Genre Police: What’s For Who

I recently had an interesting conversation about flow, and I want to share it because I think it reveals some things about RPG that we don’t talk about often. 

The conversation started out with a few of us trying to explain how the Feng Shui 2 action focus tropes worked to someone who hasn’t seen that many action films and doesn’t understand the tropes of them. 

This led to players talking about RPG combat, we were talking about how in Dungeons & Dragons combat turn-taking works and how PBTA games instead handle combat as part of a flowing narrative with no codified concept of who takes what turn where. The player without the action movie grounding stated that she had found a Masks game we had played confusing and hard to parse because there was little to no information the game codified for her about what she could do on her ‘turn’ and she couldn’t plan for her turn because the pace of the game was less about an ordered, gamified, approach with distinct phases and more of a flowing thing that had no established form, which meant that keeping what was going on at any given moment was difficult to keep in her head.

This made me stop for a second. I had sort of always assumed in my head that people, and in particular this player, would prefer a more narrative approach to combat and that searching for systems that delivered that would be more desirable. 

I’d been thinking it about it all wrong. 

That player was already getting narrative feedback from a more structured and codified system – because, as a GM, I was doing the work to make every combat in D&D feel like it had a purpose and stakes. She’d been trained in that and found it easy to invest in a D&D combat scene because the mechanics and structure were familiar. Normally we talk about mechanics that ‘get out of the way’ and let you ‘play the game’. And in doing so, we instantly think of something rules-light. But it hadn’t occurred to me that familiarity also breeds this level of ‘getting out of the way’. 

D&D players who have been playing D&D for a long time don’t need to think about the structure of a turn sequence – it is the recognised form for the way these scenes play out. To assign some other mechanic or way of thinking is like trying to draw a portrait picture using only numbers and a crayon. The tool is wrong.

I guess what I’m trying to say is how we imagine a mechanic working with players is never as simple as just a mechanic delivering a feel or trope. We have to have several things in place for that mechanic to translate to something a player enjoys. These things are required for a player to be able to parse a new idea or concept in an RPG:-

• The player must be able to understand the narrative point of the mechanic
• The mechanic draws a clear line about what it does/does not accomplish
• A GM prepared to explain when and how a mechanic changes expectations about what is needed from a player

So, a lot of my players struggled with Masks. The game for them was not only far from a recognised structure but it did things backwards to the way they expected. Combat scenes were not too regulated, with a flow of actions that they were unused to. Social scenes felt more regulated, where they were used to the free flow of ‘just talking’ without too many mechanics. 

I failed to bridge this flip of expectations. They then looked to rules to codify what they could do in the looser scenes and in Masks that doesn’t exist, PBTA games are more about feeling a genre than codifying actions. Which is OK if you are aware of the media/style that the game is aiming for and can by guided by a knowledge of the fiction. 

People who have watched a lot of supers comics will understand what the mechanics are driving at. For those players who lacked knowledge because had joined the group without that knowledge, were lost when it came to knowing the tropes. They had joined to play with friends, not for love of the genre. Meaning the had no real conception of what the mechanics where trying to accomplish, why they were doing it and how to parse what they were accomplishing or not accomplishing. So they defaulted to using knowledge about how to play from their previous RPG experience. Through that lens, the challenges the game presented looked massive and insurmountable, even though the answer to solving them was ‘I narratively position myself to solve them’ the idea you could do this was way outside their reference point. They had worked their way through the list above and failed to connect.

So, what can we take from this? 

Well, I’ve been thinking about it, and I think if I had a chance to do things over, I’d explain not only each mechanic but its place in the fiction. This means that explaining a game will take three times as long as you aren’t just telling people how a game does, say combat, but why. The most important part of explaining a rule or mechanic is the ‘This is important to the story we are telling because’. 

That discussion also allows you to check in with a player how much they understand about the the mode of storytelling you are aiming for. Like if I said to this player ‘It’s like a Hong Kong action film’ and they say ‘I don’t know what that means’ I have time to explain the tropes, why they exist and what the game is aiming for. 

More importantly, I manage the expectations of the player early on, before they engage with the game. And maybe in doing so I learn that a player is not actually going to be able to engage with the game or that a mechanic is going to be a hard step for them. And maybe you find it is too hard a step. 

I’d never offer the player at the start a place at a table playing Action World  – I felt we couldn’t do the work together to explain why things happen without it feeling too alien. But Feng Shui? Maybe one day. It has stronger codified actions, asks less of players and provides real concrete examples of what can be accomplished.

Did I just become an advocate of more codified rules in a game? I really hope not. It’s seems to sit counter to everything I know about myself as a roleplayer. Hmmm…an article for the future perhaps. Until then, I hope this gives you a baseline for understanding how to talk to your players better and why they might not be quite getting that mechanic you thought they’d love.