#159: Gremlin Creed

Lots to sink your teeth into in this edition of the world best weekly newsletter about indie games sent from my house.

I. Dear Reader

On tumblr, designer David J Prokopetz posted 10 points titled as the The Gremlin Game Designer's Creed. I really enjoyed and found it swirling around in my brain so as I did with Ken Hite and Robin Law’s discussions about Axes of Game Design. I’m going to go just go over the points and talk about them. Everything in quotes is written by Prokopetz and you can read the entire thing properly here.

So, my response to the Gremlin Game Designer’s Creed:

1. Rules are toys, and the process of rules-mediated play consists of smashing their faces together like little girls making their Barbies make out. Unless a rules module is explicitly intended to be enacted solo, it should present a generous surface area for other rules to bite into. The most elegantly self-contained piece of rules design is, collaboratively speaking, also the most useless.

This is a complex two-part statement. First, "Rules are toys", which is already a big claim. A gremlin game designer becomes someone who sees new games (new "systems") in the same way as they might see new recipes - opportunities for new experiences. This is as opposed to the camp that understand game rules as an extension of rules parents might give to a child - roadbumps in the journey to some spontaneous, organic fun.

(Further reading: Vincent Baker on RPG Essentialism and RPG Exceptionalism).

Secondly, there is the idea that good rules are completely enmeshed with other rules. Good design is when rules are interlocked with each other. The big thing that finds itself staring down the barrel of this statement is dangling subsystems. Grapple rules in D&D3.5 for example or initiative systems that employ procedure used nowhere else in the game.

But I'm not sure how this principle interacts with the idea of mini-games though. A mini-game is a kind of subsystem. But the difference between Firebrands' mini-games and D&D's Grapple is huge. I don't know how best to articulate it but the difference is that Firebrands' mini-games rhyme with each other in a way that Grapple does not.

2. The principal function of "player characters" as discrete collections of mechanical traits is to furnish each player with an assemblage of shiny things to show off to other players. Mechanical abstraction is well and good, but if you abstract away the act of curating one's collection of shinies, player engagement will suffer.

The way I've been articulating this is that good RPG design is about giving people cool things to say to each other. This lines up exactly with that. Great design also cuts out people saying boring things to each other. But that's a whole other level.

3. The GM, if present, is a fellow player. Ensure that they have their own toys and shinies to play with. The failure of a game to provide these is often a major contributor to why nobody wants to run it!

Yup, saying cool things and not saying boring things applies to the GM as well. A good game knows and cares about the GM's fun.

4. The most effective way of encouraging players to do what you want is to make a number go up. This applies to both to rewards and to misfortunes; a number counting up to disaster a much more visceral motivator than a number counting down to zero.

I think the proliferation of "ticking clock" mechanics is completely in line with the last point. From Girl by Moonlight's series track (where you try to fill your track before the darkness fills its track) to Apocalypse Keys, where this could apply to the doom clock or a character's ruin (when you reach max ruin, you become one of the baddies).

5. Crunch is good. The defining feature of tabletop roleplaying is that rules produce stories. The act of interpreting the outputs of the rules and the act of telling the game's story are the same activity. Be mindful of what kinds of stories your rules want to tell; you may find that their opinion on the matter differs from your own!

This connects back to "rules are toys" but what also comes to mind is C Thi Nguyen's book, Games: Agency As Art, which is a philosophical text that I haven't fully read. The core argument is that a game designer's medium is agency in the way a photographer's medium is light. Rules are the tools to shape agency in the same way a camera is a tool to play with light. Playing with agency leads to narratives, playing with light leads to images.

The last statement here is again a very striking one. I recently shared a video on the newsletter that made a similar point. All of a game's mechanisms affect the experience, which is another way of saying all the game's mechanisms create narrative. It's not a very long video, worth a watch.

6. Actually assembling your game's rules is as much a process of discovery as it is of invention. In the course of designing and playtesting, you may find that your own game has rules that you didn't know about. Where did they come from? It is a mystery.

Playtesting is one of the most complex parts of the game design process. It can be uplifting, frightening, vindicating, draining, delightful. My friend, Aaron Lim, is one of the great promoters of playtesting as first and foremost a kind of play. And while it can be fraught, one of the best things you can do for yourself as a designer is developing a positive relationship with the act of playtesting.

Aaron runs a playtest meetup called Playtest Zero (which I helped start and still attend). There are two sessions - one in SE Asia friendly time and one in a American / PST friendly time. It's open to anyone and happens over Discord. More info here.

7. Randomised outcomes should be made mandatory with care and restraint; randomised outcomes should be made available with delirious abandon. As far as is practicable, players should always have the option of asking the dice what unhinged bullshit should happen next. Corollary: lookup tables are your friend.

This is interesting. Randomizers (dice primarily) are one of the key pillars of RPG design. I'm not sure what exactly "made mandatory" means here because most modern design has rules about when to roll dice (and when to not).

I do think that sometimes a game positions the dice as an arbiter of what happens next. But giving the dice the power to ruin the fun isn't a good thing. The way I see it is that dice (or cards) are best used in a role where players can use them as collaborators. In some sense, this is what makes "mixed success" results important - they prompt you to add to the fiction but leave a wide space for what that addition could be.

8. Players don't need your permission to depart from the rules as written; granting it is arrogant. By the same token, however, it should never be unclear to players whether they're departing from the rules as written. Let the thought process behind what you're writing hang out for all the world to see; folks will be rummaging in the game's guts anyway, so give them easy access

I think arrogant is a strong word here but I understand it. I love the point about knowing when you're departing from a rule.

I was talking to someone recently that described game designers as being extremely "coy", writing rules but refusing to say why, as if finding out the intent of rules was a mystery to be discovered in play. I don’t want to be coy! Sure, there might be a place for that kind of emergent surprise. But like 99% of the time, its probably best to let people know why they're doing what they're doing.

9. If your game has a default setting, explain it as little as possible, but always let the rules and presentation reflect it. Seeing an entry for "poorly made dwarf" in a table of player character backgrounds will fire a group's imagination more strongly in three words than a chapter stuffed with worldbuilding lore could in ten thousand.

I'm a big fan of implied setting but it does interact with "don't be coy" in an interesting way. I'm a bigger fan of a facilitated, co-created setting. Love making the world with my friends at the table as we play.

But yes, paragraphs of lore are something that is a bad idea most of the time. It often just doesn't work. Assuming your goal is "communicate why and how this setting to people", paragraphs of lore might do the why but it almost always fails on the how. So much of lore books from the past ended with people going, "Cool, but like what do I do with this?"

10. You don't need to be good at naming things as long as you're good at puns. Wordplay, alliteration and rhyme may also serve in this capacity, as, in a pinch, may a well placed dick joke.

Ending with a joke is good.

Yours annotating-ly,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• Wait, Roll That Again is a podcast with a fun premise: Alex, the host, is designing a game and talks to a series of designers about various steps in that process. This episode with Morgan Davie about figuring out your game is particularly good.

• On Dollars and Dragons, James D’Amato talks about the business of podcasting. A lot of talk of passive income, second jobs, and so on.

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• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

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III. Links of the Week

Articles

• Black Armada Games talk about their extremely positive experience with Backerkit’s advertising services.

• Cassi Mothwin reviews Luke Gearing’s experimental adventure module, The Isle

• Mikael Andersson, game director of Paradox, talks about teaching systems thinking with games.

• Two interesting articles about smash-hit videogame, Baldur’s Gate 3. One about the problems of using the 5e system and one about how it helped to be an independent, privately-owned studio.

• It’s impossible to be a small business: Handiwork Games had £25,000 of stock stolen on the way to backers in the US. This is the kind of thing that can destroy a business but to their immense credit, they seem to be okay.

• On the Indie Game Reading Club, a written actual play of a|state, the cyberpunk forged in the dark game from Handiwork.

• EnWorld have done another survey about freelancer pay rates in the industry.

• On tumblr, Luke of Wild Woods Games has a design diary about overhauling an old game and breathing fresh life into it with new writing. It’s a BoB game called Heaven in the Dust and there’s some great insight into the poetry of those games.

• On board game designer Geoff Englestein’s newsletter, he talks about boardgames and victory conditions. It’s in response to designer Amabel Holland’s video about whether board games need victory conditions at all.

Misc

• There’s now an official Mausritter library with all their third-party content, currently more than 500 different items.

• Charity bundle to help stray dogs in Curitiba, Brazil

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IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Into the Veils Kickstarter is near it’s 2nd Stretch Goal reward. All backers are entered to win a free printed copy of the adventure (2 winners). Join the Adventure today!

• Embrace the will of the dice gods with this bundle of gamemaster resources from Dicegeeks, designed to help you improvise fun and imaginative scenarios at the table.

• Don’t Play This Game, a solo RPG of handcrafted horror. Inspired by found footage films and cursed messages. Sign up and try to survive the demo here.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Everywhen, the system that powers Barbarians of Lemuria, is on sale with the core rulebook and a bunch of supplements!

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!