Vibes of Vaarn

I'm been spending quite a bit of time recently thinking about talking about indie games. This is in part prompted by Michael Brough's excellent article advice on how to write about indie games which like all good radical works is direct and simple. And it's also because of my self-imposed challenge, the All Systems Nominal podcast, where I take the position that all games are perfect and the problem in our understanding and enjoyment of them lies in ourselves.

Naturally, this is a reaction driven by spite in response to podcasts like Dead Letters, which thinks the role of critic is to sound smart and where the premise of the entire podcast seems to be picking holes in TTRPGs until there is nothing left. I've done humanities 101. I know how to find gaps in a narrative. What I'm much more interested in and where the best critics I've read excel is telling me why something is good and interesting (I only care about one of those things). I'm not abdicating responsibility here. Roguelike Radio is modelled after Three Moves Ahead, a show that devotes 90% of its run time to discussing the flaws in a thing they love (I skip the interview episodes, which is a format where I think criticising something is a much more interesting tool, and where it happens much less frequently)

What I'm saying is I need a space to vent all my negative feelings about the games we talk about on the podcast, so I'm going to try to write an essay for each episode where the criticism I held back on the air gets exploded out like too many D6 rolls. (Not you, Death in Space, you're perfect).

We're doing a run of OSR-inspired games on All Systems Nominal at the moment (with 2? to come), and one easy criticism to make is that they are rules-heavy, and another is that they are rules-light, which is one of the bizarre pretzels that the TTRPG space likes to twist themselves into. I'm going to take Thomas Manuel's position that settings are rules, which isn't going to help much in this context, but mostly so I can divide rules into systems and settings because I like the idea that systems are universal and settings are the particular values you plug into your system (sci-fi, dwarven social status determined by the length of their beard etc).

The OSR games we've looked at so far (including the one we're about to record) have systems that are (to borrow a suggestion from Dan D) read once and forget - in that they require you read the rules but only long enough to go "oh this is OSR and the system does nothing interesting" and then get on with the roll/role-playing. There's some flavouring of the statistics, and all the games we've looked at so far have excellent class design, but only Death in Space has a system that does anything meaningful to support the setting.

Instead the secret sauce of these games is IP theft. Rather than come up with something original, they rely on a pastiche of genre setting and popular intellectual properties to coast on in a generic enough a world that you are given permission to plug virtually anything into the game without challenging anyone at the table. This is getting to the point if I had any artistic talent at all, I could start to churn out OSR hacks in my sleep: pick a bunch of popular properties and list in them as an Appendix N style introduction, create some iconic classes, write some descriptive locations and lore (but not too much lore) and then fill up the rest of the book with well-designed random tables of stuff without any attempt to support the players or moderator's ability to actually play with that stuff.

I have the advantage that I'm wildly generalising off a few samples, and, as I said in the episode on Vaults of Vaarn, I'm putting a lot of weight on a 48 page zine to the point where it's not a great load-bearing structure for this sort of argument. 

And, despite my negative language, I also don't think this is a bad thing and clearly given by the (relative) popularity of these games, it is probably the correct choice to make. Relative popularity is of course a hilarious claim to make about indie TTRPGs as this is the tiniest of tiny ponds (or perhaps a bucket of crabs - the meanest thing I've ever heard Quins say). This kind of vibes-based gameplay is generous to the players and game master and lets them get to the good stuff quickly. There's no awkward misunderstanding of the setting or how things work that can derail the game, the art and graphic design is often beautiful or at least interesting and games are fast enough to get started that you can even do funnel play where the point is to find the best characters through evolution in action. 

But if you are making a Twin Peaks inspired TTRPG set in uh I'm a little vague on the geography not coming from the states, and the Pacific Northwest from where I am places you in either China or Russia, what inspiration are you actually taking? Because the overwhelming emotion I walk away from Twin Peaks with is discomfort. And I'm not sure it would be safe to create that level of discomfort at the table, even if you had the willingness to try. There's a scene of domestic violence in Twin Peaks: the Return that would be so triggering for my wife that she's made the educated decision to not watch the entire season, with good reason.

If we're trying to be honest about game design, and supportive of vibe-based game play - which to get back on my positivity kick, is a thing I equivocated about for a very long time but have ultimately accepted - you still need to do things as a game designer that you can't do in your sleep. And Death in Space does the work, whereas some of these other game designs seem to have abidcated these decisions in ways that maybe speak to the politics of the designers (or as they might feel to argue, lack of politics, which is always support of the status quo).

First is answering the question "What are the characters doing together?". You may have a magical found family at the table, but assuming that applies directly into the setting is the much less interesting answer than whatever the designer should have thought of. Death in Space doesn't tell you why, but it gives you an excuse and the tools to maybe figure it out, and that is arguably even better.

The second is "what are the character's material concerns?" both in the short and long term. I have a running bit, repeated in the podcast, that all science fiction starts with a meal and ends on a beach; the point being that the meal grounds everyone in the fiction, because we all know what a meal should look and feel like and you can do a lot of telling about what is the same and different with an economy of action. The setting shouldn't just be places, it should be pathways; where are you now, what do you need, where are you going to get it.

The third is "what should the players be feeling and doing". This is where the systems come in - they are tools to support the process. There's always a balance here between the system and (overwhelming) the diegetic play; but my preference (which I have stated previously) is towards complex simulation to allow the players to develop literacy over time in how their characters would take advantage of these systems.