In a comment on a Monsters & Manuals post, knobgobbler wrote:

One of the reasons I won’t GM for my regular Saturday group is because I KNOW those guys will pick apart anything I run… ‘Oh! that aqueduct wouldn’t work that way!… and ‘Oh! You’ve got the physics of that all wrong!’ I’m really reluctant nowadays to run anything for self-proclaimed ‘gamers.’

This experience is alien to me. Anything like aqueduct mechanics is a mystery, from the PC point of view. Sometimes I will know why the (for example) aqueduct works the way it does, because that will be something that I have thought about, and sometimes I won’t (it’s obviously impractical, not to mention boring, to think over every fictional thing beforehand).

In either case though, if a player ever says something like “hey, that doesn’t make sense!” the response would be: yeah, that’s kind of mysterious, do you want to investigate, and if so how? If I already know some backstory, then the player can figure it out through adventuring, and if I don’t, then we can figure it out together.

Odilon Redon, The Black Torches

Assume for a moment that you have a game artifact. This is a thing, to be “used” with your games in some way. Maybe it’s a setting write-up, or a module, or a bestiary. Maybe you wrote it, maybe someone else wrote it. First: it’s important to note that these things are all the same sort of thing at some level, and thus this is not just a discussion about modules, but of any product useful for gaming. But what does “use” actually mean? Consider the idea of affordances from ecology.

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.

That’s by Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, chapter eight: The Theory of Affordances (bold items were italicized in the original, but my theme blockquote style loses that).

Okay, that’s a lot of words; how about an example? From the same chapter:

The human species in some cultures has the habit of sitting as distinguished from kneeling or squatting. If a suface of support with the four properties is also knee-high above the ground, it affords sitting on. We call it a seat in general, or a stool, bench, chair, and so on, in particular. It may be natural like a ledge or artificial like a couch. It may have various shapes, as long as its functional layout is that of a seat. The color and texture of the surface are irrelevant. Knee-high for a child is not the same as knee-high for an adult, so the affordance is relative to the size of the individual. But if a suface is horizontal, flat, extended, rigid, and knee-high relative to the perceiver, it can in fact be sat upon. If it can be discriminated as having just these properties, it should look sit-on-able. If it does, the affordance is perceived visually. If the surface properties are seen relative to the body surfaces, the self, they constitute a seat and have meaning.

What are the affordances of a game-thing? I’m not talking about the physical object, but rather the affordances of the virtual objects that arise in the shared game space that players conjure together that derive directly from the game-thing. This is the use of the game-thing. Examples. A stat block (or perhaps HD + AC) affords fighting. If a thing has hit dice, it is fightable and killable. An exact site map affords constrained exploration and movement. A more abstract map (graph-style, perhaps) affords a different kind of movement and interaction (where relationships are more important than distances; see page 5 of this, by Patrick of False Machine). A treasure (in GP = XP games), or more generally a rewarded goal, affords character advancement.

Numbers and game mechanics are not the only (or even most important) affordances, however. Because as Roger put it, fluff is crunch. Thus, the adjective “covetous” attached to an NPC may afford more game utility than 100 stat blocks. If that is true though, what isn’t an affordance? Why are so many game-things so hard to use, so badly designed, and so padded with useless information? Some of it is just redundancy (text spent explaining that there are trees in the forest, or fish in the fish market, to borrow an anti-example from Vornheim). Some of it is prolixity (writing in full sentences what might better be apprehended as a list of keywords; there is a reason why referee notes are so often in this form, and it’s not because they are “unpolished”). And some of it is just bad organization (putting things that are likely to be needed together in separate places, thus requiring page flipping or even context switching between different books). That is, there are good forms of redundancy too. So, all those things are non-affordances that take up space in modules, and are all pretty much unarguably bad design.

Even factoring out those mistakes though, game-things are more than just affordances. That paragraph of imaginary history, or an evocative description which you won’t have time to read during a session but which might help communicate a mood. Like psychological priming, and memories, game-things have a lingering (and useful) influence on the consciousness of the referee. On that subject, a while ago on G+, I wrote (in retrospect, incorrectly):

In an adventure all of that backstory is useless unless it impacts the character’s adventures.

And James Raggi responded:

It colors the Ref’s attitude towards the material which should directly impact the way the adventure is run.

He’s right, and such details are often valuable, and can even be independently works of art in their own right, but such details do not afford game play. Further, unless such exposition is organized exceptionally well, this mood-filler detracts from the other useful ideas contained within the product, and may even render them inoperable. Then you get the dreaded wall of text experience where you can’t find the relevant details when you need them in play (and this can be critical to the functioning of the game-thing, such as clues for an upcoming trap, rumors about a nearby area, prophesies of a future doom, or weaknesses of a specific enemy).

The degree to which a game-thing, as game-thing, is game-functional is the number of affordances from the game-thing that are enabled to arise in actual play, and the degree to which the non-affordance aspects of the game-thing get out of the way. This is, I suspect, why so many game products work so poorly at the game table, despite being creative and enjoyable to read.

In the recent Legends & Lore article, Mike suggests that ability score improvements could be a simple alternative for feats. This is not something I would use, because I don’t think it’s a well-crafted trade-off: a bland bonus that is likely to affect the thing you do most often versus something specific that might add some texture. It also encourages numerical inflation.

The suggestion that it will be common for characters to “raise their key ability to 20” seems particularly unfortunate. Players often use ability scores as a form of personality profile. How boring is it that all melee fighters will ultimately have 20 strength? Isn’t class level (with attack bonus and so forth) supposed to capture the idea of progression in class competency?

Having a prestige class be essentially a preselected feat chain is not a bad idea though (sort of the high level equivalent of the lower level “specialties”) and is easy to tie into the setting diegetically, which I like. It also allows people who enjoy complex character builds the opportunity to mix and match feats but means that players who are not interested in that minutiae can just go by high level flavor, like Warhammer careers.

I don’t think there should be any mechanical prerequisites for feats though, except maybe level. Needing to consider the dependency graph for feats in earlier editions is a big contributor to the overwhelming complexity of the feat system. The model for magic-user spells is a good one, from a game design perspective. Distributing the spells over multiple levels keeps the initial complexity down, but allows for significant individualization of characters over the course of play.

It has long been thought that many old school gaming principles are fundamentally reinventions and reinterpretations rather than rediscoveries. Here is more evidence for that, from N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God, page 20:

The DM must remember that it is important that the party get to the dungeon. Encounters that are obviously too strong for the group (especially if they have been weakened by previous encounters) should be reduced or bypassed—for example, the party might come across a predator’s kill or war party’s trail instead of the the actual monsters; or they might be able to sneak past a monster that is otherwise engaged. On the other hand, a very strong party might encounter up to double the number of creatures or more. In all cases the DM should match the challenge to party strength and to the general flow of the adventure.

Basic D&D has some similar advice, but the text from N1 is notable in that A) it is even more explicit and B) it occurs in the first “beginner” module, ostensibly designed to teach new referees and players how the game works. N stands for “novice-level” and N1 was published in 1982. If this passage was found in a recently written module by someone like James Raggi or Matt Finch, it would be considered the rankest of heresies.

Personally, I prefer OSR distrust of predetermination and balance over the TSR advice. Why bother even putting numbers to challenges beforehand if you are just going to scale them to party strength? Why roll dice if you are not willing to live with the result?

Anything that is a threat to PCs can also potentially be used by PCs creatively.

Vincent Baker on the role of the GM in DitV:

Most importantly, don’t have an answer already in mind. GMing Dogs is a different thing from playing it. Your job as the GM is to present an interesting social situation and provoke the players into judging it. You don’t want to hobble their judgments by arguing with them about what’s right and wrong, nor by creating situations where right and wrong are obvious. You want to hear your players’ opinions, not to present your own.

— Dogs in the Vineyard, page 124

There are a number of interesting parallels here to what high-quality D&D play is for me. In a sandbox game, you don’t want to hobble the choices of players in terms of where they should go or how they should approach a problem, nor create situations where there is a clear optimal solution. There should always be interesting trade-offs, whether those trade-offs are spending more time to be more careful or taking one route rather than another.

I’ve yet to play Dogs, and it’s always hard to get a sense of how an RPG will play just by reading it, but this looks to me like the social hazards are somewhat isomorphic to the D&D dungeon. Not in a plot sense, as is sometimes discussed (where dungeon-like event flow charts are created), but more like a set of potential connections between various NPCs and their interests.

In D&D, making a physical choice is almost always what engages the risk/reward system, whereas in Dogs the act of judgment engages the risk/reward system. Judgment is more abstract, which is perhaps why the stake setting system is required. The same kind of thing is going on in D&D, it’s just that what is at stake is usually more obvious, and so requires less mechanical centrality.

Image from Wikipedia

There are primarily two types of resolution system. The first kind is pass/fail, which I will call binary. The attack roll and saving throw are examples. The second kind has multiple degrees of success. I will refer to the second kind as a spectrum system. Examples of spectrum systems include the variable damage roll, the 2d6 reaction roll, and the Apocalypse World roll.

To complicate this taxonomy, binary systems are often actually limited spectrum systems, but with possibilities for super success and super failure results at the extreme ends of the possibility set (or auto-hit and auto-miss). Considering the attack roll, Natural 20s and natural 1s are examples of this sort of system, as are critical hits and fumbles. These systems are still closer to binary than not though, and I’m going to put them aside for the moment.

Many people play without using any spectrum system other than the damage roll. The 2d6 reaction roll was even removed from WotC versions of D&D. For myself, I find the spectrum systems very important. Here are a few examples of five-fold 2d6 rolls that I commonly use (with the exception of the magic roll, which is still a work in progress).

When using the weather system, I apply reaction penalties by season (winter is -2, autumn and spring are -1).

Thanks to Christopher Wood from Carapace King for the suggestion of the term resolution spectrum.

There has been some discussion recently about what it means to play a role in an RPG. Is it just making decisions about a unit like in a war game, or does it involve trying to get inside the head of an imaginary character? My general take is that it can be either depending on the player, but that the weight of that role playing is in setting interaction and the notoriety that a character builds up within the game.

A character’s personality is created based on what they actually do. It’s all well and good to write “coward” on the sheet, but if the character tends to charge into battle, then the actual personality of that character is foolhardy or impetuous, not cowardly, and this arises out of actual play.