On Discourse.
I’ve been writing bits and pieces for tabletop role-playing games for just over a year now and if there’s a single piece of advice I’d pass on to anyone starting anew it’s this: don’t bother with the Discourse.
Capital D Discourse, that is. Discussing, debating, and arguing with fellow creators is part of any art form (especially one so early in its development) but Discourse takes on a very specific meaning in rpgs: Tired, played out discussions and arguments over short form social media platforms that swirl around for months and years, spawning entrenched camps who squabble for so long they can barely remember the original point of division. An exhaustive definition is difficult but once you’ve been around long enough, it’s a bit like porn or fascism - you know it when you see it.
I take the stance that capital D Discourse is, at best, basically never worth engaging in and, at worst, actively damaging to the hobby. This might be an uphill battle persuasively - everyone seems to love the mud pit, popular creators notwithstanding - but hopefully I can provide some alternatives to where we’re at now.
Nothing good comes from Discourse.
I’d like to start off by telling a little story. About 8 (?) months ago, another writer in the industry was being dogpiled on for a poorly phrased tweet that seemed to criticise another game when they really intended to praise it. A number of well known creators joined in on this, even past the point that the original poster had clarified what they had meant. I felt that they had been unfairly maligned and responded to the thread that had been the catalyst for the dogpile. During the same period, I had been talking to a distributor about getting print copies of one of my games sold in their store. Shortly after the response tweet went up, I found that they had blocked me on twitter and from that point they stopped responding to my emails. Clearly they didn’t feel the same way that I did about the situation. As the week passed, the drama faded into obscurity but the bridge remained burned.
The point of this tale is not to say “don’t share what you think for fear of being blacklisted by other people in the industry” but to highlight how easily even a minor infraction can have significant consequences for a small creator. Most distribution operations in the indie ttrpg space are run by one or two people so getting on their bad books can limit you significantly. And I understand that a lot of you upon hearing this will go “well, screw them. I shouldn’t have to limit my speech for their sake” and I agree with you but, fuck it man, I was out of a job at the time and that money would have been really useful to pay bills. Losing out on that just wasn’t worth commenting on a drama that everyone forgot about within the month.
Ultimately, you just have to weigh up what you’re getting out of participating in stuff like this. At best, you might get a bit of clout, which you can achieve anyway by just writing good books. At worst, if someone is having a bad day, misreads what you’re trying to say, or has decided that your opinion on a niche topic within a niche field is worth not engaging with you permanently, you might lose out on future opportunity
(Obviously if you don’t give a shit about trying to make a living from this stuff then this doesn’t really matter and you can go nuts. YMMV, weigh it up yourself).
All Discourse is performative.
Here are three topics that I have seen rotate around twittersphere repeatedly and constantly:
Which ideology produces better roleplaying games, Storygames or OSR/Trad Games?
Is railroading bad gamemastering and/or morally evil?
Does system matter?
These discussions have gone on for so long, have been passed around so many times that I’d stake that almost everything there has to be said about them, has already been said. At this point, the phrase “system matters” may as well be a sleeper agent activation phrase for the majority of internet-brained games writers. Except, instead of doing cool spy shit, they just get really annoying for half an hour. Let’s face it, even if there was more to be said on these topics, you probably won’t be the one saying them.
For my money, these recurring arguments are no longer about advancing discussion in any meaningful way. Rather, participating in them is a form of belief signalling. If I’m an osr/trad creator, for example, I’m likely to extol the virtues of sandbox play and how it produces more meaningful roleplaying experiences because that’s what’s going to play well to my audience (and also because my products reflect these values). It’s marketing, basically.
The easiest litmus test for me on the genuinity of someone trying to push a specific game theory position is to see if they’ve bothered to write anything about it in a more structured, longform medium. Most tabletop creators call themselves writers, so, if they’re committed to discussing these specific topics ad nauseam, why won’t they write an essay about them?
This, I think, may be my biggest concern when it comes to the way that Discourse generally functions. If we want to have serious, ongoing debates about this medium, it makes no sense to host them on short form social media websites that could literally fall apart any day. Blog posts and essays are easy to source, cite, and archive but barely anyone will bother to save twitter/tik tok posts unless they’re looking to call someone out. We can find a topical example of this issue with a recently disgraced creator, Noora Rose. Noora was highly involved in rpg Discourse and, regardless of anyone’s personal opinion of her, it’d be disingenuous to say that she hadn’t made significant contributions to the conversation. Now, post-controversy, her account has been wiped. Everything she ever said on her page, every joke, insult, interaction is gone. Living only in the fallible memories of those who had witnessed them. And this is just a single creator, what happens when Musk fucks up for the last time and the whole website goes under? It happened before with google plus and mark my words it will happen again. Write. Essays.
There is always more happening than meets the eye.
Beef. Ttrpg folks love getting into it almost as much as they hate writing full paragraphs. I’m not entirely sure what makes people in this space so eager to get into flame wars with each other (my working theory is that it’s the explosive combination that so many of them are a) very online, b) queer and, c) leftists) but it seems more common than other niche communities. The trouble you run into, as a new person in the space, is that it’s very difficult to figure out who doesn’t like who, doubly so if you’re not neurotypical or not on the internet as often. There is a web of drama and division that runs across many years, personas, and websites. Some of which no longer exist.
I’m not sure if I can evidence this position, but I’d estimate that a 40% of Discourse begins not because of any legitimate disagreement occurring but because two groups of people who don’t like each other (often for very stupid reasons) have found an excuse to publicly brawl under a proxy argument. Inevitably, unaware spectators get dragged into the mudslinging without the wider context, throwing more kindling on the fire. It’s a mess.
Final thoughts.
Discourse sux. Please write essays. If you do, I will read them and other people will too. If what you write is sufficiently invigorating, they might even write their own in response. I may have failed my English courses but I’m pretty sure that’s how An Academia happens.
Happy holidays and stay frosty.
Re: “Rules Elide” and its consequences.
I’ve been watching Vi Huntsman’s (very good) Art, Agency, Alienation recently - bit by bit, it’s very long - and it’s got me thinking about Rules Elide again. I’ve read Rules Elide several times at this point, I think it’s a pretty provocative text (in a good way), and each time I read it I feel compelled to write something about it. To me, it feels incomplete as a theory of rules but I’ve always struggled to articulate why. After watching AAA I think I finally have some of my thoughts down on what I think it’s missing.
I’m not going to summarize Rules Elide within this post but will reference it heavily, you should give it a look first. This response is more of an additive work rather than a takedown.
An Addendum to Elision:
Rules Elides main contention is the function of rules within play are to elide away the parts of the narrative we decide are unimportant or that we are uninterested in. When we do this, we free up mental space to worry about the things we actually care about. The primary example given for this is a situation where a character is picking a lock. We could go back and forth about the interior shapes and mechanics of the lock, and the various methods that the character uses to breach it, but chances are that one, we don’t really care about the process of lockpicking as much as we care about the excitement of what’s on the other side and the potential consequences of failure, and two, everyone else might get up and go do something else if we spend an hour describing an activity this boring.
What isn’t pointed out is that the process of elision is actually doing a secret third thing. I’m going to be completely honest with you: I know jack-shit about locks or the process of picking them. I’ve held locks, I’ve held lockpicks, I broadly know what the action of lockpicking looks like externally by watching others do it. But the actual method is completely unknown to me. However, I would expect my level 5 rogue or whatever chump I’m playing this week to have this knowledge. When we elide the process of lockpicking, or any other knowledge based action, we bridge the gap between what the characters can do and what the players know.
Rules as Standard-Creators.
So, I’m willing to agree that the primary function of rules within a TTRPG play environment is to elide, at least most of the time. I am, however, not so convinced that this is the only thing that they do (as Sinclair seems to believe: “To say that rules elide is to say that they do nothing else.”).
One of the appeals of tabletop games to me in general is that element of consequential decision making, the idea that the choices I make are going to have tangible consequences on the shared, imagined, fiction. I don’t seem to be alone in this, at several points in my life I’ve witnessed TTRPG’s pitched as “games where you can do anything”. This is obviously marketing-brained and a little silly, you don’t need a gamebook to play a game where you “can do anything” at all, but it points us in the direction that these games are enticing due to their freedom of choice.
But here we come to a problem. To make meaningful decisions, we need meaningful information. How can we decide to take an action if we cannot predict, at least on some level, the consequences for doing so? Leaving everything in the hands of the GM leaves us in what I’ve heard some people call the “Mother May I?” zone. If we return to the primary example of unelided lockpicking, we can imagine at any point in the process the GM might throw their hands in the air and declare “Oh no! As you pull the pin back, your lockpick snaps!”. This is a reasonable consequence for not lockpicking very well but the moment at which they do this is completely arbitrary and this is likely to lead to frustration and disillusionment. “If it’s completely up to the GM when we succeed and fail, what’s the point in doing anything?”, the players cry out. Of course, this neglects the fact that the whole game is arbitrary but the appearance that it isn’t is useful.
So how do we solve this? We use rules to create Standards - accepted baselines and agreed upon limitations - to create structure for play. If we’ve all agreed, implicitly by using the rule, that when I approach a regular lock and attempt to pick it that I have a 2 in 6 chance of succeeding and a 1 in 6 chance of breaking my picks, I can now use that information when making decisions about whether to pick a lock or not. The actual rule is arbitrary but its presence removes arbitrariness from play.
Wait a minute! Maybe rules can create agency?
I think this might be the most disagreeable part of my stance here but stick with me. A lot of the hardcore elide crowd seem to view rules as things that, by necessity, can only take away agency. As sort of a necessary evil to enable smoother play. This may be true but neglects to mention who this agency is taken away from.
In a classic rpg play set up, the agency actually really rests almost entirely with the facilitator or GM. Yes, the players get to decide the actions that they take, but the GM decides on the consequences of those actions. Maybe we’re getting into philosophical grounds here but I would wager that if the consequences of our actions are completely arbitrary and not held by any baseline at all, we don’t really have agency. With this in mind, I propose that the creation of Standards creates agency for the players by removing agency from the GM.
Preempting responses.
With that said, I’d like to pre-respond to some of the questions and ideas I think this article might prompt:
Q: Couldn’t these rules exist outside of a gamebook?
A: Yeah, a gamebook is not necessary to create agreed upon Standards.
Q: The idea that agency needs to be taken away from the GM to be created for the players seems to play into strung-out “GM vs. Player” tropes.
A: I can see how it might be interpreted that way. I think it’s important to remember though that this line of thinking is not unique to TTRPGs. Lots of philosophy grapples with the idea that people may not have any agency at all when there are forces - God, deterministic factors - that control the decisions that they can take and the outcomes of those decisions.
Q: Rules aren’t the only way we could come up with a baseline. What if we just appealed to previous rulings and situations?
A: By appealing to previous rulings you’re just creating an implicit Standard (there are lots of these). I’m willing to admit that rules are not the only way to create standards though.
KiwiRPG at the Auckland games fair - A Post Mortem
Last weekend I had the privilege of running the kiwiRPG booth at the Auckland Cancer Society Games Fair, and I’m pleased to say that it went really well! We had plenty of players, designers, and members of the public stop by and chat about the organisation and tabletop games in general. A huge relief considering that it was just me at the booth all weekend, that I had never done anything like this before and was anxious as hell, and the fact that half the stuff that we were planning on having at the booth didn’t arrive in time (cheers to NZ couriers for that fun little headache).
From this experience, I have gained numerous insights, immeasurable wisdom, and a laundry list of shit that I am going to do differently next time.
There is almost nothing you can’t fix with tape (and Post-it notes)
It is honestly fucking comical how many problems got solved with tape and Post-it notes. People joke about this all the time, but it’s TRUE. Signage? Taped Post-it notes. Keeping boxes together? Tape. No business cards? Post-it note. Need someone’s details? Write it on a Post-it note. Sign keeps falling over? Tape that sucker UP. If our biggest supporter for the weekend was the Cancer Society, our biggest second supporter was the unextraordinary office products of paper plus.
I suffered for my hubris (not bringing enough food)
Every con guide tells you to bring enough food and drink. This is not new advice. However, I am (famously) a bit of a dumbass and thought, “I’ve worked shitty restaurant jobs without eating anything for longer hours; this’ll be nothing,” skipped breakfast and brought a single bag of chips with me. Unsurprisingly, I was hungry as hell by hour three of the first day and, with the only options around being out of my budget, I just had to deal with it. Learn from my mistakes and make some sammies before the event.
They stopped for the pretty books and stayed for the one-pagers
We had a decent selection visible at the booth, but the big standout was Dave Elvy/Imaginary Empire’s games, which had fancy colourful colours and a strong reputation (several people recognised them from a distance). Lots of folks walked up primarily to take a look at them, thinking I was the designer, before I explained what KiwiRPG was about.
Once they did walk up though, many people stuck around to read the one-page games and take some with them. Usually, the conversation involved me gushing about what one-page games are and the design freedom they represent, to which they would say, “Ooh, like Honey Heist, right?” to which I’d shrug and say, “Yeah, pretty much.”
The lesson here is that while not visually striking enough to draw people on their own, one-page games make great handouts and conversation starters at events like this.
People fucking LOVE business cards
We were meant to have pamphlets to hand out with our details, but unfortunately, they didn’t arrive in time. Dale, however, was very clever and sent a stack of business cards with his games. These flew off the table like hotcakes. I don’t know how I feel about them from a wastage standpoint, but it seems like having a solid stack of business cards or pamphlets is basically essential for doing stuff like this.
There’s a lot to be gained by teaming up with other creators in the industry
Talking specifically about boothing together at cons here. I got to chat with a boatload of other creators throughout the weekend, and the one thing that almost always came up was the challenges that tend to come up with events like this. There were two things that were mentioned pretty consistently:
Booths are prohibitively expensive. The Cancer Society were incredibly generous in allowing folks to have a presence at the event for free (only asking that 20% of sales go to the charity), but this is far from the norm. Most cons charge up to 1000 bucks or more to have a booth, exceeding what most small creators can reasonably afford.
Eftpos machines are also super expensive but basically necessary if you want to sell anything. At least in New Zealand, cash is becoming increasingly uncommon payment-wise, and many cons lack an atm. The price to rent an eftpos machine can run up to a couple hundred dollars a day and, if you’re mainly selling 5$ - 20$ zines/books, anything less than a total success will leave you sitting at a loss.
I think both of these problems could be solved by getting a bunch of us together to share a space, possibly as a “KiwiRPG Creators” booth. It’d be a way to enable a bunch of people to show off their stuff who’d usually be unable to.
Giveaways should be dead simple
Before the event, I came up with a microgame to do giveaways. It was fun, sort of interesting, and entirely too complicated for what we were doing. After trying it with a few people, I quickly realised that people check out if a giveaway takes more than two sentences to explain. In the end, I stripped it down to its bare essentials and that ended up being much better. Unless you’re really clever, don’t do anything fancy for stuff like this.
The conclusion
The fair was a good time. We spread the good word of KiwiRPG and made some new mates. Yeah.