Genre Police: Reading The Intent

Last time, I talked about how players can get lost in games if they don’t understand what a rule is trying to do and how to engage with a mechanic. 

In doing so, I realised I was advocating for games that pack more into codifying in a game manner what you can do. It’s a strange place to find myself in. So I thought I’d go back and look at the theory of ‘rules’ for a minute so we can identify where an RPG falls when we are working out how to play it.

What Do You Mean Working Out How To Play It?

It might be obvious but I think it is worth mentioning that any roleplaying game ruleset are a ‘text’, much as we would look at any sort of media. And while analysing, say, a book or film, we’d be trying to figure out authorial intent and how we can interpret the text. 

The interesting thing about RPGs over any other sort of media is that you begin by trying to sort the intent out before the story takes place. We have to be concerned with genre and tropes maybe more than an author. Because an author is attempting to tell a story and can adhere to or reject the accepted form of the story they are telling at a whim if they think it will work. 

Our intent as GMs is, in fact, to deliver a tale and reinforce the tropes of the game we are in and the accepted reality of that situation. If we take the same exact action in Dungeons and Dragons, Call Of Cthulhu or Champions, those actions will resolve differently. Not only because of the rulesets but also because we are meta-aware that the types of tales we are telling with each of these games is fundamentally different. They function in different realities with differing physical, moral and narrative rules. 

So when we look at a game’s ruleset, we have to also look at what it is telling us about the world and story the game is trying to tell. When we have no narrative, only the rules to go on, they must be our ‘text’. They have to guide us through what a game wants. In a good game, there’s a reason why each rule works the way it does.

The only time I will decide a game doesn’t work is when the game rules set don’t deliver an experience aligned with the fiction the game is aiming for. I love the original World Of Darkness games, but I had to hack the combat system in order to get fights to work the way the fiction of the game intended them to feel. As it was designed, the game is far better suited to a detailed combat simulator, which is why when they also released the Street Fighter RPG with the same rules, it worked really well. The point I’m making is that if a rule exists outside of its core engine that isn’t geared towards making us feel the intent of the game, what is the point?

So, if a lot of rules are pretty pointless window-dressing, why not strip a game back to its essentials? 

To some extent, a lot of rules-light games do this. Most PBTA or FTD games don’t have us roll dice a lot. They simply don’t have mechanics for things that are outside of the genre. You can have a philosophical discussion in Dungeon World, but unless you are trying to use that discussion to persuade someone, there’s no need for a rule. You can describe any act of violent conflict in Masks, but it likely only comes down to one of two rolls, depending on how you’re using your powers. It doesn’t need to outline exactly how things are different and codify each thing. The text has told us that the way we achieve the thing is a lovely description, but they outcome is the thing that drives the story. The game doesn’t need to know if an enemy is punched or blasted by flame because in Masks, the damage is the same. We describe what makes sense and an enemy takes damage, only adding a rule when it can reinforce the teen drama at the heart of Masks and the sub-set of supers comics it is apeing. It is an understandable and clever idea. But with some players, it can leave them cold. If the damage is the same, why am I bothering to define it? What bonus does my description give beyond maintaining the story?

But in something like D&D, damage types count considerably more. Is an enemy resistant to a type of damage? Is a condition bestowed? Lots of twiddly dials to adjust. The text has told us it’s interested in the details of fighting monsters and it wants us have options and think about each turn. 

It doesn’t always succeed, but the game has told us it wants us to think of it as important. And this is a different school of thought. In this version, a game adds more rules as an affectation because each new ruling adds a different element to the game, some new way to view a thing, a new action that can be taken. 

The 5th edition setting books are great examples of this – each game world comes with additional light rulesets in order to reinforce an additional part of the game, be it rules for corruption, faction affiliation, teen romance or whatever. This codifies and gives weight to parts of the game we would have otherwise hand-waved. It tells us to keep it on our mind. This approach avoids players ever being lost with the ‘what can I be doing?’ analysis. Because the thing you are doing has a system. If it has a system, you should be doing the system.

But this codifying can come at a cost. When we decide to gamify something in a fiction, it can mean that we have to follow its rules. In the 3rd edition of D&D this became stifling in the end. If someone with the correct collection of feats wants to charge in and drop a foe to the ground with a well-timed shield bash, then so be it, but if you don’t have the feat, should you be allowed to do it? If the GM says no, you feel constrained by the rules of the game and like it won’t let you imagine. If The GM says yes, then why did the other player spend all that time picking the right feats to do it? The more constrictive the rules set, the less room there is for improvisation.

And that balance is difficult for each. Both versions can rob players of agency in different ways because if their choices only count for the fiction and not the rules, it feels lightweight. But the flip is that if the rules are too concerned with the ‘how’, you can lose the ability to do what you want. So when reading a text, being on the lookout for how a game falls on this and how it minimises those difficult edges can be important to help players navigate it. And that’s basically our job. 

Next time, I might continue to look at games as text for a while and what they can tell us in their approach to things.