument very well.

 

[Ovinomancer]

That one can lean into incoherence doesn’t erase the description’s negative connotations. Often, art that is intentionally “incoherent” has the express purpose of challenging established notions of “coherence.”

I feel like this is nearing a tautology -- it's negative because it refutes a positive? Is coherence a positive, though? Can we definitively assert that this is so?

Pointing out that something doesn't hang together because it's going in different directions isn't a negative thing. The vast, overwhelming preponderance of the light you're seeing these words emit is incoherent, and you're glad of it!

 

[niklinna]

Unfortunately, I cannot take credit for how the English language works in every day usage nor its historical development. What I can do is point out that “incoherence” as term gets in the way of discussing the ideas at stake due to its denotative and connotative resonances (Language Matters?). Whether Edwards & co just accidentally chose such a word for this particular concept (games with multiple agendas) or if it reflects an implicit criticism is unclear, but given what I know of his criticisms of Vampire etc I would think the latter. Perhaps it evolved from criticism to theory.

Btw, earlier you said incoherence was when we are unsure of which agenda the game is addressing. From @Manbearcat ’s description, it sounds like Torchbearer is very sure about the agenda(s) it is addressing and that it is part of it’s design. So maybe we should add a new term to talk about games that address multiple agendas in an intentional, organized way? Like, “multimodal design”?

I tried to use the term "weaving" for games that switch back and forth, as I was coming up to speed (and from this discussion it's been clear I am still coming up to speed!). Blades in the Dark is an example of this, depending on the phase or what you're doing during the Score.

Torchbearer just straight-up smashes the agendas against one another! It's right in your face in just about every moment: Do I risk scotching this particular test in order to be able to recover from my conditions later? I really need to obtain this in-fiction objective though! But if I can't recover later, I may die after. And so on....

Both are examples of multimodal design, though, and these are just different ways of achieving that. Nice term!

Edit: Fixed a typo.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Unfortunately, I cannot take credit for how the English language works in every day usage nor its historical development. What I can do is point out that “incoherence” as term gets in the way of discussing the ideas at stake due to its denotative and connotative resonances (Language Matters?). Whether Edwards & co just accidentally chose such a word for this particular concept (games with multiple agendas) or if it reflects an implicit criticism is unclear, but given what I know of his criticisms of Vampire etc I would think the latter. Perhaps it evolved from criticism to theory.

Btw, earlier you said incoherence was when we are unsure of which agenda the game is addressing. From @Manbearcat ’s description, it sounds like Torchbearer is very sure about the agenda(s) it is addressing and that it is part of it’s design. So maybe we should add a new term to talk about games that address multiple agendas in an intentional, organized way? Like, “multimodal design”?

It only gets in the way if you're more interested in a negative connotation that with the denotation of the word. The word is being used precisely to mean that denotation. You're hung up on "but that sounds bad" and aren't giving any credence to the explanation for what it actually is showing. You're bringing that into the discussion, by making your choice about this word to focus on a connotation rather than the denotation.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I tried to use the term "weaving" for games that switch back and forth, as I was coming up to speed (and from this discussion it's been clear I am still coming up to speed!). Blades in the Dark is an example of this, depending on the phase or what you're doing during the Score.

Torchbearer just straight-up smashes the agendas against one another! It's right in your face in just about every moment: Do I risk scotching this particular test in order to be able to recover from my conditions later? I really to obtain this in-fiction objective though! But if I can't recover later, I may die after. And so on....

Both are examples of multimodal design, though, and these are just different ways of achieving that. Nice term!

I prefer 'toggling.' It's more clear and descriptive. You toggle between agendas.

 

[niklinna]

It's no different than "Is Star Wars science fiction or fantasy?" You can absolutely make the argument (and many do!) either way and support that argument very well.

The answer is "yes".