Hyperemotion

The Action of Feeling

Missiles danced through the black of space.

Drawing arcs through the void, they veered and tipped drunkenly in violent arcs, nearing but never touching the giant robot pirouetting like a ballerina. The robot spun through space until it ended the dance with gunfire, causing a chain reaction of exploding missiles.

I had just turned the channel to this scene early on Saturday and stood there with my jaw wide open. It was my first encounter with Macross.

I’ve been hooked on shounen anime ever since.

As I get older, I appreciate the craft of animation and art, but I have an even deeper appreciation for the format of the stories told. Behind the formulaic elements is a powerful and unique engine for conveying emotions and characters.

That engine is hyperemotion, and I'll break it down so we talk about using it in TTRPG stories in another post.

A Cry Becomes A Punch: Creating Action from Emotion

Hyperemotion describes a story process where a protagonist (and friends, very important!) transforms the accumulation of emotional story beats into transformative action.

It’s the moment when our main protagonist, no longer able to contain all of the scenes of sadness in the village they’ve come to love, channels that sadness and grief into a massive punch or blast of power that overwhelms the villain. The villain may have more physical might, but they can never stand against the hero who allows the emotions of others to channel through him.

At first the language of shounen hyperemotion and the language of western action genre seem very similar, but what’s distinct in shounen is inclusion and necessity of community. A western action hero may have friends, may have assistance, but they act through their own power and their own emotions. In shounen, the hero trades their emotional flexibility for the power to act at a powerful, magical level. The shounen hero is the edge-facing node of an emotional power grid that amplifies their capabilities.

Actors and Feelers

Within these emotional grids are two types of characters.

Feelers experience the world as it is, adapting and living within the status quo. They are the audience’s true lens into the world, showing us how the world is experienced.

Feelers cannot change the world. This creates deep emotional energy when the character does not fit into the world in its current state.

Actors can can change the world through their actions. That power comes with a considerable trade-off: actors cannot experience the world fully. The power to change the world isolates the actor from experiencing the world.

The agency of actors makes them seem to be the only important characters in a shounen story, but actors without a network of feelers are powerless: feelers are th characters who make life worth living for actors, and are what give actors purpose.

An actor in a shounen story without a community of feelers is at best rudderless; at worse, they are a villain.

The truly great shounen arcs are built around hyperemotion, and hyperemotion is built around these communities.

Finer Details

I’ve split things neatly into actors and feelers to illustrate the point, but in most shounen stories characters will have a ratio of actor to feeler. The ratio of actor to feeler define certain character archetypes, and in different story arcs a character’s ratio might change (a classic arc is when a grievously wounded actor must now be mostly a feeler and rely on their friends to be actors and change things).

The Krillin Effect

Have you ever watch Dragon Ball Z and asked yourself: “Why the fuck is Krillin here?”

In terms of ability and power, we can ask this of most of the cast past a certain point in the story. But let’s focus on Krillin, who quickly falls out of the power ranking and becomes the B plot of “Save Krillin!” in many Dragon Ball Z stories. To discuss the ratios, Krillin is about 99/1 feeler/actor for most of the series.

“The Krillin Effect” is what led me to hyperemotion in the first place. Trying to understand why Krillin is hanging out with martial art gods helped me understand a deeper truth about shounen manga.

Let’s look at Goku.

Goku is the opposite of Krillin (1/99 Feeler/Actor). Goku can destroy planets and kill gods. So…how can he relate to those who lack his incredible power?

He’s married but… well, let’s not talk about their marriage for the moment.

He’s a terrible dad.

This is coming from Vegeta!

Goku isn’t evil; the problem is he only wants to train and fight! But also… I think we’d all want Earth’s protector to be a little more, uhm, connected?

Enter Krillin.

Krillin has known Goku forever. He understands him and has Goku’s love and respect. Krillin for many fights remains nearby (even if he is just hiding), ready to help and cheer Goku on. Krillin is humanity’s proxy in DBZ, our champion, and our voice. Rest assured when Krillin is frightened, we are also going to be frightened.

When Krillin is frightened and threatened, Goku takes action, often breaking through his limits.

Looking beyond Krillin, there’s a community of high-powered martial artists around Goku. They are fighting to protect the Earth and their universe, but they also support each other through their actions and their feelings, to make each other stronger than they’d be individually.

The Power of Community

Great shounen storytelling isn’t about bigger and bigger fight scenes; it is about building a community’s hyperemotive loops, turning their desires and feelings into inspiring transformation.

It’s why I keep coming back.

Wrestling with your NaGaDeMons

You need to make a roleplaying game.

Not sell a game, not become a TTRPG publisher, not create an SRD and build a website. Just…make a roleplaying game. This is the part of the newsletter where you ask me, in your head, “Why, Quinn?”

This is the part where I praise the gods of writing for these rhetorical devices because I’ve got a response:

Make a roleplaying game because you were born to.

I’ve talked before about the essential humanity of TTRPGs. The connection and expression they allow is unlike anything that we do. As generative AI looms large over the entirety of human artistic endeavor, it’s instinctual to feel overwhelmed. Hopelessness and despair wait on the other side of the door, knocking loudly.

But the way out is through; we must open the door. My sincere belief (destined to make me a footnote or a prophet) is this: the sea of slop being generated by AI will elevate human expression instead of extinguishing it.

That sea feels endless, and navigating it will take time, but I feel that the polished and soul-barren nature of AI makes it easier to distinguish human work. It’s not 100% and it’s definitely possible to be fooled, but in general AI art has no value because it is not trying to communicate or express anything; the “generative part” of generative AI is the aspect that means the least in art.

But what I’m talking about is more than the end-product. The true value of art is in what we derive from it. The process of consuming and producing art is what gives it meaning and value to us. Society offers many channels for consumption, which in turn places a burden of professionalism on our attempts to produce art. Don’t write a book unless you’re going to be the next N.K. Jemisin. Don’t make a game unless you’re the next Mike Pondsmith.

This thinking tethers production to consumption. It sets us adrift in the sea of slop. I’m not a professional, so I might as well not bother.

My friend, you are not flotsam drifting aimless in a sea of slop; you are an island of innovation. You are made of stories and tall tales, your soil is curiosity and joy and sorrow. New worlds and thoughts grow in that soil. When you build a TTRPG, you offer that bounty to the world.

Whether anyone consumes it or pays for it, your birthright as a singular, one-of-one living soul is the act of expression. It’s not what anyone extracts from your work that makes it worthwhile. The value is the process which you must undergo to create that expression.

Is this the longest way possible to say “I think you should do National Game Design Month (NagaDeMon) this year?” Probably.

If my words resonate with you: Please join the jam.

Join the community.

Get inspired. Inspire others.

Make something simple.

Make art.

“No judges, no competition – just your own inspiration, a deadline,  and an enthusiastic community to spur you on!”

NaGaDeMon Jam page

This topic up-ended my regular newsletter, so I’ll have something for you next week.

We have an official Thoughtcrime Games discord: “Imagination is For Everyone” 

Say hi!

If you join the NagaDemon discord, I’ll be on their as gamefiend and the channel for my game is it-wants-blood.

I hope to see you there.

Imagination is an Endless River

Techniques for maintaining creative flow in TTRPG sessions.

Our most memorable TTRPG sessions are driven by two factors: creative flow and table sync.

Creative flow is the exchange of imaginative contributions from the table. It describes the willingness and ability of an individual and table to contribute to the shared fiction. Table sync describes how aligned players are to the fiction and each other's imaginative contributions.

When creative flow and table sync are strong, they create magical sessions with play that feels effortless and impactful stories. What happens in the absence of these factors?

Those games...aren't that fun. The less said about them, the better.

Most sessions we play are in between the extreme highs and lows. We encounter blockage and misalignment in some aspects of play, and flow and alignment in other aspects. System influences creative flow and table sync, but there are human factors that can influence this as well.

Today I'm tackling creative flow and how to deal with creative blockages. What do you do when a player has a hard time responding to prompts in play or contributing imaginatively?

Imagination is a muscle, and folks who play a lot of TTRPGs are used to flexing and stretching those muscles. But muscles can be fatigued no matter how big they are. And some players don't feel confident with these muscles in the first place!

Let's talk about each of these situations and how to unblock players in each situation.

Lack of Creative Confidence

This hits newer players hard—they’re not sure if their ideas fit, or they worry they’ll derail things.

"What if I imagine wrong?" is a very real fear and one that is not restricted to newer players. I can't tell you the number of times I've been told by an experienced player that their old GM would never let them establish details about the world that weren't directly tied to their character. When I offer it, such players have welcomed the opportunity but found themselves at a loss in this strange new world where their contribution was being encouraged and expected to drive the game.

Unblocking these players first requires establishing a table culture where contribution is encouraged (to the limits of player comfort, always). "We want your ideas at the table" is something that should be modeled and repeated as often as necessary.

The next step is to break down the creative asks with leading questions. Instead of "tell me about your character's past", presuppose some detail and re-focus your question. "Why is your character having some difficulty with the law?" makes an assumption, but provides a foothold for the player to begin their creative climb. In my experience it takes between 1-5 of these questions to get a player flowing.

Creative Fatigue

Imagination takes energy.

It's easy to forget until you have a really long workday, or find yourself dealing with intense personal matters or even if you just had an intense scene 5 minutes ago in the game. Then someone asks you "how are you responding to this?" and your mind goes blank.

Creative fatigue is the most common thief of creative flow.

What I do to circumnavigate creative fatigue is to pitch an idea with full editorial control: "I have a thought -can I share it and you decide if it works or what changes to make?"

This works because when you're fatigued it's easier to revise and work with material in front of you rather than create your own material from whole cloth. Offering an idea and explicitly offering a player the ability to do anything with it--including nothing--helps people cross their creative chasms when they come up. Even if they reject your idea completely in favor of something else, the process of saying "nope" to your idea helped them move towards an idea when a few minutes ago they had nothing!

This is really important: only offer when people are blocked and at a loss for what to do. Don't try to play in their imaginative space when they are flowing and cooking with ideas! That makes the pitch assistance and not an interruption, which keeps it welcome an pleasant.

The Ideas Must Flow

Any TTRPG session I am facilitating includes a high level of imaginative contribution. I'm in love with the strange and beautiful ideas that come out of player's minds. These are my go-to techniques for ensuring those ideas keep flowing. I hope you find them helpful, and I'm always eager to hear what techniques you use!

Make Your Way Back

Wherever the path may lead, follow it.

A few days ago, I sent the print order for my initial copies of Community Radio (thanks everyone for your support!). In front of my laptop I paused and closed my eyes, on the edge of tears while I smiled.

I’d envisioned this moment for a very long time.

I’ve been designing TTRPGs for about 14 years now, and I published Community Radio about 10 years ago. And it took me this long to finally make a print run? There are people who come out and make print runs of large games in their first few years!

The opportunity to downplay this great moment was right there, but I avoided it. I know my path hasn’t been a straight line (As my buddy reminded me: “You’ve had a lot of really hard stuff happening to you this decade, so take it easy on yourself”), but it has been my path. So I took that moment to appreciate myself for walking that winding path.

What I reminded myself of (and what I want to talk with you about) is this:

It’s only over when you don’t come back.

Some things you should quit, but if you have something you need to express, then always find a way to come back to it. Yes, even if it’s 10, 20, 30 years from now. Time’s paradox is its simultaneous abundance and scarcity, but I’ve learned that there is more of the former than the latter for what you truly need to express in this life.

Whatever that is, make your way back.

Around (And Over and Under and Through) the Table

how to use a "table" to spice up your encounters

A GM wants every action encounter they run to be memorable and exciting.

Mechanics often sideline that desire. If you want a scene that isn’t the usual set of skill checks and attack rolls, you must add something mechanically relevant and new to the encounter. But if you do that for every encounter, not only do the additions lose flavor and uniqueness (“Oh look, another fight over a lava pit…<eye-roll>”), they also add more cognitive load and rules burden to the game.

What if I told you that the answer to your problems was a table?

Think about how ubiquitous the table is in action movies and literature. In the lexicon of action movies, one can find a table:

• jumped on

• slid under

• used as cover

• used as a weapon

• used as a tool

That’s just for starters. What makes a table so great?

Ubiquitous. Tables are commonplace, and make fun parts of set pieces because they normally blend into the background.

Multiple points of interaction. If you use a gun for anything other than shooting, it’s an “off-brand” use. But a table is versatile by design. That versatility offers many ways to be creative. A table can be a weapon, terrain, obstacle, hazard, or positioning tool.

Mechanically Flexible. in TTRPG terms, the usage of the table defines what mechanics you recruit from your system of choice. Nothing needed in advance, . If someone ducks behind, use system mechanics for cover. If a character breaks off a leg and starts swinging, they are making an attack.

Opt-in. I didn’t mention all the movies where tables play no role. This represents another significant feature of the table: you have to opt-in to use it in the encounter. Decades of GMing have taught me the best encounter design spice is the ones players choose to interact with. When you force mechanics on the players, they often spend most of their time trying to make the mechanics irrelevant. When they make the decision to interact with the element, they buy-in to the friction and consiquence.

A Seat at the Table

The biggest problem with the table’s opt-in approach would seem that people just don’t use it. Depending on the playgroup style, they might never use the table. Wouldn’t that be a shame?

The simple way to “invite” players is to have your NPCs use your tables. Once players see it is a possibility to use these flexible prompts, it opens up their mind to using it for themselves.

Not Literally Tables

If I literally only meant tables, this post would have limited use. Fortunately, there are lots of tables that you can use for your game. A short list:

• a chair (often found near a table!)

• a ladder

• a bookshelf

• a crowd

• a hedge

If the element can be used for at least three things on this list, it is a good table to use.

• weapon

• terrain

• obstacle/hazard

• positioning tool

Look forward to hearing about tables you’ve used in the past or plan to use in the future!

Imagination is Powerful

...and everyone has access to it.

This is Imagination is For Everyone.

A bit about me: I’ve been blogging (At-Will Blog, Thoughtcrime Games Blog) freelancing (WotC, Paizo, and lots of great indies) for well over a decade. In this newsletter I plan to share some of that experience and how it can help you in the design and running of your TTRPG games. I want to talk about adventure and scenario design, mechanics, storyfeel, game textures and so much more.

I’m keeping this blog to 1 or 2 posts a month, and will try to keep the posts to about a 5-10 minute read. My intent is to provide actionable insight that you can use at your table or in your designs.

Thanks for joining me on this journey.

Games For Humans

Why roleplaying is more important than ever.

“Imagination is for Everyone” has been my personal motto for a long time. It seems a bit obvious of a thing to say, until you consider the moments in history where people are discouraged from imagining themselves in positions where they are beautiful or powerful or simply something altogether different than where they currently are. Imagination is powerful, and those who can control how it is wielded often think of themselves as wielding great power.

But the truth is such power is illusory: Imagination is a fire that cannot be truly controlled. When one strips the power to imagine from certain people, what they’ve really done is deter them from expressing their imagination in public squares. What’s ironic is this fires up their imagination even more to find creative ways to express themselves and communicate what is in their minds and their souls.

So yes, Imagination is for Everyone, no matter what anyone tries to say or do to the contrary. Imagination is the one true superpower that all humans possess.

Speaking of imagination: Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) represent collective imagination at its finest. In a TTRPG we use rules and conversation create fictional worlds and scenarios which we then use to connect to our fellow players. The ability to connect us in expression to other people means TTRPGs are critically important for us in these times.

When I say important I don’t mean serious; importance can mean a lot of things but certainly not that we must stare into the heart of our hobby with a grim countenance, genuflecting and bowing our head at the anointed times in a strict ritual.

(OK, honestly…this does give me ideas for a game I want to make. This happens to me a lot.)

I say RPGs are important because they fulfill a distinct need in our digital age. We are often compelled to either produce “content” or consume infinite pools of it, with little in-between. I accept that, but even that acceptance creates an acknowledgement that TTRPGs are special because they require us to simultaneously express and connect with others. When we sit to play an TTRPG (online or in-person), we participate in the creation of a fiction while at the same moment we spectate and observe the artifacts of our creation. We are cheering each other’s character on and also cheering each other player on. We are seeing and we are seen, we are speaking and we are hearing and we are heard.

Our other media demands an asymmetry of connecting and expressing. Listen more, speak less. Speak more, listen less. Be the actor or the audience. I’m not implying dysfunction inherent in other mediums but rather uplifting what is so damn awesome about TTRPGs.

We are at a point in time when human creativity is under fire; can computers mimic or replace human creativity? I can’t pretend to answer that question. What I’ll share with you is this: I think the defining characteristic of humanity is the generative drive to express one’s condition. The irrepressible urge to find something to say and the accompanying drive to get someone to hear it. When I think of being human, I look at my life, I look at those around me, I look at history and see this gleaming and unbreakable thread: This is what is happening/has happened to me.

Which brings me back to TTRPGs, games built uniquely to fulfill that human drive to connect and express. The medium uses the interplay between the social and the imaginative to provide us experiences that are truly unique artifacts. I can talk with old friends about a story we told in a game 20 years ago and the retelling takes me back not only to the imagery of the fantasy story but also to that moment with my friends; I recall where we were, what we looked like, how it felt.

Games can serve many purposes, but the reason I have stayed with TTRPGs in particular so long, the reason I design them and play them and write about them, is this: Roleplaying games are games built for humans.

Next post I’ll get my head a little more out of the clouds and plant my feet on the ground to talk about conflict versus friction in encounter design. I expect future posts to be a bit shorter, but I needed to start here to frame for you how I think about these games we play. It informs how I run RPGs, how I play and design them. My goal at all times is to optimize these games for the humans in them. My hope is that I can help you optimize your games and play sessions for the humans you play with.

Thanks for joining me on this journey.

Friction Forward

Conflict sets the shape of your RPG stories, but friction gives your stories texture.

Lately, I've been contemplating the contrast between conflict and friction in adventure design and at the gaming table.

The early 2000s taught us that we can create consistently good roleplaying experiences through conflict and stakes setting. If one explicitly thinks about the conflicts characters engage in and the stakes of those conflicts, it leads to powerful narratives at the table rivalling any prestige drama.

I learned those lessons with many others and incorporated them into my game design projects and in the games I ran. Seeing stories as based around central conflicts does work, but I still found myself challenged sometimes in a project or a game scenario when trying to create an interesting narrative. Conflict is about having the right opponent. It doesn’t matter if it’s nature, another person or yourself, thinking of a story beat in terms of conflict requires you to find the side B to your side A.

Sometimes that side B likes to hide. Sometimes that side B... doesn’t seem to be there. Maybe it doesn’t align.

I run into this problem more when I design an adventure than when I run a live game. When you write an adventure, you have much less purchase upon which to rest conflict; you are writing a structure for people you will never meet who make decisions you know nothing about, so conflict can only be broadly defined.

When playing or running games, I have found that framing every challenge as a conflict also results in “conflict fatigue”, a situation where every beat is so hard fought that it destroys tension. When you constantly fight against an opponent, each fight loses its intensity.

What you want is to preserve the focus and intensity of conflict while still being able to offer colorful and challenging situations to your players. What I find helpful in this situation is to switch how I frame my story beats. Instead of conflict, I frame my beats in terms of friction.

Something in the Way: Using Friction

Conflict is the clash between opposing forces over some important goal or resource. Friction represents inertia, complication, and difficulty involved in reaching a goal or destination. The key difference between conflict and friction is the former requires stakes and an opponent, while the latter does not.

What I’ve found about looking at my TTRPG adventures and scenarios as fractal layers of conflict is that the layering of stakes within stakes diminishes the stakes I want my players to care most about. What I want are a few good conflicts, with obstacles and complications in the way. The goal is to create texture within a small amount of conflicts so that each conflict feels vital and moves the story forward. Friction doesn’t need an opponent or stakes, so we can add it without diffusing the concerns the story seeks to raise; We are adding bends and hills to the otherwise straight road of our conflict.

Conflicts are the keyframes of my story, and friction creates interest and movement between each keyframe. What this looks like in practice is I create a core conflict and few sub-conflicts. Each conflict defines an opponent and what is at stake. Then, for each conflict, I ask “what complicates this conflict? Why can’t we just start fighting?”

Friction shouldn’t be so difficult or complicated that it pulls the players in the opposite direction of the conflict. Too much friction and we’ve developed “sidequest syndrome” where players have so many extra sub-tasks to perform it overloads working memory, forcing them to ask: “what were we doing again?” In any type of storytelling, over-reliance on techniques is to be avoided.

Friction Forward

There’s more to be said about the layering of conflict and friction, but I’d love to hear from you. Do you use an approach similar to this when running or writing adventures? Would you like some examples of this in practice?

Story Feel

TTRPG mechanics have emotional undercurrents that we as designers can use to shape experiences.

Here's a trick I use these days to unblock myself when I struggle with game design: Rather than digging deeper into math, or throwing myself laterally into new expressions and innovations of procedure, I step away from the problem I am wrestling and I ask myself "What do I want players to feel while they are doing this?" The question is not "what do I expect them to feel in the outcome?"; I must root myself in how the process and performance of the mechanic evokes emotion. For the moment, I ignore the outcomes and the responses they draw forth.

I chase down the emotion players should feel. I catch it and am then rewarded with a vector and direction for my design. There are infinite ways to express combat, but once I know I am looking for players to experience terror in a combat, most of infinity clears and I am left with a more manageable list of options and approaches.

I first noticed this feeling when thinking about my own experiences playing and game-mastering over thirty years. When comparing two different systems in my mind, I noted how each could elicit small bits of emotion and various stages in the process of making a skill check, for example. One system generates excitement because it relies on the opportunities for a big swingy critical and/or a colossal failure while another feels more stable yet more powerful because it provided me as a player room to drastically alter the fiction of the game.

Once you open a door, it's difficult to close. I looked for and found those micro-emotional components to all the games I played or read. After some time, I gave it a name: story feel.

If you're familiar with the term game feel, story feel is definitely similar. While game feel describes the intangible yet tactile sensation of playing video games, I see story feel as the intangible emotional sensations of creating stories via play.

Game feel is a satisfying sensation when you shoot an enemy or hit the gas in your race car. Sounds, visuals, and controls contribute to that secondary physical sensation.

Story feel can use some physical components - a d20 feels different from 2d6, which feels different than rolling 60 d6s (I love you Tenra Bansho Zero!) - but the sensations are less about physicality and more about the emotional weight and transitions. If you've ever felt a sense of dread in making a roll to determine your character's fate or felt pure cathartic joy when you finally get a chance to roll to hit some bad guy you've been chasing forever, you are already familiar with story feel. 

I use large examples to make it clearer and easier to see, but the vast majority of the time it is subtle. Story feel often whispers, so you must lean in close to sense the emotion on the other side of a mechanic. I think we as designers like to talk about statistics and probability because it is quantifiable; it is easier to find, easier to measure. But the most important quality of all that math is the emotion it elicits in the people who play your games. What makes great TTRPGs great is how they support and contrast the emotional beats of a story with the emotional beats inherent in creating that story.

When I center story feel in my design, I always find my way.

Delivering on the Promise

A lexicon for describing RPG quality

My game Community Radio is going to launch on Feb 7 on Kickstarter! Want to play a light one-shot game inspired by media like Welcome to Nightvale, Northern Exposure and Pontypool? Then you want to play Community Radio.

Sign up to be notified when our Kickstarter launches!

Doublespeak

In 2024 I find myself wanting to have two conversations about a TTRPG. The first conversation is concerned solely with my preferences: Do I like this game? The second conversation involves the game’s quality: Is this a good game? 

The conversation on preference is fine, but the second conversation is often frustrating. It’s because the conversation on quality often is just the conversation about preferences pretending to be objective. Worse yet, the conversation taken to extremes becomes a mind-numbing version of “What a TTRPG should be.” You go far enough down this road and people are telling you it’s not a TTRPG if:

- the characters don’t have Hit Points

- there isn’t a combat system 

- the gamemaster doesn’t roll dice…

I wish I were being hyperbolic but I’ve had all of these conversations and worse in over 30 years in this hobby. I get why people turn their preference into design criteria. There are as  many ways to appreciate TTRPGs as there are to design them; that’s why we love them! But this variability means it is easy to confuse preference with what the game is actually trying to do. Just because it doesn’t do what you expect a game to do doesn’t make it bad.

I’m not looking for objective truth. I don’t want a one-size-fits-all box for TTRPGs to fit in. I want a small and actionable lexicon for describing the properties of an RPG. I've been using this with close friends for a while, and it’s actually been a corner piece of some really great discussions - we still get to hold our preferences while actively discussing what a game is doing and not doing.

When I say lexicon, I mean there are three words. Here they are.

Promise

A quality TTRPG is one that satisfies its promise.

Promise is the contract between the game and its audience about what experiences it aims to help players create. Promise is part designer intent, part context derived from genre and setting. TTRPGs don’t exist in a vacuum and must communicate their promise within the space of expectations that players bring from other games. If I tell you a game is Powered by the Apocalypse, that is a different set of expectations than if I tell you the game is a 5e OGL game. Putting preferences aside, the conventions that each of those choices brings impacts my game’s promise in different ways.

A role-playing game can’t be of a high quality without a strong and clear promise. It can stumble on how it delivers on the promise and still have great impact, but I can’t think of a game with a muddled or poor promise that overcomes it.

At a high level, the ways a game implements its promise are with consistency and economy.

Consistency

A quality TTRPG satisfies its promise in a way that is appropriately consistent for different groups of players.

Consistency describes how  easy it is for different groups is to have similar patterns of experience.  A game has low consistency if everyone tends to play the game their own way, with many house rules and different takes; it’s expected that people will make the rulings they need to at the table in a wide range of situations. A game is highly consistent if different play groups have different experiences (the whole purpose of games that create stories!) but similar patterns. 

High consistency is no better than low consistency. Why? Because it’s all about what the game is promising. Different games and genres promise different levels of consistency.

Economy

A quality TTRPG satisfies its promise with rules of sufficient economy.

Economy (or as my friend Chris Chinn likes to call it, "Burden") measures how much cognitive load a game incurs in fulfilling its promise. How many different rules and procedures does the game have? How complex are its rules? How much do we have to keep in working memory during play? 

The more cognitive load required, the lower its economy. Games with a high economy have a minimum of rules that achieve more than their initial footprint would imply.

I’ll repeat what I said on consistency: There is no right level of economy other than what is promised. What did the game and genre context tell you to expect, and what did you deliver? 

In Detail, in Practice

I hope these elements make sense and you can see where I’m going with it. I’ll talk about each of these in detail over the next few weeks, but in the meantime let me know what questions you have!

The Promised Land

More thoughts on Promise in TTRPGs

My game Community Radio is going to launch on Feb 7 on Kickstarter! Want to play a light one-shot game inspired by media like Welcome to Nightvale, Northern Exposure and Pontypool? Then you want to play Community Radio.

Sign up to be notified when our Kickstarter launches!

I’ve had some really great discussions and chats with people about Promise, Consistency and Economy in TTRPGs. By my standards this registers as unmitigated success, because the only reason the terms exist is to foster great discussions with others about this hobby that we all love. Feel free to ask questions and give feedback!

As, err, promised…I’m going to go into each of the terms of Promise, Consistency and Economy in more detail in the next few posts. I’ll clarify points that these discussions have shown me I was initially unclear, and discuss what I think makes for best practices. Today I provide some further clarifications and thoughts on Promise.

To restate what I am talking about when I discuss Promise:

“Promise is the contract between the game and its audience about what experiences it aims to help players create.”

Promise should evoke

You can see a game’s Promise as a binding contract. That is not wrong but that is not all the game’s Promise does. A Promise must inspire and evoke to be truly successful. A strong setting or unique player roles often make up for deficiencies in a game’s Consistency or Economy, but a game without some evocative element rarely overcomes that, even with solid design.

Promise isn’t defined through just play

Evaluating a game's success involves examining how well it keeps its Promise. Does it provide the mechanics and narrative support to tell the promised stories? Players and GMs often compensate for a game's shortcomings. They fill in holes or ignore other mechanical shortcomings using their own play patterns and house rules. I think this is great and to be encouraged, but it shows that the best way to talk about a game’s process is through its text and the genre norms it partakes of and not through individual examples of play. 

I am not saying that we shouldn’t also play TTRPGs and experience them (I don’t want to live in that world!); ideally we use the text to understand what we are being promised and confirm that through play experience.

Promise isn’t premise

Fun fact: my first drafts of the lexicon used Premise instead of Promise. It makes sense initially, but I found it focused almost solely on designer intent. It ignores the context in which the TTRPG was produced, which plays just as large a part in what we expect and understand from a game as what the designer intends.

I feel that Promise speaks to that larger world, encapsulating both premise and context. A designer is not beholden to all of the genre expectations and norms adjacent to their setting, but aligning expectations with players means that a designer is required to be clear on where their game might differ from what is expected. This can be done without comparative language (“My game is not like other games where you play adventurers in a dungeon”) by being clear and upfront about what your game is about, declaring the tropes your game is subverting up front (“In this game you play the monsters inhabiting a dungeon”).

Breaking Promises

“If we only judge a TTRPG by the promises it makes, don’t all games keep their promise?”

This question has been posed to me several times. It’s a good question! I find that it’s quite common for games to fail to meet the Consistency and Economy that they promised. 

An example I will use (with an extreme amount of  love; I cherish this game) is the original Vampire: the Masquerade. It promised amazing character drama and storytelling, but mechanically and structurally had little support for it. You could certainly have the games that it promised (I have), but it depended a lot on how the specific group wanted to structure the game (aka low Consistency). For a story-based game, the Economy was poor; combat in particular was a long slog of duelling dice pools and multiple stages. I feel that the game’s mechanics didn’t live up to the Promise. 

At the same time, the Promise was so evocative from a setting and player role (“We get to play modern day vampires!”) and from a conceptual level (I’m hard-pressed to think of any game that even pretended to care about a character’s internal state at that time) that Vampire changed TTRPGs when it was released, making room for games that could eventually meet those promises. 

I could talk about this specific game for a long time (feel free to ping me for a longer discussion), but my point is this: a TTRPG can definitely break its Promise in several ways and still be impactful and enjoyable.

A Worthy Waste

The Illusion of Efficiency and Speed in TTRPGs

TTRPGs are a waste of time.

TTRPGs tell stories with rules that give us instructions on how to talk and roll dice, which is an inherently inefficient process. Relying on conversation as a medium means that TTRPGs often take much longer to tell a story than the other mediums they borrow from and lean on. You could tell an RPG story in 4-6 hours or you could watch the movie in 2 hours. Dwelling inside those folds of those inefficiencies is a unique experience that the movie could never offer; we can connect, we can express, we can interrogate the story in ways no other medium allows us to.

That time we “waste” in TTRPGs also is what makes them worth playing.

What got me thinking about this was the number of Kickstarters and YouTube thumbnails I’ve seen exhorting how “fast” they play, particularly for combat. Setting aside the fact that many so-called efficiency gains offset themselves by adding further cognitive load in extra options and decisions, I’ve felt that the need for “speed” and productivity within TTRPGs misses the point of why we play them. TTRPGs are conversations at their core.

Should we be rushing our conversations? I don’t think I’ve had a conversation I consider great where someone was looking repeatedly down at their watch.

What I’m not advocating is systems that burden users with lots of processes and cognitive load for no reason.

But too often I see people trying to speed up something like combat in a game with a detailed language for it: “Combat is taking too long!” And the answer seems to be: speed it up! Start a timer when a person has a turn, or move to the next person if they hesitate too much. Digitize everything. Let’s hurry it up, people!

Again, this is a horrible way to have a productive conversation about anything. What I’ve learned is that there are two ways to approach this illusory speed problem: avoid the conversation or embrace the conversation.

A conversation that you don’t want to be having is too long, by definition. If you want the “highlights-only” view of a fight, that’s perfectly valid! It's OK to not really care about it, but support that desire by using a system that abstracts it or de-emphasize its role in your games.

But if you want to have a conversation, why not enjoy what is there? My experience and observation about the “too long combat” problem is that actually people aren’t having solid conversations about it. For many, combat is the part of the game where the conversation dries up, becoming prosaic as the table focuses on the tactical. You must wait your turn while others process out their tactical orders. I’ve played in and heard about games where there isn’t even a description of the events of the combat.

What I’ve found works is to lean into the parts of a TTRPG that it excels at; Describe the round by round, the blow by blow. Create a high-level picture of the fight, but attend to details. Pause in the combat and ask: what does that spell look like when you cast it? How does your fighting stance contrast with your opponent’s?

Tell the story, find the flow. Take the time you need to take.

Waste time, but make it the most worthy waste you can.