Not all knowledge is transitive, even in closely related fields. It’s also easy to get dazzled by the most prestigious thing around. Video games are hot. Pen and paper? Not so much. In some ways, fantasy literature will always be cooler than D&D, but that doesn’t mean D&D has to be more like fantasy literature.

Popular media exerts an influence on the way we think that goes beyond digestible opinions to how we structure ideas. I’m reminded of a piece Jaron Lanier wrote where he suggested that computers would trounce the Turing Test not because they’re more convincingly human, but because computers are training us to behave more like chatbots.

Lest you think some romantic, Luddite call’s on the way, I’d say the failure here is technological – and it will be overcome, given time. Computers aren’t getting smart enough, fast enough. They have trouble expressing ideas in fuzzy, weirdly associated clusters.  They need set classes with specific associations. We don’t – so tabletop RPGs don’t.

We have capabilities that video games will eventually emulate, but might also ignore in favour of an audience that accepts a different way of interacting as we get used to thinking like the machine. We’ve also learned to value thinking this, with literalness and specificity, perhaps at the expense of our other abilities.

For example, when we look at the old Storyteller system, we see a lot of game systems that are designed around the fuzzy rules of language. We construct dice pools based on what their component traits mean in plain English, or in gamer slang (where Dexterity is used for gross motor agility more often than it is in non-gamer English). In more recent games such as D&D3e, 4e and so some extent, Storytelling (post2004 World of Darkness) we define traits based on set characteristics and relationships outside of fuzzy language, and the name is really shorthand for those characteristics. Strength is defined as a thing that provides attack roll bonuses more than attack roll bonuses being a natural consequence of being strong.

I’m glad we imported this into pen and paper RPG design, but I’m not so hot on devaluing fuzzier ways of knowing. An “objective” design requires use to train the audience to reverse its semiotic reflexes and think of the word as the “unreal” simulation, and the characteristics as reality. It also denies us a certain amount of fruitful confusion of the kind I always loved in games like Mage: The Ascension, but which might happen in any RPG.

I know lots of gamers have bad memories of this sort of thing coming to bite them on the ass (I have those too) but I also remember those fading as I grew to make friends with other players, and that the very act of negotiating meaning through language was a key to that rapport. It seems to be a stronger bond than that generated by systems and contracts because in its fuzziness, it must be flexible to catch transforming meanings and unanticipated connotations.

That’s good stuff. Let’s keep it around.

On a couple of occasions I’ve said that you need time, resources and talent to consistently produce good work. If you’re missing any of these, your game, supplement or whatever is going to suffer, and not just in ways you can easily anticipate. Yes, the writing can just suck, but what happens when a good writer doesn’t have time to thoroughly refine her work? What if she doesn’t get paid enough to give it the word count and attention it deserves?

Work that falls short due to deficits in time, resources and talent hits print all the time. For example, I see a lot of “little big,” games out there: books that have been shrunk to a smaller format to buff their page count. Or you get something like Geist which is full to the brim with funky ideas, but suffers from a short development cycle that left a lot of systems (including the ones I worked on – I really owe the fans an unofficial revision) looking wacky.

In an age where fewer outfits have all the time, talent and resources they need, the easy solution is to redefine the hobby as something that doesn’t need as much of each. Sing the praises of little games. Retreads. Toolkits. There are other reasons to like each of these, but they’re not the New Hotness just because of an intellectual sea change in the ol’ hobb-dustry. It’s because we can afford to churn them out.

When I write for money, I try to create large chunks of well-integrated work for because that I think gamers can create less elaborate material all by themselves. Some very talented hobbyists out there could write the Big Stuff, but talent is a just third of the game. On contract, I’m blessed with enough time and motivation to write an entire alternate combat system for a game. “Off the clock,” I’m happy to just hack and annotate somebody else’s rules. That tells me that as a gamer, I don’t really want to buy small, isolated things I can just plug in. I can do by myself.

Same thing with short adventure hooks. Does anyone really think they can’t do without them?

I came to this conclusion while I was assessing my Hundred Millionth Day campaign, which has now strayed some distance from its ultra-orthodox AD&D1e roots. Part of me thought I should mix it up with an open source clone and release a whole game, but after picking at it I’ve come around to thinking that even over 50% hacked and modded AD&D still isn’t the same as an original game – and it shouldn’t be.

This conclusion didn’t come overnight, though, and I’ve produced lots of stuff that probably isn’t up to the standards I have now – plus, as I said earlier, there is some short, hacky stuff that really is worth your dime, because despite other constraints, the talent side of the equation really shines.

In AD&D1e, social systems exist to determine whether an NPC is going to attack or shake hands, hang tough or flee, or be loyal or treacherous. They don’t take the form of a character resource (like 3e’s Diplomacy) marshalled against NPC resources. The situation instead creates modifiers to a 50/50 default, and break points (enemy reduced to half hit points, henchman given cheddar) arise where you check for a change in the social weather.

Function

Where does Vampire come into this? On one hand, the game could benefit from strong social systems — including systems that affect PCs — but you can’t overshadow supernatural powers and compulsions — the Beast, or Presence. One of the best ways to do this is to get out of the socialize-as-combat model and explore other constructive things and ask: What do Vampire PCs do socially? Answers:

• Wheedle information and favours
• Embarrass enemies and give friends status
• Change what people think of them
• Meet people and create social networks

Form

I thought of breaking these down into three domains based on Attribute, but that’s not how Storyteller works; attributes measure things we can talk about in concrete terms instead of metagame conveniences. If we go for the method favoured by Storytelling and newer games we lose the ability to reflexively determine dice pools, because we end up with attributes that don’t mean things we can grasp without mastering the system.

I do like three categories, though, so let’s go with:

Relationship Building: Two or more characters try to build a social advantage between themselves. Examples:

• Romance (they develop mutual rapport)
• Covert communication (they build a “secret language” of innuendo or other factors)
• Institutions and ideologies

Storyteller already has rules for acting in concert and combining successes. We’ll use these for relationship building. Passing on a message through innuendo might require a Manipulation + Expression from the sender, and a Wits + Expression from the receiver, with a target of 3-5 successes. Creating a cult that mostly runs itself might require a dozen of more Charisma + Occult successes. These are measures of how impressive the feat is, not how hard each step is to take — that’s a function of difficulty rating.

Impressions: The character tries to modify his status in the community — this is a matter of type, not just degree. Examples:

• Escape notice (or be extra notable)
• Be popular (or unpopular)
• Be a certain kind of popular (known to be badass, smart, etc.)
• Saving face

To make this system work you need to measure how strong an effect the character needs to achieve (successes), and how hard it is to get done in the relevant scene (difficulty). I’d use trait-based signals to establish thresholds here. 3 or 4 + the Status Background of the person or group you’re trying to impress might be suitable to make an impression at a party.

Sway/Power-Over: Lastly, we’ve got the “social combat” stuff folks go for — sometimes it’s the right way to go. Like standard combat, the core engine is a series of opposed rolls, but there isn’t  Health analogue and an inescapable consequence — and thanks to the role of Disciplines, there can’t be. If controlling your mind is a power, straightforward social sway makes that power kind of suck.

You might get around this through a “damage or dare” system. The player can choose between performing an action or applying a penalty linked directly to the system: Willpower loss, a dice roll penalty, etc. The game or Storyteller could apply a price list based on service, or five degrees of general severity, and room for haggling.

Combine Them

Develop interactions between each subsystem. Examples:

• When you build a relationship, its value in combined successes becomes the number of successes you need to fracture it through sway-type social attacks.
• Build a powerful institution with a strong impression. A successful stunt to get attention creates a “seed” of successes that can be increased by allies’ efforts.
• Use social “combat” on the ability to steal the successes used by your enemy to make an impression. He builds himself up — you tear him down.

I can think of more specific systems for create social durations, resistances and so on, but they all spring from using these three “channels” in concert. And even if these specific methods don’t hit you, stepping outside of “social fight” thinking has plenty of potential.

In my experience, gamers thick into the hobby love being literary, cinematic, or genre-y because they think (but might not admit) that tabletop RPGs are inferior pastimes, and that they need to redeem them by hitching them to more prestigious art forms — or failing that, to “real games,” defined as either popular games like CCGs or family games like Settlers of Catan or Monopoly. That’s the inferiority complex I talked about in the Suck article, and it’s driven much last two decades of RPG design.

Back in the Suck post I talked about three factors that combine to make RPG play experiences distinctive. Individually, they’re nothing special, but mix ‘em up and they provide the best reasons to play.

Place: Place is the sense of being in a fictional location. It’s the easiest part of the triad to nail. That’s the dungeon and hexes on the map, but it’s also about the relationships between places, such as trade routes, magical gates and war torn borders. Although RPGs focused on place early on, systematic work on place is uncommon, and often leans a bit too much on conceptual translations from video games (“zoning”). I think non-systematic work on place has led to a thick stew of ideas that newer systems fail to pick up — and since new game designers like to basically talk about how terrible what came before was, looking back isn’t usually a priority unless it’s for sentimental, anti-intellectual reasons — y’know, OSR style.

Society: Society could be the dynamics of a clique or a fictional nation — anything that helps us figure out what the fictional moral agents of the game think, do and relate to each other. Vampire: The Masquerade represented a huge step forward in thinking about society by using relationship maps and social rules that were gameable inside the story world, and not just in systems removed a step from the fiction.

The society concept has really degenerated due to systematization. Most social resolution systems aim for a false equivalence with violence, which is both sad and vaguely offensive (do I really “attack” someone to woo them?). This is not to say that social systems are bad, but they say things about the game’s world view.

In system or fiction, society sets expectations about the game’s values. My AD&D game’s social break points make mercy and negotiation central assumptions of the world, and leads to some powerful moments when enemies (like undead) don’t follow them. In Indigo, the anarchist command staff needed to present arguments that went to the mass of the ship’s crew. In Vampire, manipulating the rules of an Elysium or Conclave is a game within the game.

Time: Time — momentum in the story world — is probably the quality most in danger of being sacrificed to the gamer inferiority complex. Time is tricky, because we can let it just happen as something purely attached to character actions, but that leads to a hollow, repetitive play experience. Nowadays, people are so afraid that anything the GM does will make our inferiority-battered players feel even worse that nothing of consequence can be allowed to happen outside of characters’ pond.

Let me use visual metaphors. Conventional story is looking through a microscope. You can’t see much in that little circle, but you can see it exceptionally closely. Creators need to pack information into that tiny field, and imply things about the world beyond it, but rarely get to tell the reader that she’s insignificant because she can only see one tiny, bounded territory. You never want to imply that some microbes 1 mm outside the specimen dish are in the midst of this awesome epic that’s way better that the amoebic drama you get to see.

In RPGs, you stand up from the microscope, get a magnifying glass and look around. It’s impossible to build these contrived tableaux “on dish.” You’ll shove your magnifying glass anywhere! GMs have tried to solve this problem by screaming, “No, look at the fucking dish!” The newer, “indie” method is to create a tautology where looking at the dish is the only permissible form of looking, and didn’t you contractually agree to it, and isn’t asking what’s over there exactly like caning a child? One retro method is to talk about how In Ye Olde Days, Hexe I-10 Didst Hold Paramecia So Fierce,” and then boot everybody into the nearest dungeon, where the GM could constrain your vision again.

A dynamic setting allows things to happen that are not merely backstory, but matter to the world on its own terms — and yes, even letting important things happen to *someone else.* We do not do this to upstage the protagonists. We do it because we want the players to feel less constrained about where they point the spyglass, and so that they have the opportunity to create their *own* sense of importance. A world that’s all hooks is always less interesting.

Peer Mode

Definition: Peer mode supplements game rules and essential customs with goals and standards drawn from an imagined community (real or not) — so much so that the relationship with the community can overshadow play.

Examples:

• The “golden rule” appears at this stage.
• Gamers post to social websites asking what the “consensus” is about a game.
• “Actual Play” becomes a ritual to legitimize a game or play style, even to the point where its representations of play are inaccurate.
• A game group develops censorship and conduct codes and discusses “triggers” of upset, often in elaborate or ritualized detail.
• Vampire: The Masquerade clanbooks lay out how you ought to play members of each vampire clan.

Details: Peer mode’s a real problem nowadays because it’s deeply tied to the Web. Before the internet, communicating outside of your group was a high-latency affair; you waited a month, quarter or year between inputs from outside your group — plenty of time to explore playcraft autonomously. Peer mode existed before the internet, however; close players are peers too.

Peer mode is where you start formulating what constitutes good or proper gaming beyond self-centred interests, but not within a larger theoretical architecture.  You and your peers muddle along, driven by whatever influences you bring into the game in a non-systemic fashion. You think of good gaming not in terms of artistic goals, but answers to questions. In fact, this mode can encourage a shallow anti-structural stance because your peers areeverything. “Just don’t be a dick,” is a common peer mode sentiment. This is an answer begging for elaboration, which it only gets in haphazard tactical positions: spot answers to questions, confusion and challenges.

(Lots of RPG theories are really peer mode tools. It’s a set of vague words used to develop tactical responses. Peer mode is also the primary mode used by marketers.)

If you say the internet expands your real time peer group, you’d be simplifying it; it really represents an alternate peer group that overlaps with people you really game with. This is occasionally useful, often disastrous, and can even represent a type of play related to, but not the same as, conventional game play. What we’re witnessing is a whole set of performances for the online peer group that don’t necessarily lead to better TRPG play. We now often mediate the interests of multiple imagined communities: peer groups we visualize as having certain tastes and responses that we want to appease. 

On a more positive note, peer play represents the first stage of normative play morality. While we never totally outgrow other modes, adopting peer mode represents the kind of maturity you expect from older teenagers and later. Valuing others’ opinions is essential to peer mode. Ironically, stepping up to peer mode away from the “wars” of other modes mean that we start thinking less of individuals, and more of “good” power blocs and what might impress them.

The best thing about peer mode is that this is where we start to think about breaking the rules for the sake of the group, but it isn’t essential to do so.

Here’s what peer mode groups need:

• Referents: As peers concentrate on smooth interpersonal relationships, their need for specific objects to provide context only increases. They need to agree about things, not just about being agreeable. One of the easiest examples to look at is Mind’s Eye Theatre games, where details about combat and power use actually increase in importance despite the fact that it’s supposed to be a social game. This happens because fairness is important to most peer groups, and that value needs a firm context to express itself in. On the other hand, peer mode promises freedom from rules, because they’re a means to an end in the people, not the game. Nevertheless, groups need specifics to use as props in performances where they demonstrate how much they want to make peer play work. Groups in this mode often talk shit about game systems because they need systems to be “broken;” those provide an opportunity to demonstrate peer loyalty by “fixing” them.
• Tactical Consensus: Peer mode relies on bringing people together to consider what they want on a case by case basis. These are not conscious aesthetic positions, but they can be organized enough to work with broad hypothetical scenarios. Make yourself understood by grabbing a referent, assign it some significance, utter a rallying cry and appeal to your peers. You need to fix a combat system, maintain discipline in Clan Ventrue, or promote your favourite system. You might ape an overarching justification for why you have these tastes, but at this stage it’s a ruse; you really want agreement.

Next time: Fundamentalist Mode.

Definition: The egoistic play mode uses both explicit game rules (usually a technical text) and customs of play (passed on orally or through non-technical text) to fix player roles and manipulate relative status between players.

Examples:

• All games which assign the GM a miscellaneous authority
• D&D’s fighters are expected to be among the primary close combatants in an action scene. When the fighter’s player accepts this role and performs well, the group approves. If the player has her fighter cower or she makes a serious tactical error, she’ll lose status in the group.
• A game group falls into a pattern where one player is the leader, one is the jester, and another quietly serves a support role across multiple stories.
• Aeternal Legends provides a system where system-defined expert characters get “first crack” at a task in order to keep non-experts with extroverted players from talking over the expert’s player.

Details: In egoistic play, the stakes are social status and role assignment. Subjection, which retaliatory mode thrust us into to make us feel pain and pleasure when game systems operate, turns into the target of play. Social status is what tells us how much we can quantitatively influence activity at the table; role assignment determines what type of influence we are permitted to have.

Social status and role assignment are closely linked, to the point where some roles automatically grant a status advantage. The GM is the easiest example to cite, because so many games give GMs sweeping powers. One of the classic mistakes made by other theories is to assume the conventional GM is just a degree of status, and get obsessed with the role as a power locus that needs to be controlled or broken up. But there are low status GMs and high status players, too.

In egoistic mode, roles tend to be fixed to particular players; the traditional player/character or person/player isn’t really up and running, so players tend to stick to roles in the group after a period where they negotiate (argue, stare meaningfully, write dreary basis of unity statements) for the choicest pickings in the set of roles everyone recognizes, consciously or not. This fixedness actually intensifies competition. People holding advantageous roles (party leader, “the chosen one,” GM) struggle to hold the advantage, while low-status players negotiate for power or subvert the significance of their roles, other roles, or all roles.

To make this work, game groups move from retaliatory mode initiation to instrumentalization: the process of making the player not just a subject to be administered by the direct application of texts, but as a tool for the regulation of power between participants — but this can’t happen until the group figures out two things.

• Role Definition: It’s easy to identify the GM, but harder to figure out what the other roles are — you might slip into one without even knowing. The game’s text, gaming traditions and broader cultural borrowings all determine the cast of roles. For example, D&D’s character classes influence the roles that pop up in the game. But in Toy Dogma, the “fighter” is not a role — the “guy who plays the fighter” is.
• Status Signs: Culture and game also determine which signs represent status. Signs like talking over other players or getting more “spotlight time” are performances that assert the will and right to power over the game. (This is why extra attention and success even situations that are supposed to be handled with mechanistic systems seem to go together — or haven’t you noticed that the popular guy wins more?)

Again, these are related. Your role determines which sorts of status performances you’re permitted.

None of the above should be considered to be inherently positive. In fact, griefing is a powerful “status performance.” So is nitpicking.

5.3 next. That’s the Peer Mode.

No Telepathy Rule: One of the big problems with current game theory is that it jumps between mindblind solitude and an idealized shared space. I don’t write anything that assumes that if we get everything right we’ll mystically share an experience. Toy Dogma takes a frank look at power relationships as they exist even in “good games.”

It’s Only a Model: Toy Dogma is post-structural, in that while it introduces narratives and schemes about how we play and design TRPGs, these are types of play themselves; I’m making idea-toys to reveal something about how roleplaying games work, not to talk about precisely described essential properties. Those might exist, but nobody will know what they are without some Singularity-bullshit style leap in our understanding of human thinking. If you believe your ideas really hit an “essence” you’ll end up writing about “brain damage” or saying that women are evolutionarily incapable of liking D&D as much as men. The Toy Dogma is sincere, but everybody’s sincere about things that have arbitrary schemes.

Crisitunity Friendly: One of the mots common reactions I get is, “Say, isn’t (problem) necessary to make things work at all?” Sure —  but play and design issues are often the flipside of necessity. Jason Corley has repeated my point about the role of marketing in the development of RPG theory, and problems acknowledging intractable and paradoxical issues spring from theory’s relationship to salesmanship.

To sell you something, a theory has to claim that it represents a “step forward.” That’s crack the theory and design communities have got to stop smoking. The current divided state of D&D fandom is the most prominent example of how thinking your game “progresses” leaves people behind.

A lot of my stuff talks about (and will talk about) issues that either can’t be fixed, or can be good or bad, depending on how we approach them. 5.1′s retaliatory play (especially initiation) is an example of this. Bad stuff can be good stuff. Bad stuff can be necessary. Instead of digging for a term with a nice pedigree, I’ll go with a Simpsons-ism: “crisitunity.” Toy Dogma is crisitunity-friendly.

Man, this is going to take a while. I’m going to root through some other theory to get there, too — more work! So I’ll start with the first stage:

Retaliatory Mode

Definition: A retaliatory play mode drives player actions and attitudes with punishments and rewards directly (or nearly directly) administered through explicit rules — typically those supplied in the game’s text.

Examples:

• A  player portraying an adventurer easily slays an orc. This irritates the GM responsible for the encounter. The GM introduces a demon that kills the adventurer’s player.
• A GMing advice section tells you to punish characters (damage them, belittle them, etc.) when players behave in some “difficult” fashion. These consequences are determined prior to any naturalistic effect that might arise from the game’s story. A dragon could get you at any time, but this dragon did because the GM is angry, not because the Fictionian Wastelands features roaming dragons.
• Mind’s Eye Theatre features a player-run Status Trait economy that leaders use to punish unpopular characters, and reward popular ones.
• If your character turns to the Dark Side in the original (West End Games) Star Wars RPG, you hand your character over to the GM, losing the ability to play him — just as if he had died.
• Exalted awards “stunt dice” for interesting descriptions of actions.

Details: Direct rewards and punishments are explicitly built into game texts or play practices, or attached through a very strong implication of what a player ought to desire, and what he or she ought to dislike. For example, a D&D player in this mode views hit point loss (and character death) as punishment and XP as a reward.

This contrasts with a primarily indirect reward or punishment where (for example) a player receives praise when her character gets damaged doing something entertaining.

It should be noted (thank you Lee Short — see the comments) that in this mode, punishments are usually more prominent than rewards, even if the text or group doesn’t come right out and say so. Consider D&D, where the reward system has grown relatively weaker (balanced adventures represent a “treadmill” so levels and items primarily allow characters to keep pace) while punishments (hit point loss, penalizing conditions) are the most common game effects. (I should note that punishments are also more “balanced” because the game is designed to specifically act as a check on retaliatory GMs.)

Lots of upsetting experiences grow out of retaliatory mode play, but it also lays a dangerously compelling foundation for play and design. Its lack of ambiguity makes it easy to link behaviour to rules and traditions — as long as players understand their roles as the subjects of these tactics. Retaliatory mode sucks, but it’s easy to design for.

It’s seductive. You might end up assuming that’s just how games are without a boss or boss-text to control things.

Retaliatory mode lays bare a basic truth:  With or without supporting texts, the game group makes players believe its rules and traditions constitute meaningful rewards and punishments, and that people identify with the constructed person/position they act upon.

Many of these customs aren’t explicitly taught because people often grasp them reflexively. (Some aren’t explicitly taught because even though they’re bizarre, the group is too insular to know that such-and-such-a-thing is weird, but that’s hard to spin theory about) Examples:

• “I am my character.”
• “The GM is emotionally invested in the game world.”
• “The more social influence one has in the world, the better.”

The retaliatory mode introduces a twofold play initiation that gamers carry through sessions, perhaps even into games that are supposed to be very different from the ones they were initiated into. (We’ll go through different initiations throughout out lives. I think some key initiations especially affect how we play ever after — our first, the ones we associate with making new friends, those related to life stages, sex and other Big Things). It also transfers to other modes — it’s a core part of adopting a TRPG.

Play initiation at this stage includes:

• Discipline: Texts and oral traditions enforce ideas about what pain and pleasure mean during the game. One game measures success (pleasure) as triumph over a monster, and failure (pain) as being eaten, beaten or driven away. Another links pleasure to the ability to make a desired story event occur.
• Subjection: The group forces players to identify with the target of discipline. Retaliatory play fails when you do not identify with the character, or identify a narrative you’re building with part of your personal story. If you are not your character, you cannot feel the character’s pain or pleasure; retaliatory play in a game with player characters has little power over you. (This does not require “immersion,” by the way. The type of investment is flexible, as long as it is facilitates discipline.)

That’s it for now. 5.2 will explore the Egoistic Mode.

• In TRPGs, participants communicate using rules and customs to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not yet defined.

. . . but there’s one more thing: our guard against absurd arguments about some impossible tabula rasa:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate using rules and customs to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not entirely defined.

We need guidance right from the beginning, though these bits (genres, mission statements, core stories) are subject to interpretation. Bad game theory promotes these initial definitions into a kind of church; follow the doctrine or fuck off. Play is obedience is play.

But this wasn’t always what we meant by play. What happened? It would be too easy to get into sappy talk about child’s play. Child’s play can be vicious; kids haven’t learned who has status, when to speak and when to shut up. They can be casually cruel. It’s the land of Lawrence Kohlberg’s first two stages of moral development, and a bit of his third.

(Note that this little trip of mine is not dogmatic Kohlberg. He ain’t perfect — Carol Gilligan’s critique is the best known. He’s too focused on formal polities as moral instruments. His framework is interesting, and I’m warping it as I go.)

Kohlberg also talks about “higher” post-conventional morality and here discusses a concept whose name will excite certain gamers: the social contract. The notable thing about social contracts as Kohlberg defines them is that they have little to do with the failed RPG theory of social contracts. Focused on “being on the same page,” rigid sets of expectations, and reward/punishment systems, dead-theory mechanisms prod players through a stage one (moral choices from fear of punishment) to restricted stage four (code-driven — Christian Fundamentalism is an example) framework. Highly defined notions of genre and convention (“back to the dungeon,” or a “Golden Age” implying an inescapable historical process) have the same purpose, through it’s rendered less formally.

The term “social contract” is poisoned; we have to use something else. Fortunately, Kohlberg’s notion of the social contract also marks a point where we can look to his critics and pull back from an overly academic, political context (Kohlberg tends to identify “higher morality” with sheer scale, and with formal institutions that carry Big Moral Plans out — the problems are easy to see) and into a style of interpersonal relationships that recognizes:

1. We possess different interests, and that diversity usually tolerable, if not intrinsically valuable. (If everybody was the same, we’d get bored.)
2. We also possess common rational interests that can often be inferred from early-stage development. (Avoid pain, seek pleasure, play that utilitarian banjo.)

The natural conclusion is that we must fairly negotiate the role of our differences in various contexts. This unites our differences and our common self-interests into a single process. This fairness does not, however, require a fixed set of rules to “get on the same page” or any of that bullshit.

Kohlberg discusses a “prior to society” perspective, but this is a bit grandiose. Certainly, we must return to primordial, progressive honesty as best we can to evaluate the most fulfilling way to play from moment to moment, and  ideally, this region of our thinking comes before we apply rules and customs, but we’ll always get a little “dirty” with other concerns — we are never in a pure place.

We’re starting to create a process, answer a question from last time: What kind of communication takes place?

Negotiation. Constant negotiation. Simple and complicated negotiation. Negotiation where each party believes something different happened but it still works out.

Second question: How do participants use rules and customs while communicating?

The answers depend on our moral commitment to the game. Let’s come up with some stages:

1. Retaliatory (“You killed the Big Bad? ROCKS FALL, EVERYONE DIES,” or “Escalation.”)
2. Egoistic (“Look at me! Look at the GMPC!” or “Bringing the Awesome.”)
3. Peer Pressure (“This is how you play a proper Tremere,” or “I will never abandon you.”)
4. Fundamentalist (“System Does Matter” and D20-supremacist dogma)
5. Interpersonal (“How do you feel? How do you want to feel?” This mature mode of gaming is our realistic goal. Negotiation with a respect for difference.)

Beyond this, I could posit a Transpersonal Stage moral commitment, where social good and high level artistic achievements take centre stage, but Kohlberg’s already-shaky structure loses its grounding.

But what about those kids? A moment ago I looked down on idealized childhood roleplaying, but in the West (and maybe elsewhere) we’ve got life stages where we bounce around: adolescence where we roam around the first three stages as we try to find a place in the power structure, and early adulthood, where, conventional identities in hand, we appear to fall back into an antisocial low stage when we’re really arguing with cultural norms — and as often as not, that argument is a good idea.

Coincidentally, these life stages — these “Fuck the Law” eras — are also where most gaming takes place. That’s what some dated market research says, anyway.

Basically, we do most of our TRP gaming during volatile periods where we might be at our worst, but which also have the potential to liberate us from being boring, obsessed with social conventions and base reward/punishment cycles. When we’ve been hurt by this it’s easy to get stuck fixing things with rules — that’s how society, with its naturally low opinion of the us (the mob), already regulates our behaviour.

Toy Dogma is more optimistic. It craves the dangerous realm of play because post-fundamentalist play demands we listen to each other now, and not just during design or setup. It’s hard to listen when rules tell you to shut up, how to speak or what to say. We know we’ll bounce around different levels of commitment. Games help us; they don’t rule us. We play with them like toys.

I’ve really grown to love AD&D1e as a game of its own, however, and understand it now much better than I did when I was a child, playing Dragonlance or running my own game world hacked together out of Dragon Magazine articles, canned modules and seat-of-the-pants improvisation. AD&D1e is a grownup game, believe it or not: an RPG that requires a slow, deliberate exploration of your options, plenty of discussion and a willingness to look up fiddly bits. I used to think that this was an indictment of the game’s design, but I got turned around from a chat with Ed Greenwood where he talked about his encounters with wargamers and how “slow” they seemed, while the deliberated over the next moves on huge hex maps. This also explains why 1e’s text meanders so damn much; organization was just not as big deal when collectively touring the books is part of the ride.

Once you look closely, you come to understand that with all the bells and whistles intact, AD&D1e is a game of remarkable cohesion and subtlety. You can encounter some crazy things, but encounter reactions determine whether you’ll step right in to a fight. Charisma is an extraordinarily powerful ability score because it influences henchman and hireling numbers and loyalty. Weapon vs. AC adjustments justify the large weapon table. So do the special abilities of certain weapons. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s not just a bunch of crazy shit hacked together in the way even supporters claim. It sure seemed that way to me when I was a teenager, but I played it in an impatient, edited form. It looks to me that this half-game is the AD&D OSRIC emulates.

Most of the changes I’ve made have been ways to keep the behaviour of the system while appeasing my generation’s decreased patience. For example, even though I use increasing AC, I add -5/+5 modifiers at 1 and 20, respectively to emulate the old tables. I’ve shifted to a 20-sided die where possible. I use a universal ability score table, but it has three entries per score – between them, I can emulate most of the older mechanics.

Changes to the real output of the system are only just starting to establish themselves. I added critical hits (If a natural 20 is also a hit). The biggest change I’ve made is to eliminate the daily rest requirement for magic user spells. MUs now have a study time per spell slot equal to 1 + spell level hours, and a slot “recharge” time of the same duration. Spell slots represent the maximum number that can be memorized and ready to go at any given time.

Eventually, this will turn into its own game, and I might even publish it. For now, I’m enjoying designing a game the old fashioned way, how most of us do game design in the beginning, but unlike many people – including a younger me – I’m not fixing something broken. I’m learning the cut of the suit, appreciating the craftsmanship, and tailoring it with care.