#99: Everything Old

I. Dear Reader,

I know some people get annoyed by the fact that a lot of RPG discussions are repititive but I don’t. This is for many reasons but let me just illustrate one of them today.

So Jason Tocci, designer of 24xx and other games, has been posting previews of his new game, Alight, on twitter. As a part of writing the text of Alight, Jason is explicitly not assuming any RPG experience from his readers as he wants the game to work for new players. One of his recent previews discussed what he called the three layers of rules. Jason has blogged about it before and it’s very interesting stuff! His three layers are: the social layer, the fictional layer and the abstract layer. The social layer is the layer which is about the people sitting at a table. The fictional layer is the layer which is about the characters in the fictional world that they believe is real. The abstract layer is the intermediate layer of game rules.

I won’t fully explain them (read the article!) but here are some examples:

• “Do not discuss non-game business during the game” - the social layer
• “Carrying a sword within the city limits is punishable by fine” – the fictional layer
• “A sword does d10 points of damage” - the abstract layer

Okay, but those examples aren’t from Jason. They’re from Markus Montola’s paper The Invisible Rules of Role-Playing: The Social Framework of Role-Playing Process which was written around 2005-2008. (Montola doesn’t use Jason’s terminology. He calls them exogenous, endogenous and diegetic based on another framework. This stuff is not even the focus of the paper but when he does mention it, it’s almost exactly what Jason is talking about.)

So Montola wrote this about 15 years ago but Jason separately and indepedently .came up with now. That’s interesting but it’s not even the most interesting part! Montola himself is actually reframing something Gary Alan Fine wrote in 1983 in probably the first ever academic book about roleplaying games, Shared Fantasy: Role-playing Games as Social Worlds. And that’s incredible! This idea now becomes 40 years old! Does this diminish Jason’s idea? No! If anything, I’m more interested now. If people are independently coming up with the same thing for 40 years, it’s probably something I should know about.

But also Jason didn’t just write this just as theory. He wrote it as really vital and useful advice. The advice, to summarize it a lot, is: if you’re having trouble with one layer of rules, look at the previous one for the help.

jason at pretendo dot games @pretendogames

Very torn between thinking "this example is ridiculous, why are you including this" and thinking "reading this in an RPG text years ago would have literally changed my life"

If you’re having trouble with the rules, look to the fiction. If you’re having trouble with the fiction and the rules, then maybe you need to look to the social i.e. talk to your other players about it and fix the social dynamics. I’m thinking about the eternal reddit problem of someone describing a problem at their table and the comments just echoing, “Talk to your players”. (Trying to solve a problem within the fiction is when you get “Rocks fall, everyone dies” as a solution. Valid when the nuclear option is the only one, I guess.) It’s an important piece of advice that Gary Alan Fine never stated it as simply and usefully.

So even though we might be having the same conversations for half a century, we still get good things out of it. And that’s worth remembering!

Yours chronologically,

Thomas

PS1: I only now this stuff because Dr. Evan Torner aka GuyInTheBlackHat is a constant helpful presence of twitter. He’s always very kindly and generously linking to academic texts when these conversations happen on twitter among non-academics. Dr. Torner is the person who linked Montola’s article in Jason’s thread and got me reading the original articles. So thank you!

PS2: If you’re interested in learning more about Gary Alan Fine’s book Shared Fantasy, it’s the subject of the latest Game Studies Study Buddies podcast episode.

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II. Media of the Week

Dave Thaumove reviews Night’s Black Agents, the classic spies versus vampires game built around GUMSHOE.

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III. Links of the Week

• Kickstarter has announced that ZineQuest is going back to it’s original February schedule for 2023. This year, they had switched it to August to coincide with Gen Con. Seems like they now regret that choice.

  • The indie Zine Month initiative also looks set to continue in February 2023 as well.

• The silent RPG, Alice is Missing, has sold movie adaption rights to Paramount so we might be seeing a film based on the game at some point.

• On the Gaunlet blog, Lowell Francis looks at RPGs that released a decade ago - from Archipelago to Champions Hero System 6.

• I don’t know a lot about the Satanic Panic so this was an interesting read from Bethany Harvey in Project Nerves about how it played out.

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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.

• Plant Girl Game is a cozy tabletop roleplaying game about a family of plant children working together to prevent an ecological disaster.

• ratti incantati bookstore is celebrating its first spin around the sun with a weekend sale 8th through 10th of July - 25% off storewide + zine freebies! Mark your calendar!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the all-new, fan-supported Fate-SRD.com. Built to be fast, attractive, and accessible, check out the site for rules, downloads, actual plays, and community.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.

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