The Camera Always Lies, Part 2: Back to GNS
Here’s a thing I like to say which isn’t entirely true but it sounds good and it points to interesting thoughts:
In improv, everything you say is automatically true (“I’m police! Pull over!”) but there are usually strict rules about what you can and cannot say and when and how you say things (for example, you can only say two word sentences). RPGs, broadly are the opposite: you can say anything you want whenever you want (“I waste him with my crossbow!”) but there are strict rules about how and when things become true (“ok roll to see if you hit”).
I like that because it identifies the differences between improv and ttrpgs, and also identifies the similarities between the two things: namely that they are both exercises in sitting around and deciding what happens. Usually collaboratively with others, and usually without the planning involved in more directed forms of what-happens-creation, like writing. This is actually pretty impressive because it’s been historically very difficult to define what rpgs are and why we play them in a way everyone can agree upon. Which is of course why theory exists in the first place: to try to solve that problem.
The definition of “truth-creating” doesn’t quite help us delineate between rpg and traditional game, though: games and sports are engagements with rules that produce a final set of actions that are true, that are (outside weird edge cases, as always) unpredictable and unplanned, and we engage in a shared, rules-governed process to create what-happens. The difference, again, comes from theory.
What most people might not know, or could easily forget, is that RPG theory existed long before Ron Edwards crashed into the scene. Edwards’ sins are mostly well known, I think, but probably his biggest is convincing people that theory was a bad idea. This is always the risk of an enfant terrible - if they become attached to the ideas they spout, then the ideas die when the individual does. But before Edwards the same work had been done, although it was just as often GDS - gaming, drama and simulation. Edwards made two chief conclusions which helped poison the well: that games should pick one thing and do that well, and that games that did not do this were necessarily incoherent. Both these statements are in contradiction to how the theory was being used before Edwards. Indeed, we can look at Everway which condensed these terms down into its core mechanic: when it came time to figure out what-was-true in Everway, you either used karma (what should most likely happen in a simulation), drama (the best story) or fate (roll a die, broadly close to playing a game). This is how most (nearly all) RPGs work at some level, even if the rules say otherwise: we all (consciously or not) are doing all three things, all the time, switching back and forth between them, because slowly though the 1980s we took a weird poorly designed game-that-became-a-simulation and decided it was a game-simulation-storytelling thing.
And again, the point of GDS was not to turn it into a Cosmo quiz and draw battle lines but rather to help players talk about how they made these choices so they could get better games. The point of the theory was so that when we had discussions like this:
Now to be clear: that doesn’t necessarily mean, as Edwards suggested, picking ONLY one of those things for our rules design, or what we do at the table. As I said in Part One, I think a large part of the enduring appeal of the RPG is that there is all three of these ideas acting at once, and the tension is not a sense of failure, but rather it is much like the tension in a trampoline: the very source of the fun. Indeed, the ability to step out of the avatar stance into an author stance and make jokes like the cast of MST3K is only possible BECAUSE it is a game as well as a simulation and a story. BUT this combination also has its costs - we often cannot take the story seriously because we step out into this mode. And that is where I absolutely agree with Edwards. Trying to mash them altogether may be the essential part of what makes an RPG an RPG, but in doing so, I would argue, we often make fairly weak games, confused simulations and poorly executed story-telling machines.
An example of the first is in 4E D&D. To me, this is the only D&D that I find worth playing because it makes combat an interesting game; combat in most RPGs is about as much a game as snakes and ladders. You roll and see what happens. There are no tactics and few choices. But because 4E did this, it made people think it wasn’t even an actual roleplaying game. That was the trade off! We may in fact want our games to be poor games so they are better at what I shall call the GNSMISHMASH. Similarly, we abandon exhaustively detailed simulations often, because we find them poor games or poor stories - throwing away things like encumbrance or wandering monsters for things that are more fun to play or produce more drama. We COULD have mechanics that are completely dedicated to telling really amazing stories to each other but, much like 4E, a lot of TTRPG players instantly back away, feeling like that’s Not How It Is Supposed to Work. Because they want to stay as avatars, which again, as I said in Part One, resists good stories.
My most recent game, The Score, was designed with lots of goals but one particular one was trying to get the idea of shared storytelling to people who either a) bounced off TTRPGs or b) haven’t played them much. To that end I tried to remove all the usual barriers that make TTRPGs hard to play:
- Most RPGs take a few hours to play, even simple ones. The Score is easily under 15 minutes, from chargen to the end of the film.
- Most RPGs tend towards regular play. The Score is one and done.
- Most RPGs are big and bulky books. The Score fits in your pocket.
- Most RPGs have a lot of rules, even simple ones (hence why their books are large). The Score has just enough rules so that it’s not just “make stuff up” like so many other simple card based RPGs, but so few you can fit them on a playing card.
- Most RPGs need a GM. The Score doesn’t.
- Most RPGs need a fair amount of creativity and inspiration and ability to make shit up on the fly (or it puts all of that onto one person). The Score, as much as possible, doesn’t.
But the really sneaky thing The Score does is this:
- Most RPGs demand avatar play; The Score pretends to that, then doesn’t do that at all, which sets players free to tell better stories.
I don’t know if The Score is a TTRPG, but it certainly runs counter to most of the principles of TTRPGs, and as I say, that’s deliberate, because I think most, if not all RPGs operate in the GNSMISHMASH and thus are bad at telling stories. They CREATE stories, but don’t tell them well. And here’s the big big thing:
People keep telling me that they hate RPGs but they love The Score
Exactly as I hoped.
To me, this is really important information. It tells me that there is a thing that TTRPGs do, and it’s this weird GNSMISHMASH, and then there’s another circle, over there, that’s a lot LIKE TTRPGs, but is also not like them at all. I’m not saying there’s no overlap. But over here, in “games that tell stories”, is something that is so unlike TTRPGs that people who hate TTRPGs love The Score. And that to me means we should pay attention to what makes The Score different, and why, because again, the reason I made this game is I think not only does D&D deform the TTRPG hobby with its outsized influence, I think the idea of TTRPGs-GNSMISHMASH that most other games do is actually also doing the same thing: deforming our idea of storytelling games by forcing under into the GNSMISHMASH. And I think the only way to figure out why this is true is by using theory.
Because Edwards so thoroughly poisoned the well, however, we have people saying such nonsense that GNS is merely a tradition of design. If it is only this, then we remain back where we were in 1989, reading Prince Caspian, with no idea what we are doing and why we are doing it. If you insist on throwing theory away, I would at least ask you to provide an alternative.
Now look, I’m not the first lunatic to kick down the door and say “over here is a Brand New Thing, Outside the Establishment” - Edwards did this too, but I have the proof of concept and I can explain why I think things are different. And there are plenty of examples like this - Fiasco, For the Queen, Decaying Orbit and other “prompt” RPGs are doing much the same thing. Do we need to call them some other genre of game so people don’t get confused? That’s hard to say. On the one hand, it is pretentious to act like there’s this Other Hobby; on the other hand I feel like why not let GNSMISHMASH be a thing, and create a thing over somewhere else in the hobby that is free from all that baggage, and doesn’t seek to improve GNSMISHMASH. That’s always the key thing here: I am not here to fix TTRPGs/GNSMISHMASH because I think that is a fine and wonderful thing, perfect as it is.
I just want to do other things as well. And clearly? I’m not the only one. Here’s one more example from a Kickstarter update for a game called Lunar Uni - the teacher was so used to standard (D&D influenced) GNSMISHMASH they were using that game totally wrongly. They had to unlearn that whole style of avatar driven play.
And also, yes plenty of more traditional games have moved the needle on this issue, changing the nature of or expanding the amount of D we want in our mishmash. But (partly because dnd dominates everything) we can’t really get away from the core form. I will talk more about this in part 3.
That’s why I don’t call The Score an RPG. That term may just have too much baggage attached to it. I like what rpgs do. But the core way it decides truth is holding me back. And I got places to go, and people to be.
https://dconstructions.wordpress.com/2024/10/30/the-camera-always-lies-part-2-back-to-gns/
http://dconstructions.wordpress.com/?p=4708