#67: Questions as Mechanics
I. Dear Reader,
So a few weeks ago, I did a panel at Metatopia Online along with momatoes, Aaron Lim, Jamila Nedjadi and Logan Timmins. The panel was all about questions and how they show up when you’re playing and designing games. The basic idea was that questions are “mechanics” - in the sense, that you use them in a game like you use any rule. It was a great panel and it’s now up on Youtube.
But it’s pretty long so I thought I’d summarize some of the cool ideas that came up:
Aaron Lim points out that all game design (to some extent) can be seen as made out of questions. Games usually have a starting position, a question to be answered, and some tools to answer that question. For example, Apocalypse World’s core question is, “What will you make of the world?” and B/X D&D’s is “How do you prosper in a dangerous world?”
But in boardgame or videogame design, the answers that are possible to a game’s questions are really limited. In TTRPGs, you get to answer questions in more broad and unique ways.
The way you use questions really differs across playstyles. I feel like in trad games, the archetypal question is the GM asking their players, “What do you do?”. In an OSR playstyle, it’s mostly the players asking the GM questions. But the panel focuses on storygames and how they use questions.
Definitely, the main use of explicit questions from the GM to the players is sharing narrative control over the world. Momatoes uses the word “co-authoring” which I really liked. It’s common in storygames for designers to specifically write questions into their rules that are directed at the players and not the GM. These could be at the beginning during a worldbuilding phase or just peppered through game play like in Jason Cordova’s Paint the Scene technique.
In talking about Apocalypse Keys, Jammi mention how some of the skill in crafting questions is folding two layers together: the explicit question hat is asked asked and the hidden question that gets answered without asking. The example he gives from his game is “We loved each other once. Why do we keep hurting each other?” When you answer this question, you also have to answer the underlying question of “What hurts me and what hurts you?”
Logan has a game called If you’re lost, look and you will find me // time after time which is just questions. It’s a two player game where the players take turns asking and answering questions. In some sense, this is a storygame stripped down to its buikding blocks. And of course, none of the questions that you ask each other is the question you’re playing to answer.
There’s lots more including what makes a good question, how to reduce the pressure of big questions, and lots of little things like that. And we could’ve said a lot more as well but alas, our old nemesis, linear time, foiled us again!
Yours questioningly,
Thomas
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II. Listen of the Week
Well, technically, I already shared a piece of media already and there’s loads more panels from Metatopia in the same channel to watch!
But I will share another video that doesn’t have much to do with TTRPGs but I thought was really nice. 3 representatives from 3 different videogame design co-ops walk through the fundamental questions that people have about co-ops. This is stuff like “does everyone need to have equal salaries”, “are there no leaders or hierarchies?”, etc. It’s particularly useful because they make it clear what is common and what varies between their three organizations which tells you that there isn’t “one true way”.
III. Links of the Week
Sandy Pug Games released the digital version of their game of adventure and healing, Monster Care Squad, a couple weeks ago. This week, they posted the license for making 3rd party content and it’s as progressive and thoughtful as you might expect.
Dicebreaker have a nice feature that says a little about each of the five games from South America in the LatAm: Break Out kickstarter.
A gamebook about Scottish culture and history, specifically the Picts, is on Kickstarter and the neat part is if they fund, they’ll release the digital version for free.
One quick tip for making gods in a fantasy world more interesting.
IV. Small Ads
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