#4: Magic✨ and Other Miscellany

the one where I bring up sociological storytelling

Welcome! Watch as I reach into my hat and voila, it’s issue #5 of the Indie RPG Newsletter! And a rabbit. Of course, there must always be a rabbit.

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I. Let’s Talk About Indie Magic!

Reader Joshua Merin asked about freeform magic in the open discussion thread. This is what I ended up writing.

Magic in RPGs is a subject that I’m not sure I know how to talk about properly. Don’t get me wrong, it’s easy to say: “I like this game and I don’t like that one”. But why? Why is hard. So as a place to start, let’s start with the truism that RPGs are a conversation. And that rules guide that conversation. All rules - and rules for magic specifically - can be seen as permissions, limitations, or both.

When a game says something like “Spend 1 miracle point to do a miracle”. That’s permission, right? You’d probably assume you couldn’t do a miracle unless that rule existed. That’s also partially a limitation, right? Not in the scope of what a miracle is. But in how many times you can do a miracle. You need points - and they’re probably going to be hard to get if the game wants a miracle to feel, you know, miraculous. Maybe the most compact and explicit system of permissions and limitations is the pair of magic moves from Monster of the Week (pictured below). It’s very explicitly using permissions and limitations to structure the conversation anytime someone says “Okay, I want to use magic to …”

So if you want to just do something like this, you can! But I think there are lots of other interesting ways that games do magic.

(Disclaimer: There are lots of trad systems or non-indie games that might be good to mention here like Mage the Awakening or Ars Magica but I’m not the best person to talk about those games and they’re not really what this newsletter is about. The same with OSR games like the Whitehack whose magic rules you can learn about in this fun video by Collabs Without Permission.)

I want to mention two small games: Batts’ The Wizards and The Waste and Joaquin Ollo’s Labyrinth of Verra.

In The Wizards and The Waste, you play a spellcaster. And the game gives you the permission to use magic to do anything that you want. But spells are bargains. A player declares what they want their magic to accomplish in the fiction and the table discusses what the cost should be. There a number of “resources” that you can pay as a cost - your limited power, your humanity, and so on. So the limitations, again, isn’t on what you can achieve in the fiction, the limit is whether you are willing or able to pay the cost. And since the group decides together, the logic of how much something should cost can vary from table to table based on preference and tone. But the game has another kind of limitation. It asks each player to pick a source of magic for their character. This could be a book, poetry, images, comics or music. If a player chooses say Alan Moore’s seminal V for Vendetta as their source of magic, they must narrow down on three panels. Then, when they cast magic, they must interpret those three panels - in terms of content, colour or atmosphere, maybe - and explain how they act as a source for their magic. Sounds fun, right? It’s a great recipe for unique conversations at the table. No two games need ever feel the same again!

Now, let’s talk about the Labyrinth of Verra (which I also mentioned last week). In this game, every character has a Might stat that they can use to do magic. But everything about that power - what it looks like, what it can or cannot do - is discovered through play. To summarize how it works, when a player wishes to use their magical power, they declare their intent. Then the GM declares whether they have to roll under or over their Might stat to achieve their intent - thus, giving the GM the power to decide the odds. Also, the higher your Might (i.e. the more experienced your character), the less likely you’ll be able to successfully use your powers in new or unexpected ways. That’s an interesting tension, right? Getting better at what you already know versus losing out on the flexibility of your magic. And there’s more: If you fail a check, the GM can declare a new rule about your magic or erase an existing rule. Thus, as you play, you discover the rules that govern your powers - but also those rules keep changing. Because Labyrinth of Verra is about chaotic ever-shifting individuals and their magic has to be chaotic to reflect that.

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II. Unlearning Rules and Magic in ‘Fiction First’ Games

I remember listening to an Actual Play podcast of a game of Dungeon World many years ago and one of the players was a Wizard. Now, honestly, Dungeon World isn’t a very interesting game to me and Wizards are even less interesting as a class. But this player was really interesting to observe. In a very natural way, they infused everything they did with magic. For example, they did not walk, they floated above the ground. It might seem banal but coming from D&D 5e, there was this moment of whiplash where I was so worried about what this would do to the game. Wasn’t this dangerous?, I thought. If this player can just invent minor magic powers anytime they want, that will break the game in a number of ways later on. Now, this mindset is pervasive among D&D players because of how the game trains you to think about magic - about how it conceives permissions and limitations. It quickly became apparent to me how differently magic could work in a Powered by the Apocalypse game (and any other fiction first game) because of how the moves focus on the fiction. It also drove home how much D&D had throttled my natural sense of creativity in play.

Now, contrast that with Blades in the Dark. There is magic in that game - mostly through talking to ghosts. But more broadly, in that system, magic can work entirely within the fiction just through the mechanics of Position and Effect. Say you have two players who have to sneak through a courtyard that is crowded with guards. One player is going to just attempt this using their natural stealth. This would probably be a Desperate action. If they fail, it’s going to be nasty. The other player has a way of becoming invisible (ignore the question of “how” for the moment). The GM would look at that and probably downgrade the roll to Risky or maybe even Controlled. Now if they fail, the fictional consequences are much less nasty. Magic in this system is just another approach to the problem. It’s all about fictional positioning. Blades in the Dark gives you verbs (like Prowl, Hunt or Study) and then asks you to elaborate on how (“going to the library” or “praying to St. Anthony” both work as ways to Study - it is the world as manifested through the GM that says one is more likely than the other). Then, the GM and players talk about how their verb choice and their elaboration affect the risk and reward of their attempted action. Once everyone is on the same page, you roll. What is magic here but just another aspect of the fiction that we have to take into account in our conversation? I find this idea delightful and my preferred way of infusing “soft magic” into games.

Generally, a la Sanderson’s Three Laws of Magic, there seems to be a rule for magic in tabletop RPGs that goes something like this, “the way magic works in your game is how your game is meant to be played”. Or something like that.

I don’t believe in laws anyway. >_>

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III. Sociological Storytelling and RPGs

There’s an article about the disastrous final season of Game of Thrones that went viral (no idea what this means anymore) that I was reminded of recently. It’s by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and the article is an analysis of sociological storytelling versus psychological storytelling. To paraphrase the article, sociological storytelling de-emphasizes individual characters to instead focus on institutions, relationships and communities. Think HBO’s The Wire. You usually follow a large cast of characters and are invited to empathize with all of them. Rather, than psychological storytelling which emphasizes the internal life of one or two select protagonists and you are (more or less) asked to connect only with them. Psychological storytelling is Hollywood’s defacto mode of being.

I’m reminded of something that one of my favourite critics George Scialabba once wrote:

Our age is hungry for accounts of inner experience - of what it feels like to be abused, neglected or spoiled rotten; addicted to drugs or shopping or love; a child prodigy, schizophrenic genius, gang member, or Satan worshipper. We don't seem equally interested, though, in public or collective experiences, like work and welfare.

This same divide applies to roleplaying games and their emphasis on character. There are very few games that I know that attempt to explore sociological storytelling. The only example that I have experience with is Band of Blades, where you’re telling the story of a military company more than the story of the individuals within that company. (Yes, I’m not done talking about this game.) Oh, and Kingdom by Ben Robbins, though I wasn’t a huge fan of the game during the one time I got a chance to play it. I haven’t played it but Legacy: Life Among the Ruins is another game that might fit this criteria.

But I seem to have a very small list. If there are games that come to your mind, let me know!

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IV. Miscellaneous

• There is a TTRPG Resource Jam going on over at itch. It’s not a game jam. It’s a jam to make resources for people who make indie games. If you’ve got something that you’d like, head to the Community tab and request it.

• As a person who needs it, I always complain about the lack of GMing advice for indie RPGs. The principles might be the same but a lot of games need specific advice! So I was happy to discover Rob Donoghue’s blog, Walking Mind. (Rob is one of the founders of Evil Hat) The blog has posts on lots of different things but there are also a couple of recent-ish posts specifically about GMing Blades in the Dark.

• If you like newsletters and tabletop games, do you read More Seats At The Table?

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V. Small Ads

Nothing this week! If you’d like to advertise with the newsletter, the submission form with all the guidelines can be found here.

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As always, thank you for reading! And if you’d like to discuss this week’s newsletter or propose a topic, you can comment here or message on twitter @chaibypost. I had a really nice follow-up conversation about clues and solving mysteries after talking about it in the newsletter last week.

Have a good day!