Maps

When you think about dungeons, you probably quickly get an image in your mind of some twisty, almost maze-like rooms and corridors. And that’s great. Maps are a fun part of dungeon design and play. When people started making dungeons in the early days, they tried to make mapping the dungeon a challenge for players. The idea was that it might be fun for the players to get lost because a spinning room changed their orientation, or a gradual descent in a long hallway put them deeper underground than they thought.

I’m going to argue, however, that attempting to create challenge and fun by disorienting players doesn’t actually work in today’s games, if it ever did. It rarely results in the PCs being lost in a dangerous place and instead results in frustration and arguments at the table. The art of communicating the dungeon’s description to the player tasked with sketching a map for the players to reference is a difficult one already, without putting in ways to make it even harder. That’s why I hate mazes in dungeons, and why, when I put a maze in my current project, I give the GM a way to handle it narratively with some die rolls to see how quickly the characters get to various points. That way, there’s no, “okay, and then the right-hand path goes for 10 feet and turns to the left, and the right-hand path goes 10 feet and then comes to a T intersection. No, the right passage goes to the left. Wait, no…”

And of course, if the group is using some kind of VTT, dungeon terrain like Dwarven Forge, or similar visual aids, the designer’s tricks aren’t really going to work anyway.

But sneaky tricks aside, what makes a good dungeon map?

Lots of designers talk about “Jaquays-ing the Dungeon,” referring to the work of my friend Janell Jaquays, who is sadly no longer with us. I love that term. Simplified and taken to its broadest applicability, you might say this means, “Ensure there are multiple ways to reach most places in the dungeon. Rather than just one linear path to get from the entrance to the end, connect the rooms or encounters with multiple passages or connections.” Your map will look like a series of looping paths rather than just a line from room 1 to room 2 to room 3, etc. I’d take this even a bit further, actually, and discard the idea of a dungeon entrance and a dungeon end. Put in multiple entrances, with some only discovered after some exploration of the dungeon, like a secret passage discovered from inside rather than from the outside of the dungeon, or a locked door where the key can only be obtained after exploring within.

There’s a certain kind of art to drawing a dungeon map. I don’t mean that it takes drawing talent—anyone with a sheet of graph paper can do it. I mean the layout of the corridors and rooms, the shape of the rooms, and the way it all fills the page can be very visually pleasing. Look at other published dungeon maps and study them simply from a composition point of view. Find the ones that look the best to you and learn from them. A pleasing dungeon map has a compulsion built into it. It makes the GM want to run that adventure and makes a player want to explore.

Sure, you’ll hear people complain that the traditional winding dungeon map isn’t realistic, and I could come up with a bunch of geology-based reasons why it’s not as unrealistic as you might think, but who cares? It’s appealing, interesting, and cool, and when you’re making products for other people, those are important considerations.

The whole graph-paper-dungeon concept has one real drawback. And that is because you’re drawing on a flat piece of paper, your dungeon will be flat. But one of the best things about a subterranean locale is that it can easily exist in three dimensions.

Give the dungeon lots of verticality. Stairs are great for this, obviously, but ledges, drop-offs, balconies, galleries, pits, sinkholes, chimneys, and ramps, all add interesting texture to the dungeon. Think about the ceilings as much as the floors and walls. A hatch (or a secret hatch) on the ceiling is always intriguing.

Presentation of Information

Look, I think a lot of us have come to the realization that the “wall of text” is not GM-friendly, despite how guilty I and the next designer who’s been doing this for 38 years or so are of writing such blocks of text. (What’s that, there’s hardly any designers still doing this?… I’d rather not dwell on that.) It’s hard to quickly find what you need, and at the table, easy reference is everything. I’ll even take the next step. Maps with a numbered key are not very GM-friendly either. What is GM-friendly is putting the text the GM needs right on the map itself. Then there’s no page flipping between the map and its relevant text. If it sounds like there wouldn’t be enough room for the designer to say what they want in or next to the map, it might be a good exercise to see what’s really necessary for a room or area description.

The GM needs to know:

• Is there light?

• Is there a dominant smell or feeling in the room? For example, is it damp, cold, or dirty?

• Is there something alive or moving in the room? What’s it doing?

• What furnishings or features are in the room? (Start your description with the most visible or obvious thing.)

• If there are locked doors, traps, hidden things, or interesting contents inside a feature or furnishing?

The way I’m solving the space issue in what I’m working on now is that, in addition to a big overall map (or multiple such maps), I’m zooming in on a small section of related areas. I can fit about six to ten areas and the text describing them on a two-page spread.

In this project, each cluster of rooms will get a page of background, lore, and notes about what happens to the area should the PCs change things and come back. This is where I can go on at greater length about tactics and whatnot too. This page is meant to be read ahead of time to understand the detailed areas, but it’s likely unnecessary to refer to it during play. Then there’s also a page of game stats for creatures and items.

Take a look at this unedited rough sample.

Non-Combat Challenges

I’m going to close this series of articles by simply pitching that while we often associate dungeons with “hack-n-slash”-style gameplay, I prefer to design dungeons where that’s not the assumption. I like weird things to interact with, strange locations to explore, and mysterious objects to investigate. Maybe some fighting too, although preferably with some interesting tactics or opportunities for the PCs to use non-standard means of bypassing or overcoming a challenge.

I remember after I wrote Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, players came to me and said that it took forever to get through all those fights. My response was usually, “You fought everything?” Even back then (and that was 20-some years ago—I’ve learned a lot since then), I tried to make it possible to bluff/charm/sneak your way past most of the combats if you wanted. Still, the fault is likely mine for not making that even clearer to both players and GMs. That’s the lesson to learn. Give the players options to take more than one approach, and don’t obfuscate those options. Put multiple factions of NPCs in the dungeon so the PCs can ally themselves with one to bypass the others, or pit them against each other. Develop a hierarchy among the dungeon inhabitants so that taking out someone important (or impersonating them) puts the others in disarray.

And even better, don’t rely on NPCs and combats too heavily in your dungeons in the first place. Crossing a narrow ledge, piloting a raft down an underground stream, figuring out the weird mechanism controlling a big gate, overcoming the defensive measures protecting the magic gem in the glass case, learning that the statue can be moved to cause a secret door to open, trying to convince the ghost to tell you the password, dealing with an unstable ceiling or a floor that can’t hold an adventurer’s weight—these are all potentially exciting or intriguing dungeon situations, too. Dungeons are a great way to please all kinds of players because all different kinds of challenges can be presented in rapid succession, all in the same mysterious, dark, and frightening environment.

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Why Dungeons?

Dungeons are the ur-setting of RPG adventures. Obviously, they came first, arising from Dave Arneson’s Castle Blackmoor and later, Gary Gygax’s Castle Greyhawk. I already covered how dungeons make the PCs’ choices more manageable for both the players and their GM. But dungeons aren’t realistic, some will say. Now, the classic dungeon arises from a fantasy milieu, but I will only look slightly askance at someone throwing around concepts like realism in a world where wizards cast spells and dragons breathe fire. That’s not the real counter to the “not realistic” thinking. Instead, I’ll grant that the dungeon isn’t realistic, and that’s great. It’s nothing in the real world. It’s an alien environment. Its that otherworldly nature of the whole thing that makes it so intriguing.

Just like how we don’t get fun from our rules because they’re realistic (sword wounds tend to kill from infection days after the fight as often, if not more often, than dramatically on the battlefield), the environment that gives a clarion call to magic-wielding, bigger-than-life adventurers is one filled with unknown dangers and mysterious mystical wonders.

And dammit, dungeons are fun.

Encounters and Challenges

It’s useful to know the game system the group will be using to play in the dungeon. There are two reasons for this.

1. The designer has to know the capabilities of the characters, at least generally. Now, to be clear, I don’t think you should design specifically to their abilities. Giving players challenges they can’t overcome by using something written on their character sheet encourages player creativity and ingenuity. And it’s more fun. (There’s that word again.) Challenges should be a mix of situations where the characters can use their abilities to succeed and those they must overcome using an idea that they come up with in the moment.

If we’re going to really drill down on this, success from creativity shouldn’t be required to progress in the dungeon. Player ingenuity might lead them to rotate the statue so that it faces the mirror, revealing a secret passage, but there should be another way for them to keep progressing as well, either by exploring, making a lock picking check on the locked door, or carefully scooting along the narrow ledge. In this example, though, I’d encourage you to make the secret passage an easier or more rewarding path. And I’d further encourage you to make it fairly obvious that it’s better. The players won’t be sad to learn that using their senses and their imaginations is better than relying on game mechanics, and the GM won’t be sad that the players will start to pay more attention to the descriptions they’re given. That isn’t to say that every challenge should have both a mechanical and a creative solution, but honestly, there would be nothing wrong if they did.

Lastly, I’d say that sometimes there doesn’t need to be a solution. If there’s a magical gateway inside a block of transparent crystal that leads right to a treasure room, the designer doesn’t need to provide a way to get through it. Rather, give them a conventional (longer, and more arduous) way to get to the treasure room. If they can figure out a way to break the crystal block without destroying the gateway, well, good on them.

Or—and I’m really pitching near-sacrilege here—don’t provide the conventional way. Let it tantalize and aggravate the players. Then, when they discover a magical artifact or whatever months later in the campaign that will solve that problem, I almost guarantee that they will remember the block of crystal with the gateway in it, and they’ll go back.

2. The designer needs to be able to pace the dungeon adventure. When we’re talking about exploring the Dungeon (note the capital D), there’s almost certainly more adventure than a typical group will finish in a single session. Knowing how many sessions a group might be in the Dungeon is valuable. Will the characters leave when they need to rest? How will the number of encounters in a typical session match up with how many the characters can tackle before they’ll need to rest? (In a perfect world, those numbers will be identical every time, but we do not live nor game in a perfect world, and there will always be variability.)

And if they’re having a lot of encounters, the characters might advance and become more capable at some point. That point, however, varies based on game system. But a good designer can judge that amount of advancement within a margin of error. If there are six sections/levels/regions to the dungeon and they’ll start the first one as a beginning character, it’s good to know how skilled or powerful they’re likely to be when they reach the sixth one, for example.

Embedding Story

Telling a dungeon story isn’t like writing a novel. It’s not even like designing an event-based RPG adventure. It’s its own thing. You design a bunch of interesting challenges and encounters, but the real gift you give to the GM are the stories you embed into the dungeon. Note that I say stories, plural, and that I use the term “embedding stories” rather than “telling stories.” I’ve said it before in my columns here, but I’ll say it again: the designer isn’t the storyteller. The group around the table tells the story, working together creatively. To put it another way, the designer isn’t writing a script, or even directing the action, they are creating some side characters (with agendas of their own) and laying out some props and scenery. The director and the main actors—the GM and the players—are doing all the rest.

So the designer layers in story threads that the players might pick up on and the GM can run with, or—just as importantly—threads they can ignore, miss, or even reject outright. The designer doesn’t know what motivates or interests the players, nor should they. Place treasures for those motivated by wealth, wonders for those fascinated by weirdness, mysteries for those who love to solve them, and so on.

Part of a dungeon’s story, of course, is why it exists in the first place. Natural caverns are self-explanatory, but if it was built, who built it, and for what purpose? My personal favorite dungeon backstory is for it to have been built for some original purpose by one group, but is now used by another for a different purpose, like the catacombs under Paris initially built as tunnels for quarrying purposes, then used to store the dead, then used by resistance fighters in WWII to hide, and later used by artists and musicians (sometimes illegally).

So in a dungeon’s design, a portion of an old mine could be expanded and used by an old religion for their temple which was later abandoned and occupied by some horrible monster like a dragon. The adventure might involve the characters confronting the dragon in its underground lair, but the descriptions of the place will involve all kinds of crumbling religious iconography. And the whole place has mine shafts extending away from it, perhaps to some other location that has been repurposed for something else.

Which suggests that a single dungeon can have multiple purposes at the same time and—more importantly—multiple types of occupants. A monster lairs in one bit, but some humans use another part as a defensible fortress. And then there’s ghosts haunting another part from some past tragedy, or maybe there’s a cemetery above on the surface (or an ossuary below).

Factions in the dungeon—the different organized or semi-organized groups of inhabitants of the place—can certainly help turn a bunch of underground rooms into an engaging story. They can help add verisimilitude to the whole thing as well, and make everything seem dynamic. If there are trolls in one area, they might come to help the trolls in another area if they’re under attack. If the cultists know their subterranean temple is at risk, they might develop patrols to watch for an attack. These are dynamic situations, and they suggest the beginning threads of a story that might emerge as the characters interact with them. Do the trolls like helping each other, or are they actually vying for supremacy? Do the cultists resent being put on patrol rather than performing their normal religious duties, or are they bloodthirsty and love getting a chance to confront their enemies with their wickedly curved daggers?

Further, do the cultists and the trolls work together because they worship the same chthonian gods? Do they conduct trade? Or do they hate each other and attack on sight based on something that happened before the characters even came to the dungeon?

This isn’t just flavor or background. These are things the players can discover and use, inserting themselves into the story by infiltrating, bribing, or allying with one faction, pitting the factions against each other, or anything else their devious little player minds can conceive.

The Boss at the End

I’d just like to point out that the concept of a “boss monster” originates from video games, not tabletop games. We’ve just adopted that mentality for so long that it feels like ours. What I mean by that is not that early tabletop dungeons didn’t sometimes have someone in charge, if it was a dungeon with an organization of the inhabitants, like in the Moathouse of the Village of Hommlet. Rather, what I mean is that the concept of “if we beat the boss monster it means the adventure is completed” wasn’t a thing in those days. You might defeat Lareth the Beautiful in the Moathouse, but there was still adventure to be had. In fact, in a well-run Moathouse, Lareth might very well come find you before you come find him. When I ran that adventure [mumble mumble] years ago, I’m pretty sure good old Lareth saw his final defeat near the entrance to the dungeon level, after he and his best guards had attacked the PCs repeatedly throughout the dungeon, driving them back or vice versa.

And of course, part of what I’m getting at is that not every dungeon even has a “boss.” If the goal of the adventure is to explore the dangerous ruins to find the magic scepter, obtaining that scepter is likely the signal that the adventure is over. There might be a monster there, but it doesn’t have to be the boss, or even the most powerful monster in the dungeon. The philosophy of the boss monster suggests that exiting the dungeon and getting back home is just denouement. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

And—again, I’m spewing sacrilege here—maybe the dungeon endpoint doesn’t need to be a fight at all. There are lots of different kinds of challenges, and the absence of a final combat doesn’t need to be an anticlimax. Although some players might see it that way because of video games.

Next time, one last entry about dungeons. We’ll take a look at maps, the best way to present information, and how dungeons can be more than just a hack-and-slash fest.

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The Big Picture

Lots of writers, including myself, have written about how a “dungeon” can be anything—a castle interior, a sewer system, a large spaceship, a cavern system, or even a city. In fact, any RPG adventure can be organized as a flowchart. You have “encounters” and connections between the encounters, just as a dungeon has rooms and corridors.

It’s handy to think about the connections between encounters and how the potential paths the players might choose affect things, even when designing an event-based (as opposed to location-based) adventure, because it will have you asking yourself questions like, “How do the characters get from this encounter to that one?” “How do they get out of this encounter if they want?” or even, “How will the players know that they’ve completed the adventure?”

Because flowcharts are really just simplified dungeons (or rather, dungeons are disguised flowcharts), I think dungeon design advice can really apply to any adventure. And what I really want to talk about is actual dungeons, as in, “…and dragons.” Not something that just can be treated as a dungeon, but a dark, damp, underground complex filled with danger and—as the characters hope—treasure.

Limitations are Good, Actually

Dungeons are cool because they limit the players. Now that might sound bad, but hear me out. One of the charms of RPGs is that you can do anything, right? It’s true, but having limitless options can be just as daunting as it is freeing, if not more so. In reality, rather than in theory, the players have been at work or at school or taking care of the kids or whatever all week long. Their lives are busy, and they’re always making decisions. Decision fatigue is a real thing. Lots of players find comfort in a paring down of choices. “Do we take the left passage, the right passage, or go back and open that door we found earlier?” That’s a manageable amount of choices, but still enough to be interesting, if—and this is an important if—the players have enough information to make intelligent choices. They hear rushing water off to the left, there were claw marks on that door, and the hobgoblin they allied themselves with told them to go right. What do these clues mean? Exploration allows them to find out. Without those clues, however, it’s basically a meaningless decision, to the point where there might as well only be one option.

This seemingly counterintuitive idea of limitations on creativity exists anywhere. A screenwriter can have the characters do a lot of different things, but they can’t have the characters break into song unless it’s a musical, or climb aboard a starship unless it’s science fiction. And more specifically, the characters have to undertake actions that are comprehensible and suitable to what’s been established about them before unless there’s a good reason. A painter has a finite number of colors to work with. A novelist has to use words with meaning, etc. etc. So limitations might sound bad, but they’re actually good.

GMs benefit from limited options as well. In that dungeon setup, the GM only needs to manage what’s to the right, to the left, or on the other side of the door. Totally doable. So doable, in fact, that a decent GM will have the game mastering bandwidth to make those options more interesting, and more interactive. Like if, say, the dungeon inhabitants off to the right hate those by the water to the left, which is something the players can take advantage of. And so if the PCs drive off the folks to the left, the ones down the right path might give them a way to bypass the trap behind the door. If there are eighteen different options, though, that interactivity becomes a lot more challenging to run.

The Megadungeon

While I’m a fan of all dungeons in concept, what fascinates me the most is the dungeon as environment, as opposed to a city, the open sea, the jungle, or what have you. And to achieve this, you probably need to make the dungeon big. Somewhere along the way, big dungeons became known as “megadungeons,” and so we’ll go with that.

The megadungeon, or just the Dungeon (capital D), is a unique environment that is completely focused on the very idea of an RPG adventure. Combat, treasure, environmental challenges, and puzzles, all relatively close together.

Tolkien can write about his characters exploring the Mines of Moria, and it’s thrilling, surprising, entertaining, and more. But it’s not the same kind of narrative an RPG group creates if they explore a dungeon, even if it’s an extremely similar location. Tolkien decides that the Fellowship finds Ballin’s Tomb before they get to the Bridge of Kazad Dum, but in the RPG, the players decide. The players (and thus, their characters) have agency in a way a novelist’s characters never could, by definition.

Now, you might say that a novelist can elegantly weave the events into a coherent, meaningful narrative, while events in the RPG dungeon are just unconnected, random encounters. But I would take issue with that. A good designer can feed the GM the story threads such that a meaningful and rewarding narrative can arise out of the encounters, even though neither designer nor GM knows which encounters will make it to the table, in what order, and how they’ll be dealt with.

In the worst case—where the designer has just given the GM a bunch of seemingly random, unconnected encounters—it’s up to the players to wholly develop the narrative into something meaningful. In the best case, the designer has provided the GM with enough connections and backstory so that the story emerges from the encounters. At first, it might just seem like a combat encounter, an environmental challenge, and then an interaction, but when they’re done, the players will see that the monster was guarding the entrance at the behest of a mind-controlling vampire, the environmental challenge came from crossing a crumbling bridge that the aforementioned monster damaged before being mastered by the vampire, and the interaction is with a victim of the vampire who has valuable information for the PCs if they’ll help them escape.

And the chef’s kiss aspect of this is that if the players made different choices in which encounters they experienced, how many they experienced, how they dealt with them, and in which order, the narrative emerges regardless. They face the guardian monster, but rather than crossing the bridge, they find a secret passage that takes them into a private chamber of the vampire that—when they search—reveals not only the vampire’s nature, but grants them clues to the villain’s background and secrets to how he can be destroyed. This chamber leads to an encounter with victims mesmerized by the vampire and eventually a chapel devoted to his dark gods.

Again, it’s just a combat encounter, an exploration challenge, another combat, and a spooky scene. But as they weave together, they form a thrilling, cohesive narrative exploring a vampire’s lair.

It might not be the same narrative as the one first described, but that’s actually a good thing. Because we want the players and their characters to have agency, and we want their choices to matter.

The different encounters constellate into a narrative, like when ancient stargazers looked up into the night sky and linked stars that have little or no relation into a single representative image—a constellation. The encounters in aggregate create an emergent story. And the best part is that the threads weaving the encounters together are the characters—the most important part of RPG play.

That’s why when I design a dungeon, I seed it with what I call “potential character moments.” These can play to a character’s skill or abilities, but what’s even better is when they bring out the character. A villain threatens to take revenge on the person who matters most to the character that bested him—who is that? A demon steals away a precious memory from the mind of a character—what’s that memory? To get what they want, the character has to pledge an oath that will remain with them for the rest of their days—can they live with that? Just like in any story, the characters should leave the dungeon more fleshed out than when they went in.

Next time, we’ll go deeper into the dungeon and really pick apart some of the specifics—factions, stories, and adventure endings. And more!

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If I had titled this “Currency in RPGs,” you might have thought I was going to write about gold pieces, which is fair because treasure in games is very much a factor in game design. If you can buy magic stuff with gold, it absolutely affects game balance and character progression.

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But that’s NOT what I want to discuss today. I want to talk about all the currencies in games that aren’t actual money that characters possess. RPGs are actually full of such currencies. The most common one is character health. Hit points (and their many cousins in other systems) are essentially a currency. Or rather, a metacurrency.

If the money a character possesses is their narrative currency to earn and spend, then other currencies in games are earned and spent by the player. Thus, the term “metacurrency.”

A player’s character has only 15 hit points left (out of, say, 30). Do they “spend” some of their hit points to get into the next fight, or do they avoid it until they can heal some of them back? It’s worth mentioning that I use hit points (or any kind of similar health mechanic) as an example of metacurrency because everyone knows what they are, but as a concept, they are actually more complicated than many other metacurrencies because you don’t spend them so much as you risk losing them and you have little control over how many you lose. As a transaction, it’s more like gambling than spending.

So let’s look at more straightforward metacurrencies in games.

Experience Points

Basically, a character earns experience points (or whatever the game’s equivalent may be) and then the player “spends” them to improve the character, which might mean going up a level, gaining a new superpower, or whatever the game offers. One of the most important things about experience points is that they should be awarded for doing what you’re “supposed” to do in the game. You can have a lot of philosophical discussions about what an experience really is, and how it may or may not improve your character, but from a purely game design point of view, it’s the way the game rewards a player for, well, playing.

While the very concept of roleplaying is decidedly open-ended, every game has some general activity that characters are supposed to partake in. In Numenera, it’s discovering the wonders of the Ninth World. In Call of Cthulhu, it’s defending the world against the forces of the Mythos. In modern D&D, it’s fighting monsters (in older editions, it was finding treasure). The promise of experience points is what tells players, “if you do this activity, your character will advance.” It’s kind of like saying, “When in doubt, this is what you should do.” It should tie into the game’s underlying story in broad terms. Defeating supervillains is the story behind a superhero game, exploring new planets is the story behind many science fiction games, so these are the activities you (hopefully) get rewarded for doing.

Some games allow players to use experience points to do things other than advance, making them even more of a currency. Crafting magic items, for example, might cost experience points, although having a new magic item or having a new ability from gaining a level are pretty much the same thing in the big picture. A game like Cypher allows players to spend experience points to do special actions or even reroll a die. Which really just allows one currency to do the job of two, as we get into the next type of metacurrency…

Hero Points/Luck Points/Karma Points

Many games, going back to the late 70s, gave players some kind of metacurrency that could be spent to change outcomes. Often, this is just simply the ability to reroll a die to get a more favorable result. Other games give out special points (or cards, or whatever) that grant a character a way to do something really special, often something impossible or very difficult using the rules as written. You inflict more damage, leap near impossible distances, shrug off what should be a lethal wound, and so on.

This kind of metacurrency has many different names depending on what game you’re playing and its effects range from the very straightforward to something that relies heavily on player creativity in the situation at hand. Virtually all of them, however, focus on the idea that PCs are luckier, more heroic, or more blessed than NPCs. It’s the idea that PCs are special, and that’s what makes them the main characters of the story being told by the group.

Often, these points are awarded for doing heroic acts or taking special actions, and typically allow (or force) the GM to make judgments on the acts of the PCs, meaning that the frequency this metacurrency is available can vary greatly from GM to GM. It’s difficult (but not impossible) to incorporate rules or at least guidelines for awarding them, which makes the metacurrency feel somewhat separate from the regular rules of the game found in the books.

Integrated Currencies

Some metacurrencies, however, are enmeshed directly into the game’s mechanics. In Cypher, the points in your stats are a currency that can be spent to power abilities or lower the difficulty of a task. Narratively, this portrays the idea that using abilities or putting in effort is taxing. The spent points, of course, can be restored with rest. Thus, the very act of playing the game means that you are managing resources and spending or conserving your metacurrencies.

Other games use cards rather than dice, and many of these involve each player having a hand of cards. A careful player will save their best cards for an important moment in the game, thus managing them like a resource.

While these are just two examples, they show that a metacurrency can be more than just a little bonus to let a player be lucky or heroic. While people sometimes feel as though metacurrencies are extraneous mechanics that sort of sit on top of the main rules of the game, they can be mechanics that are the very core of the game functions.

Again, calling upon a mechanic that we’ve all been familiar with since the earliest days of RPGs, consider D&D-style magic items. If your character has a magic potion that can only be used once or a magic ring that works three times per day, those uses are a metacurrency.

Or, many games will have limited uses built into character abilities (not the magic gear the character has, but the inherent talents and powers a character has on their sheet). Fourth edition D&D gave players abilities that were all based on how often you could use them—once each encounter, once each day, and so on. The whole game was driven by this metacurrency.

Why, even everyone’s favorite (or least favorite as the case may be) magic system—the Vancian system used in most of D&D’s history—turns spells into a metacurrency. And if your fantasy game doesn’t use Vancian magic, it was probably replaced with something involving spell points which are—yup, you guessed it—a metacurrency.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of including metacurrencies in a game’s design, but I think you’ll agree that it’s almost impossible not to have the concept in some form in practically any game.

Also, we’re updating Numenera to the new Cypher rules and adding in cool new products. Check it out!

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See, when I visited this topic before, I don’t think I fully explained the options involved in the choice the designer should make intentionally. Namely, when a character attempts an action and then rolls the dice, what does the dice roll really tell us?

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The differences are quite subtle (or, to the casual player, nonexistent), but they’re actually greater than they might seem at first. The two main ways involve one of the following:

1. The dice determine how the world works, the answer revealed when the character interacts with the world through their actions.

2. The dice indicate how well the character performs in their stated action and nothing more or less.

Approach #1 assumes that it’s a wild world out there with lots of moving pieces. The character tries something, and maybe it works, and maybe it doesn’t. It might very well be out of the character’s control. A success might mean that conditions are in the character’s favor rather than that the character does a good job at their task.

For example, if a character goes to the library to learn some important information regarding an investigation, the GM might ask for a roll. The roll indicates failure, and so while it might be that the character didn’t look in the right books, it’s just as likely that the dice are suggesting that the library didn’t have that information. In the latter situation, presumably the character never had any chance of success in the end. They didn’t fail—the library didn’t have what they wanted. No one could have succeeded. It’s not the character’s fault—it’s the damn library.

The same character goes to speak with the local chief of police to ask them questions about the investigation. The GM has already decided that the police, unbeknownst to the player, have no useful information to offer. However, the player rolls extraordinarily well—a maximum success. The GM wants to honor that roll, and so they decide that it turns out the police chief does have some useful knowledge that they’ll share, and it will aid the character. The dice, in this case, literally overruled the GM. They determined what the chief knows (which, in fact, the GM had already determined—the dice changed what the chief knows, likely altering the overall narrative).

Now the investigator walks up to a woman in the local grocery store and asks her questions about the investigation. Rolling well might indicate that she’s in a particularly talkative mood, that she knows more than it should seem, or even that she’s secretly in love with the character and has admired them from afar. A poor roll could suggest that she doesn’t know anything, or just that she’s in a bad mood.

The dice are shaping the world.

Something similar will happen if the game in question has rules for “fumbles.” If the player rolls a fumble (not just a failure), the GM is likely encouraged to interpret this as something unexpected happening. The stairs the character stands on are slick, and our character slips and falls. This is less about a clumsy character and more about the slippery ground. The dice dictated something about the environment.

Taken to the extreme, a character could attempt to look for their lost keys in the bedroom and find them with a successful roll, even though they lost them out in the street. (Or, conversely, they could fail spectacularly looking out in the street, and the GM determines that the roll means they’re actually in the house.)

In approach #2, where the dice indicate how well the character performs, when the investigator goes to the library, talks to the police chief, or speaks to the woman in the store and the dice roll simply indicates how carefully or intelligently the investigator spent their time in the library, how persuasive they were in the police station, or how charming they were in the grocery store. The GM determines if success was even achievable. No die roll allows the PC to achieve something impossible, like getting information from someone who has none to give.

Approach #1 is probably a little easier on the GM, for the dice are taking the burden of deciding what’s possible. The player opens Schrödinger’s Box, and the dice determine if the cat is alive or dead. No one knew before they opened it.

However, #1 leads to more uneven stories, and puts players in a world that’s a bit difficult to navigate because it is less predictable. Neither player nor GM knows entirely what’s happening or how things work until the dice stop rolling.

Conversely, approach #2 is less random, but probably less dramatic. Rolling that nat 20 doesn’t help you if the task you’re attempting is impossible. If you fumble, it’s because you goofed, regardless of the context. From a certain point of view, it grants some player agency and GM narrative power, perhaps, but the predictability of it probably dulls a bit of the over-the-top fun.

Part of the irony is that some players likely believe that they’re playing a game using approach #2, but it’s actually #1. What’s perhaps worse is when GMs and designers think the game is #2, but it’s actually #1, mostly because they don’t notice the difference.

But does it really matter? I think it does. It all comes down to the question that I have raised here before (certainly one I’ve discussed elsewhere in essays and books), which asks where the power at the table truly lies. Is it the GM, the players, or the game rules (and thus the dice) themselves? If the PC attempts something impossible, but rolls a critical success, does the roll overrule the narrative? Does the result of a dice roll depend solely on the character attempting the action? Is it a little of both? I don’t think the answer is as important as those involved—particularly the designers—knowing what the answer is.

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Game design shares a similar sensibility, where the GM is the sound engineer making adjustments in a studio you designed. I like to think of rules that can be altered in specific ways (with specific results) as levers for the GM to adjust. Make one change, and you might need to make a few others, or at least understand the implications of the change you made. Increase the difficulty to hit a foe in combat, for example, and fight encounters will last longer, any special effects that require a hit will happen less often, and so on.

Let’s talk about levers that a designer can give to a GM to adjust, and how some of this is good and some of it can just create extra work for the GM to make the game function (which isn’t good).

Levers

Levers, in this context, are controls a game gives to a GM to fine-tune things to ensure the group is playing exactly the game they want to play.

Consider experience points (or whatever the game gives to a player to advance their character in some way). While a game can just make this very formulaic, this is an example of a lever I like to give the GM control over. Some groups like to advance their characters more quickly than others—perhaps becoming more powerful is the fun they get from the game. Others like to go more slowly. Perhaps for them, it’s more about the story than the power of the characters.

The same is true for other rewards, like treasure, accolades, boons, or whatever exists in the game in question. These should be adjustable to suit the needs and desires of the GM and players.

However, when providing one of these levers the game then also needs to inform the GM what the effect of adjusting the lever would be, or, conversely, how to adjust the lever to get the effect you want. If you’re playing D&D, for example, and you really love characters from about level 4 to level 8, it should be made clear to the GM how many experience points to award and when to award them to keep player characters in this “sweet spot” longer. Similarly, the GM should understand that if the PCs gain a given amount of treasure, it will affect the campaign in a certain way. Will it make the characters considerably more powerful? Will it impoverish them so that they are strongly motivated by treasure? Will magic items become more important than character abilities, or will the PCs be underequipped at a certain point?

Other levers you might provide GMs are the difficulty of challenges, the length of time between adventures or between scenes within an adventure, starting gear or background options for characters, and so on.

Levers don’t have to be as complicated or precise as the controls in a recording booth. They can be as simple as changing the level of bass or treble on your stereo at home or in your car. But it’s nice, as a GM, to have some tools to perfect the gameplay experience.

Fixes

Fixes are different from levers, although they might seem the same at first. Fixes are things the GM is either told they have to do, or they learn they have to do through experience. They aren’t a matter of fine-tuning, they’re a matter of “the game doesn’t work otherwise.”

Fixes are almost assuredly a symptom of bad design.

Consider a fantasy game where some creatures cannot be harmed by mundane means, and you need magic to face them. The GM might look at magical treasure as a lever, and decide not to give the characters much access to enchanted stuff because they want a low-magic game. The results of this use of the lever in question are either:

1. PCs just can’t face certain creatures and have to run (or find atypical means of success)

or

2. Characters with magic (like a mage) become dominant over the non-spellcasters

If either of these happen once or twice in the course of play, that might be an interesting change of pace, depending on the game or campaign in question. If it becomes the rule of thumb, either result is going to end up with dissatisfied gamers.

However, the game’s rules (or the GM, tired of player complaints) might suggest that this isn’t a lever, it’s a fix. To make the game work, the GM needs to make sure the characters all end up with enough magic to deal with the monsters.

But the trouble with fixes is that they’re usually clumsy. Because now, if the GM hands out magic to make each character viable, how is a low-magic game even possible? Moreover, what’s the point of creatures that require magic to defeat if the GM needs to give everyone magic? If a creature is immune to non-magical attacks but every character has magic, that immunity is a waste of ink on the page of the creature’s stats. It has no meaning.

The true solution to this particular problem needs to come from the game’s designer. It requires a retooling of what immunity to nonmagic attacks means (or perhaps removing it altogether). It’s likely too big an issue to leave to the GM. Even if some GMs make it work, using enchanted treasure as a lever or even a fix, the game should work for all GMs, not just some.

Other fixes often revolve around healing. Hurt PCs need to recover from their injuries to keep going (and so the players can keep playing). But if the game system doesn’t inherently have a method to make this fast enough to please the players or robust enough to keep the characters alive, the GM and even the players are expected to fix it.

Look at (mostly older editions of) D&D and the “cleric issue” wherein someone “had” to play a cleric because the rules provided—getting back 1 hit point for resting a day—wasn’t enough to make the game work. A group of PCs without a cleric was seen as broken, and without one, the GM had to provide some kind of magic or technology to expedite healing.

While healing can be a lever in some games, where the GM can increase or decrease the rate of healing to alter the pace of a game to some desired end, in this case it was simply a fix that had to be implemented at the table.

Games shouldn’t require a GM to fix them. The idea that the GM has to do something like that points at a problem with the game’s design. Even when the needed fix isn’t too difficult, it often requires a fundamental change to something in the game, not just a little tweak. It seems almost ridiculous to have to say it, but game designers need to recognize the difference between the two, and provide needed information on the anticipated results of adjusting the levers, leaving the GM free to do so.

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You see, you can give a GM a rule for every situation, and they’ll be able to run the game as long as they keep referring to the rulebook (or, I suppose, memorize it), but if you give the GM a widely applicable mechanic and instruct them how to implement it in a variety of situations, they can run the game and never (or practically never) refer to the book.

In other words, teach a GM how to assess a challenge and deal with the consequences, rather than trying to create rules for a varied number of situations and corner cases.

Having a discrete rule or modifier to cover every different situation is appropriate for certain kinds of games. Cypher, however, is not one of those games. Neither are a lot of other, more narrative games. Such games need a generalized mechanic for penalties and bonuses, like the concept of advantage (roll twice and take the better) or disadvantage (roll twice and take the worst). Or, in Cypher, easing or hindering the difficulty of a task.

To explain why I feel this way, consider a bespoke rule for how to handle a character’s chance of drowning. Such a rule frequently creates one of two situations:

1. The PCs fall into the water and play stops while the GM looks up the rules for drowning.

2. The PCs fall into the water, the GM handles it as seems appropriate, and the players see the rule later and "fact check" the GM.

I don't like either of those situations for games like Cypher. In fact, doubly so specifically for Cypher because in addition to creating a system where gameplay moves quickly, we’re trying to portray multiple genres, and it's likely easier to drown in, say, a real-world setting than in a sword and sorcery one.

Similarly, I don't want to have things like jumping distances or climbing difficulties in the player-facing rules, either. The GM should have suggestions for such things, but they should be presented as examples of how to set modifiers or make rulings. And again, genre influences this heavily. An accountant in the normal world might leap a decent distance, but Indiana Jones leaps farther. Daredevil leaps farther still. One might argue that’s a function of the character in question, not the genre, but it’s likely a middle ground. Some genres change what is considered realistic. Regardless, the GM needs to be informed of all of these factors, so they can affect the difficulty of the task.

Teach them to fish.

A hard lesson for many game designers is that most players don’t think like game designers. And I’m talking about players specifically, here, not GMs. A designer might want to include a rule to cover a situation so that a player will know what to expect in that situation. Telling the player what sort of modifier they can expect if they try a certain action—it sounds good, right? But this assumes that players read the rules and, perhaps even more unrealistically, refer back to them. Most players look to the GM as their guide through the rules. Instead, overly specific rules teach both player and GM that they are supposed to stop playing and refer to the rulebook when the situation arises (the first of the two likely outcomes that I previously mentioned). It slows down play.

The “teach a man to fish” adage doesn’t apply to players. Or at least, the players of somewhat more narrative games like Cypher. For players, the goal is to teach them the general rules—state your action, and circumstances will likely modify your chance of success, but let the GM worry about the specifics. That’s one of the main reasons why we’ve decided to have one book for the players in Cypher, and one for GMs.

But, for a very tactical, very mechanical game, the bespoke rules approach might be perfect. Players of such games want precision and detail, to increase the ability to play tactically, and for their game to simulate what they feel is most realistic. The precision, not the speed of play or ease of use, is the important part.

The task of the designer is to know what kind of game rules they’re working on.

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For example, when a PC is attacked in combat, they can choose to try to dodge the attack or use their armor and shield (if they have them) to block the attack. Obviously, the more armor you wear, the easier it is to block, but the harder it is to dodge. But successfully dodging means the attack misses entirely, whereas when you block, you probably still take some damage. And different kinds of attacks might be more easily blocked than dodged or vice versa. This makes every round of the fight potentially even more interesting and dynamic.

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A major way we’ve introduced more choice is through each character’s focus. In the original Cypher System (and its granddaddy, Numenera) you chose a focus for your character, and then you got an ability every time you gained a new tier. The choice was interesting, but you only made that choice at character creation.

In Cypher, each focus has its own “flowchart” of weaving paths of abilities. In some games (mostly computer RPGs) these are called skill trees. You can move up and down the tree as you desire, to get the abilities you want, as long as you follow the path. In other words, you start with a couple of Tier One abilities, and then when you advance, you can take a Tier Two ability or you can take another Tier One ability. As you go through your PC’s life, you can keep reaching for higher-tier abilities or you can go back and choose a different path.

From a design perspective, this was a lot of work, because it meant not just reorganizing the abilities but creating a lot of new ones. This, however, is a boon to the game, because it allows us to create varied abilities that fit each focus. Under the old paradigm, when you thought of an idea for a focus, like Commands Mental Powers, you basically had to mechanically define that focus with six abilities, no more, no less (we eventually started adding a choice of two abilities at Tier Three and Tier Six, but the point remains). In this new paradigm, we can take anything that seems appropriate to Commands Mental Powers and present it as an option somewhere in its tree.

Combat is a way that a lot of people look at a game’s “balance” (in some later article, I’ll explain why I put that term in quotes). That fact created pressure to offer a lot of combat-related abilities in the foci, because we didn’t want one focus to appear to be more “powerful” than another. The new paradigm gives us the freedom to add in far more abilities that are useful outside of combat. These new abilities give interesting options when PCs interact with NPCs, explore the environment around themselves, travel, gain information, and do all the other things that characters do in a game. These new additions are extremely satisfying from a design point of view, but also give players many more interesting choices each time their character advances.

To use an entirely different metaphor, if the old way was like choosing which train to board at Tier One, and then just riding that train wherever it took you, the new way is more like taking that same trip by car and choosing which road to take, where to stop for lunch, and so on.

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That said, categories are important. If I went into a bookstore that just had all of its books together in a single section, it would be hard to find the book I wanted, and almost impossible to browse to discover books that were similar to one another.

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Working on Cypher makes me think about genre a lot. And genre is important to this game because we all (designers, GMs, and players) need some common ground to talk about the games being played. And that means drawing similarities and distinctions between settings and stories. Conan is pretty different from Lord of the Rings, but they both have more in common than either share with, say, Star Trek.

So we have genres in the game for sword and sorcery and epic fantasy. Still, they’re both really subgenres of fantasy, quite different from the subgenres within science fiction like space opera or postapocalyptic. This exercise, eventually, produces some interesting observations. Fantasy and science fiction can be (perhaps crudely) categorized by their trappings: magic and technology. But what makes horror its own genre isn’t the trappings at all. In fact, you can have both horror fantasy and horror sci-fi. And of course, modern horror, historical horror, and so on. Horror is a genre, but not in the same way as fantasy and sci-fi.

So we decided not to pretend they were the same. Horror in Cypher is more what you might call a genre template that can be used as an overlay on any setting or genre. Horror doesn’t have its own descriptors, types, or foci (the big pieces of the game that make up a character). Instead, when we present horror, it’s got optional mechanics for stress, rising tension (which we call horror mode), and so on. For GMs, the section on horror has lots of advice for establishing and maintaining mood, and discussion of what makes something scary, rather than, say, the fantasy section’s discussion of world-building with magic and monsters.

Once we’d established this approach for horror, I quickly realized there was a similar sort of template of a different kind. I call it “…and there’s magic.” Because you can use any setting, time period, or genre, and just add magic to create a new and interesting genre. Detective noir and there’s magic. Far future space opera and there’s magic. Basically, adding magic turns anything into a sort of fantasy setting, but mages crafting spells within a Dyson swarm orbiting a neutron star is a lot different from soldiers in WWI trenches hurling spells at each other from across the battlefield or witches looking for terrorists in modern-day Paris. Any of these settings is possible with Cypher.

And of course, you could have a horror version of pirates on the high seas… and there’s magic.se You can combine these templates.

I’d be remiss in not mentioning superheroes. Supers, as a genre, aren’t really a template so much as a melting pot. Classic superheroes are really every genre thrown together, with a wizard and his companion wearing a suit of high-tech armor, fighting an alien menace. In many ways, I feel like this is where Cypher really excels, because you can use anything and everything from any book or supplement all at once.

Designing toward genres and settings of any kind is the whole point of Cypher, and I’m proud of what we have accomplished in that regard.

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I hate time tracking, for example. If your ability that allows you to hover in the air lasts for 5 rounds or turns, that basically means you get to play the game in an interesting way five times and then the game (not you) decides you’re done. And that requires you to keep track of those five turns. Not horrible, but you’ve got to do a little record keeping, and if you’ve got a couple different abilities like that, you’re tracking multiple things at once.

But at least a turn or a round is a measurable, easily defined game mechanic. If you’ve acted five times, five rounds have gone by. Straightforward. How long is that in the story—in the reality of the world? If someone in the game world is clocking your character with a stopwatch, how much time passes?

Honestly, who cares? It’s probably about a minute, but it might be a minute and a half or it might be 45 seconds. It’s very likely not vital to the story precisely how long those actions take. It’s like a single short scene in a movie. Determining how much time has passed, even when measured in rounds, doesn’t have a huge impact on the game compared to the trouble it takes to track those rounds.

However, often in games, including Cypher System, you get abilities that last a minute, or an hour, etc. In other words, the games use narrative time to track the duration of the mechanical effect. There’s already an awkward transition involved. Converting game mechanic durations to narrative time passing in the game is like having to translate one language into another. In the game, the rules probably tell you how long it takes to walk across a room in terms of actions, but how many minutes does it take to walk down the street? Likely not covered in the rules.

“Has a minute passed since we exited the starship?” a player might ask. “Um, I guess so?” is likely the GM’s answer. Even if there are precise amounts of time associated with rounds, in the middle of a moment of rather mundane action like getting off the spaceship and walking through the station to get to the captain’s quarters, the GM hasn’t been tracking them. To reduce every single action a PC takes that way would quickly get tedious.

Now, in Cypher, we’re already abstracting distance (using Immediate, Short, Long, and Very Long ranges rather than specific feet or meters). So why be concerned about precise time tracking? Better still, in Cypher we give players the agency to determine when they try harder in an action by applying Effort. What if we could do both with durations?

As we’ve been tinkering, we’ve made it so most durations last until you take your next 10 minute or longer recovery action. Recovery actions are used to restore points you’ve spent from your Pools, so they’re important—but the player decides when they happen, not the rules, and not the GM. That means most durations last as long as the player wants. It also means that if you’ve got multiple effects in play, they all have the same endpoint. It also means that players are often faced with interesting decisions—do I get my points back, or do I try to go without a bit longer so I can have my effects stay active? You might really want to keep flying or remain fire-resistant or stay extra strong all day long, but you need points in your Pools to act effectively.

And of course, because it’s Cypher, the GM can decide it would make the story more interesting to have the player’s effect end prematurely, in the same way that athe rope frays when the hero in the movie is climbing it, or they find they only have one match left to get the fire started.

Speaking of which, in the spirit of minimizing bookkeeping, you can also just not worry about how many arrows are in your quiver, bandages are in your first aid kit, or similar things. I mean, you can worry about it, if that’s your thing, or the GM can just use a GM intrusion to tell you you’ve only got one bullet left and you’d better make it good. In other words, we do away with bookkeeping and tracking of all kinds with narrative solutions in the players’ and the GM’s hands.

And for a game like Cypher, that’s where it should be.

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A common observation from players is that the concept of cyphers works well in some genres, but not others. In fantasy, for example, they’re potions and scrolls and whatnot. But in a modern game, what are they?

We’ve had answers to that question over the years, but I decided to explore those answers and basically rebuild cyphers from the ground up.

Cyphers are abilities that your character has that change. The goal of including cyphers is to spice up the game, so that the players can pull out something surprising to make an encounter or a situation more interesting. In other games, you might deal with the same challenge the same way every time, but with cyphers, you’ve got different tricks up your sleeves. You’re on an alien planet with weird monsters that attack again and again. Sure, your warrior can shoot the monster each time, but what if the second time, they’ve got the ability to ask the GM a question about the beast to get more intel? What if one of those times, they can foil the monster’s main attack and drive it away? Or stun it long enough that their allies can make short work of it? Those are all very different encounters, and it’s you, the player, not the GM, making them different.

So we took a concept called subtle cyphers and highlighted it. A subtle cypher isn’t a potion or a device. It’s a sudden burst of insight, so a character can best utilize the conditions around them. It’s a surge of adrenaline or a second wind. It’s luck. It’s all those things that go into stories that are so very difficult to mechanize in a game.

These kinds of cyphers all offer abilities that don’t need the supernatural to explain them. Even a character in a James Bond-style espionage game can use one to regain points to a Pool, get a one-time boost to a task, or gain a momentary bit of inspiration (mechanically represented by asking the GM a question). There are many different cyphers, and while none of them are going to break the game, they’re going to be useful and interesting.

Cyphers are the things a character can use to seize the moment and take advantage of something that isn’t a long-practiced skill or an ability they’ve trained themselves to use (though they have those too, of course, and can always rely on them). In other words, a character’s got a bunch of stuff on their character sheet they can consistently rely on, and then a couple of “wild cards” that change from time to time. These keep the game from ever getting stale, and they ensure that everyone’s got something special and different to do.

And every time a character rests significantly (as in, an hour or more of narrative time), they can get more cyphers to use, so players are encouraged to use them.

This is the default way cyphers operate in the game. The idea that cyphers are physical objects is the exception, not the rule, used in genres where they are appropriate. These are called manifest cyphers, and characters can have a mixture of the two kinds.

Manifest cyphers are more dramatic. They make things explode, cause them to shrink down to a tenth their size, or conjure magical power that imbues a weapon. In a game where there’s magic at work, ultratech at play, or any kind of special weird devices, they offer interesting alternative options and again, give characters capabilities that go against “type,” so a fighter can read someone’s mind, or a star pilot can heal their friend’s wound. Manifest cyphers can absolutely turn the tide of a single encounter or save a PC’s life if used well. They grant powers that almost certainly require some kind of supernatural or high-tech to explain, but the majority of genres allow for such things if you want them to.

We’ve also organized cypher effects into categories of power, reflected with cypher levels.. One cool thing about this is that characters that can make cyphers—whether a witch brewing potions or a tech cobbling together a jury-rigged device—have useful and meaningful guidelines for how powerful the cypher should be.

There are even ways a spellcasting character can draw upon these cypher categories to choose a specific cypher to cast as a spell (and remember, with genre abilities, anyone in a fantasy game can become a spellcaster—at least a little—if they want to).

Overall, by reworking and recategorizing cyphers, we’ve made it even easier to reflect abilities (supernatural or not) in different settings. And since both cyphers and differing settings are at the core of the game, it just makes sense.

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In Cypher, we try to cover all manner of genres, and the different genres are often defined by what characters do. In an action movie, characters perform incredible feats and fight the bad guys, probably without superpowers, magic, or ultratech devices. In an epic fantasy, noble warriors and powerful wizards defend the weak against the forces of darkness entirely differently than, say, Spider-Man or Superman would.

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But, another difference you’ll notice from genre to genre is that characters in these stories are affected by the dangers of their worlds differently. And we don’t even have to bring supernatural powers into it (although we can). One might argue that a Lovecraftian investigator, Indiana Jones, and Ethan Hunt all attempt to maintain the veneer of being characters who live in the real world. Each of them is going to react to falling from a great height in different ways. The investigator’s leg is probably broken at least, but Indy grimaces in that way only Harrison Ford does, struggles painfully to his feet, and then gets on with whatever he was doing. Ethan Hunt might give some sign that it hurt, but likely pauses even more briefly than Indiana Jones before getting up and running impossibly fast for an impossibly long distance to defuse the bomb or whatever.

Or take the different subgenres of fantasy. Aragorn’s going to get all manner of cuts and bruises, but he can fight off literal hordes of orcs (and worse). When we read of Locke Lamora, however, there’s little question that a sword slash or crossbow bolt or two could bring him down.

It’s really interesting to see how characters’ ability to withstand punishment can vary from genre to genre (or subgenre to subgenre). Wounds in Cypher, then, can easily be modified to reflect this. In a dungeon exploration-style fantasy game or a modern-action game, characters can get the ability to withstand a few more minor or moderate wounds. A superhero can take a few extra major wounds and keep going.

But there’s more. The amount of time it takes to recover from a wound is affected by this as well. Our pulp action hero might pull themselves out of a cave-in, take a moment to catch their breath, and be fine, while a sci-fi character who survives a battle with a warbot might have to spend some considerable time in the med bay. Conan might shrug off the blow of some tentacled monster, but a person in a modern-day horror story might end up in the hospital (or worse) after their encounter with the very same creature. (It’s funny how Lovecraftian monsters are so ubiquitous that they show up in virtually every genre. Rather than making changes to the monster’s stats to make it appropriate, it makes more sense in Cypher to make changes to the PCs.)

The amount of time it takes to recover from wounds can easily be modified based on genre, as well as how many wounds a character can suffer before facing any effects. Both of these attributes—recovery time and wounds sustained before consequences occur— factor as easy “dials” to turn to make the game work in the way that feels right. And it’s nice that these are rules hacks built right into the game and ones you only need to fiddle with once (or at least, once per campaign), because once you use this metric to help define the setting, you don’t need to do it again. While we provide genre-by-genre guidance for what to do in this case, a GM can modify it in different ways. Want a gritty, deadly superhero game? Simply don’t give the characters the ability to take more wounds (or recover from them so quickly). Want a non-lethal post-apocalypse game where the characters can just keep going and going? Easily done.

The wounds system can even provide a surprising tool regarding character abilities, because some characters might actually improve (in a sense) when they take wounds. Imagine a raging barbarian style character who actually gets a bonus to attacks after suffering a certain number of wounds because it’s enraged them further. Or an action hero whose ability to stand toe to toe with the villain only comes at the end of the fight, rather than at the beginning. This is also a great way to portray the “little guy who’s dangerous when cornered” idea for some characters. Still other characters might gain abilities when their allies reach a certain threshold of damage, because they are so invested in protecting them from harm. Or some kind of strange wizard or other supernatural character might gain access to an ability they wouldn’t have until they are “on the ropes,” so to speak, like the Human Torch’s “nova” ability.

We can use mechanics to vary genre in other ways too, but they’re not quite so easy as adjusting recovery time or effects from wounds, which is why we’ve done the work for you. A big way is what we call genre abilities. Your character type gives you a bunch of abilities at character creation, and not so much as you advance (unlike focus, which just keeps granting you new abilities every time you gain a new tier). Instead, at higher tiers, you can choose new genre abilities appropriate for your character and genre, irrespective of your type. These are things that we deem to fit any character of a particular genre. Are you a character in a sci-fi game who wants to be a good pilot, but you don’t want to take the starship pilot type? How about a thief in a fantasy setting who wants to know a little magic? (Gray Mouser, anyone?) These new rules have you covered. Although not a part of the actual character sentence, these ability options almost act like one, making it clear that your setting is very important to your character’s essence, much more than ever before. You’re not just a swift archer who defends the weak, you’re a swift archer who defends the weak in an epic fantasy setting.

There are other ways the rules help us define and represent genre as well. Most of them are pretty straightforward, like equipment and skills available. If you’re a Cypher fan already, some of them you’ll be familiar with, like Horror Mode for horror games. And of course we’ve also worked hard to make cyphers adapt better to different genres. More on that in a future article.

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A frequent area of discussion has often been the way PCs suffer and track damage. (To be clear, this is true only of PCs. The way NPCs and creatures suffer and track damage won’t change—it’s too clean and easy.) The idea in Cypher has been that as you suffer wounds, you get weaker, and are thus able to do less amazing things than when you are fresh and hale. Some GMs have said, however, that this system makes their players less likely to use points from their pools for Effort to improve their chances on a task or to utilize their special abilities. It felt, they said, like too much of a risk to spend their “hit points.” While there are plenty of ways to explain why this isn’t really an appropriate way of looking at it, the truth is that D&D is so deeply embedded in the mindset of so many gamers that a lot of us just can’t help but hoard whatever kinds of “points” our characters have like misers clutching pennies.

So I started looking at different ways to do it. Fresh off of designing The Magnus Archives RPG, I was already in the mindset of having “categories” of damage, so to speak. In that game, when you take minor injuries (or any sort of mental shock), you gain Stress. If you suffer anything that might send a person to the hospital, you track it as a serious injury. Like the damage track in Cypher, take even a few such injuries and you risk death. It’s meant to be a very lethal game, where your character’s life is always in danger when facing a bad guy with a gun or a knife, or one of the monsters of the setting.

That’s too lethal for most genres, and the idea of stress isn’t always appropriate for every game. But the general idea of narratively talking about injuries and wounds rather than points of damage was appealing. And it spoke to the goal of preserving the story-based focus of Cypher, if not doubling down on it.

In this new take, there are minor, moderate, and major wounds, each tracked separately. Minor wounds don’t debilitate you until you take the max you can withstand, usually five. At that point, further minor wounds become moderate wounds. When you’ve suffered four moderate wounds, your tasks are hindered, and further minor and moderate wounds are tracked as major wounds. Each major wound you sustain hinders your actions by another step, and if you take just three of these, you’re dead.

But they don’t always work in a cascade like that. When you get a bruise or a cut, it’s a minor wound, but if someone slashes you with a sword or you fall off the roof of a house, it’s a moderate wound. And the bite of a gigantic monster or a shot from a high-powered rifle is likely a major wound.

Fortunately, armor can reduce the severity of a wound if you make a block roll, and the better the armor, the more it eases that roll. Alternatively, you can still make a dodge roll to avoid the damage entirely, but wearing armor makes that more difficult. These rules give players an interesting decision in combat—dodge or block—and depending on the character, one is probably a lot easier than the other. You can’t really do both simultaneously. Circumstances play into this as well. Even if you’re wearing incredible armor, if you’re facing a soul-devouring ghost, you probably don’t want it to touch you at all. And if someone’s spraying dozens of bullets at you with an Uzi, even the most nimble character probably can’t dodge them all, and they’ll really wish they were wearing armor to block.

Wounds can be healed in all the ways you’d expect—first aid, technology, magic, rest, a hospital stay—but in addition, you can use Might points and a little time to remove a wound you’ve suffered, narratively explaining that given a bit of time you determined that it wasn’t as bad as you had initially thought.

Characters might have all manner of special abilities that allow them to ignore some wounds, withstand more wounds than normal, or reduce wounds’ severity. Essentially, it’s as easy to create a character who is a proverbial tank that can take incredible amounts of punishment and keep going as it is to create a character with amazing reflexes that no one can lay a hand upon. Or, you can make a character that doesn’t focus on either of those things and avoid dangerous situations entirely, because there’s so much to do in Cypher beyond just combat. And that’s going to be more true than ever going forward.

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Rightly or wrongly, this is why so many long-time D&D players embraced 3rd edition but not the 4th edition. Both editions arguably changed a lot of the rules, but many felt 4th edition veered too far from the essence of the game. (It’s why 5th edition reverted back to a more 2nd or 3rd edition style game, while quietly retaining some of the advancements of 4th.)

So it’s not really a matter of how much you change, but what you change. This caused us to look at Cypher and really think about what makes it the game so many enjoy. We came up with three very broad answers:

1. Customization of characters

2. Ease of running the game

3. As a “traditional RPG,” a rather heavy focus on narrative

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Customization

The core of character creation in Cypher is the character sentence. I am a blank blank who blanks, or, I am a descriptor type who focuses. We not only wanted to retain that, we wanted to give more options and, in general, make building the sentence easier and faster so you can get playing the game more quickly.

I wrote last time about our ideas regarding character type. Descriptors have sometimes been a little muddied with extraneous stuff, and so we have worked to standardize and streamline them by simply making each a stat modification and a starting skill.

And foci, well … we love foci, so we just wanted to make them more fun. Rather than a proscribed progression, we asked, what if they worked more like skill trees found in some video games (or the forte in Invisible Sun)? This would mean each focus might have a different “path” you could follow through it as you advance, and you could take the abilities you really want. (As a side effect, adding more abilities to the foci makes advancing characters beyond Tier Six really easy!)

Lastly, there were a lot of abilities (from both focus and type) in the game that just eased a task one way or another. Useful, but not always interesting. With plenty of ways of easing tasks (the foremost being Effort, another core concept of the game), we think it’s more fun if most abilities grant a character a true, new capability. In particular, we wanted to expand the number of abilities useful outside of combat, especially interaction and exploration.

Ease of Running the Game

Cypher is a joy to run as a GM, full stop. There are many reasons for this, but likely more prominent is that NPCs and creatures are simplified compared to characters, with all the necessary information to run them sometimes being encoded into a single number: their level. I wouldn’t change that for anything.

This has the added benefit of keeping past adventures and sourcebooks valid, regardless of any changes we might make to the game. If creatures and NPCs don’t change, that means you can still pick up any past book and use it pretty much as written. (Character abilities from older products will also work just fine, but one might not always see the need for them, depending on the context.)

Likewise, cyphers and artifacts, GM intrusion ideas, traps, challenges, and similar things from older products will still be perfectly viable alongside what we’re doing.

Focus on Narrative

Narrative focus is something that couldn’t change if we wanted the game to remain intact. In this context, it might be useful to consider very broad definitions of traditional versus narrative games. So, consider that a “traditional” game focuses on rules that simulate reality (or fiction)—D&D being the obvious example—that then allow a story to emerge from the situations that those rules define. A “narrative” game worries far less about simulation and much more about the story—a couple of examples are Powered by the Apocalypse and Fate. I’m vastly oversimplifying here, but you might say that in a traditional game, your character takes damage after the bad guy shoots you because that’s what the rules say. In a narrative game, you might have to be rushed to the hospital after being shot because it makes for an exciting story.

For a traditional game, Cypher’s always leaned more heavily into story than strict dictation of the rules. While not a fully narrative or freeform game by any means, it actually strives to bridge narrative and trad gaming styles by also prioritizing what’s best for the story the group is creating. GM and player intrusions in the game are the easiest examples of this in Cypher.

We’ve found that focusing on story and smooth play means streamlining some of the rules clutter in the game. As so often happens with games, there are mechanics in the rules that seemed like a good, useful tool at the beginning that eventually no one really uses because they’re extraneous or don’t fit the overall style of the game. Frankly, these are rough edges to a game that a designer can smooth out and people won’t even notice that they’re gone, which is actually quite satisfying.

As we work, we hang on tight to what makes Cypher the game it’s always meant to be, and when we make a change, it’s to make things even more Cypher. We’re always fastidious about making sure it’s the game we all love.

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From a design point of view, this means you have to ask questions you don’t have to in other games. Is a magic fireball just a grenade with different set dressing? Is it different when two knights hit each other with swords than when two robots slice at each other with laser axes? Is piloting a hovercraft mechanically different than driving a car?

These are fun questions, but that doesn’t make them superficial—they’re important.

While the main rulebook covers a lot of different genres, we’ve also done a lot of work on genre-focused Cypher System books, like Stay Alive! for horror, Godforsaken for fantasy, and Neon Rain for cyberpunk. As we move forward into Cypher’s future, we don’t want to undo any of that work. We’re lazy that way. Still, all this additional work has taught us a lot about dealing with different genres and settings, and we don’t want to pretend that it hasn’t.

First and foremost, we’ve learned that the game as it stands is slower than we’d like to jump into a fresh one-shot adventure or campaign. As I mentioned last week Cypher was designed to be more of a game-creating toolbox than a game, and that can be less than ideal at times. Genre, I believe, is the answer to that problem. Rather than just having core character types that can be molded and modified to fit any genre, we’ve determined that it’s a much easier and more fun experience (not to mention faster) if those types are just designed for a specific genre. This means that rather than taking an adept and making a lot of choices to make it into the wizard you want to play, you can just play the wizard type we’ve designed for you. This new approach doesn’t require a player (or GM) to choose abilities and whatnot to reflect the desired spellcaster—it instead asks you to choose from a wide variety of pre-made options like the wizard, the sorcerer, the witch, the mage, and more. You still have a lot of choice, with many customization opportunities if you want them.

We’ve also embraced the idea of sub-genres in a big way. So while the mage or a necromancer might be better suited to your dungeon-fantasy game, the wizard might be more appropriate for an epic fantasy (à la Tolkien or King Arthur). A Conan-style sword and sorcery game might work best with a witch or a sorcerer. Of course, because all the types are compatible with each other, you can choose whichever you want.

Likewise, this means that we don’t just have science fiction options, but hard sci-fi, space opera, cyberpunk, and post-apocalyptic choices for you. And of course, there’s modern “real world” options, superhero options, and more.

One of the reasons that this new way of looking at types works so well is that these choices are simplified and streamlined, meaning each option takes up a lot less space in a book than types that cover every conceivable campaign imaginable. This, in turn, makes them less complicated and intimidating to jump into.

By digging deeper into the different genres, it’s a lot easier to have the game you most want to play. Flavor is so important to really enjoy a game. While some people are fine with a general fantasy game, others want to embrace the difference between Conan and Aragorn, for example. Sure, superficially they’re both guys with swords, but the things they can do, the companions they travel with, and the challenges they face are actually quite different.

Ultimately, having defined types specific to genres means that no matter what campaign the group wants to play, it will be much easier to play straight out of the book, and get things up and running fast. Of course, if the GM has some really weird ideas for their setting—things that don’t fit into a standard genre or subgenre—there’s plenty of options to customize everything, but that info will be presented in a user-friendly way for the GM’s eyes only, just to cut down on the rules clutter.

Ultimately, we gave ourselves the task of making character creation faster and easier without decreasing the options and ability to customize. (I’ll talk about that more in a future post, including greater access to skills, and abilities having more interesting and varied effects for PCs.) It was difficult, but I think we did it.

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That’s what it’s like to play a game as a game designer. It’s maybe even worse. Because while a car does many things, you’re probably not constantly trying to do new things with it all the time. As a creative enterprise, playing an RPG means coming up with new situations, which typically challenge not only the people around the table, but also the game system itself. It’s not the goal to constantly try to break the system, but nevertheless, that’s sort of what you end up doing.

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I’ve been playing the Cypher System for longer than anyone, and the other designers at MCG have been using the system thoroughly as well. In our own games, we’ve smoothed the rough edges. We’ve created new ways of doing things that improve the play experience. It’s not a matter of the game having been bad, it’s just that new inspirations come along to make things better.

That said, years and years of play also showcase what there is to love about a system. You see the things about a game that you’ve been playing that you’d never change. You see them as hills you’re willing to die on.

Most of you know that Cypher started as Numenera. When I saw that the rules could be extended to other genres and settings, I set out to trim away the elements that made it specifically for the Ninth World and create a sort of toolbox for GMs to tailor the rules to any setting. It was still the same game, but it appealed to those who wanted to tinker and hack the rules to make it what they wanted.

That’s a fine goal, but plenty of GMs and players just want a game playable without a lot of extra work. A game that didn’t suggest how you might take a general type of character and make it a starship pilot, a druid, or a swashbuckler, but one that just gave you a starship pilot, a druid, and a swashbuckler (and lots more). However, one of the core conceits of the game that absolutely couldn’t change was the customization that allowed you to play exactly the character you wanted. Not just a starship pilot, but one that was always coming up with cunning schemes and secretly had psionic abilities: a crafty starship pilot who commanded mental powers. Not just a druid, but one that excelled at getting what they wanted and could call upon the powers of the earth to give him tough, rocky flesh: a charming druid who abided in stone. And not just a swashbuckler, but a surprisingly brainy individual who learned to wield a rapier and a dagger at the same time: an intelligent swashbuckler who wields two weapons.

As we tinker, one of the other main ingredients of the game’s design that we all agree just shouldn’t change is the ease of creating and running NPCs of any kind, from intelligent folks to ravenous beasts (or something in between). Fans of the Cypher System seem to agree that it is a very easy game to run, whether with lots of prep or very little (or no) prep. A nice effect of keeping this aspect of the game unchanged is that all previous adventures and sourcebooks will remain entirely compatible. For Cypher fans, this is great because we’ve produced a lot of great adventures and sourcebooks over the years.

We’ve been experimenting with the Cypher System for literal years behind the scenes. Some of these have manifested as optional rules in some of our sourcebooks like Claim the Sky, Godforsaken, and Neon Rain. Others have emerged in related, standalone games like Old Gods of Appalachia and The Magnus Archives. Others have yet to see the light of day, but we’ve been having fun with them ourselves for a while. We’re anxious for you to see them.

Over the coming weeks, I’m going to be writing a number of articles discussing some of the specifics we’ve changed and not changed—and more importantly, why. As you’ll see, many of them come as a result of feedback we’ve had from others playing the game. Exciting times!

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Be Up-Front With Your Experience With the Topic at Hand

RPGs are a very odd art form. You can’t present what seems like a valid opinion of a movie you’ve never watched, or a book you’ve never read. If you haven’t interacted with the thing you’re talking about in the way it was meant to be interacted with, everyone would likely agree that you have no right to judge it. No one would say, “I saw the poster for this movie and it was ugly, so it’s a bad movie.” Or if they did, certainly no one would lend it any credence.

And yet, people hold forth opinions about RPGs without having actually played them all the time.

I have been guilty of this myself.

Now, you might be saying, “But Monte, no one has time to play every game.” And my response is, I know. That’s my point. People churning out opinions on every game that comes along have difficulty maintaining credibility. Purporting to be an expert on everything makes you appear to be an expert on nothing.

We all, as a part of the hobby, need to recognize the gulf that exists between the opinion of someone (like a reviewer) stating their opinion based on merely reading an RPG product and that of someone who has actually played it. You can make some valid and insightful points from just reading the product, and you can certainly weigh in with some subjective feelings, but you can’t really judge the product as a whole without actually using it to do what it was designed to do. You wouldn’t judge a blender without ever turning it on, so you should be careful about judging a game without playing it.

You can still be an active and valuable part of the discourse if you’ve read a product, but you should probably start off by saying, “Well, I haven’t had a chance to play this yet, but…” This is true if your opinions are negative, positive, or mixed. This admission doesn’t weaken your position, it strengthens it. It shows you have an awareness of both yourself and the intricacies of assessing a game.

Crazy tangent time: If we can wax philosophical for a moment, it’s just possible that even someone playing a game can’t fully judge it. Take a game like D&D. Sure, you can play a one-shot in an evening, but does that give you the full breadth of the experience? Ask a serious devotee of the game and they’ll tell you that you haven’t really played until you’ve had a year-long (or longer) campaign where your character goes from low to high level, and until you’ve tried multiple different character options regarding species and class. Then, arguably, you’ve had the true D&D experience. Then you can talk about what’s fun in the game and what isn’t.

Much too demanding? Probably. Insanely impractical? Almost certainly. But honestly, D&D and games like it are meant to be played over months and years. If you really wanted to find out what such a game was like, would you ask a new player or someone who’s been playing for 15 years? (I’d argue if you really want the true picture, you’d ask both.)

But the real point is, the only fair and meaningful way to form an intelligent opinion about a game is to actually play it.

As I stated earlier, I’ve been working on RPGs for thirty-five or so years, and the number of people whose opinion about a game I would pay any attention to based only on them reading it is probably just two, or perhaps three. It takes a deep, deep understanding of games as a whole to be able to judge a game that way, and frankly, those that I think could do it would probably have an understanding deep enough that they’d know it’s better to actually play.

Realize That All Subjective Opinions are Equal

There was a time when a literary critic could publish a review of a book in a journal with detailed analysis and research, and that opinion would probably be more insightful, informed, and significant than your brother’s, who also read the same book. Critical reviews and analysis were valued and appreciated, and no one would publish one that wasn’t well-thought-out or well-presented. But those days are long over. Some dude on YouTube giving a review is absolutely no different than what you have to say at your game table about the same game. You’re both just gamers.

And that’s okay. I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t pay attention to what others have to say. The reviewer might have a fresh outlook that makes you take notice. But so might a poster on Discord or a girl you’re chatting with at the game store. Opinions matter regardless of where they are presented.

A reviewer might think poorly of a game, but your friend said they really liked how it sounded and wants to give it a try. The reviewer’s opinion doesn’t trump your friend’s. Don’t dismiss someone’s opinion just because they don’t have a platform that reaches a lot of people, because that reviewer probably didn’t give the game any more consideration than your friend did. In fact, your friend probably gave it more because they have more on the line—a fun night of gaming. The reviewer is very likely onto the next game and their next review.

Also, beware of consensus. Or rather, the illusion of consensus. If someone says, “Everyone loves this adventure,” what they likely really mean is, “Everyone in my game group loved this adventure,” or, “The people I follow on social media who are talking about it love this adventure.” Regardless, the vast majority of the time when someone in a discussion says, “Everyone thinks…” they are probably talking about less than ten people. Even if an opinion posted online gets fifty likes, and that’s more likes than any other post on the forum got that day, it’s indicative of very little. Fifty people are next to nothing compared to the number of all the people out there who play RPGs.

Plus, when it comes to opinions, it’s not really about quantity anyway. The most popular thing is very often not the best thing. If one person feels one way about something and ten people feel the opposite way, that doesn’t make the one person wrong. If anything, it makes the one person’s opinion potentially more interesting if they can articulate why they feel that way.

Roleplaying games are games of talking. So it’s natural and right that talking about games is an important part of the hobby, almost as much as playing games. Talking about (and listening to others talk about) games can enhance your own experience at the table, providing new ideas and new insights about making your personal game session better. And if you’re interested in designing games, talking about them is vital. Incorporate other people’s opinions into your own thoughts. Consider not just how people feel, but why they feel that way.

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If you know one thing about gamers, you know they have opinions. They love the games they love and hate the ones they hate. They have opinions about games, game designers, and game companies. Which is all great.

However, if you participate in any of these conversations, there are some ways to do so that can make you look smarter and more reasonable when you do. I’ll warn you, though, what I’m going to say goes counter to most of what people think will make them look smart or win arguments in discussions.

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Recognize the Difference Between Subjectivity and Objectivity

There is a world of difference between “this game is great” and “I love this game.” While both are valid things to say, they are not stating the same thing. The first statement is an opinion, the second, even though it may sound like an opinion, is a fact. Someone in a discussion about a game can be wrong about facts, but they can’t be wrong about their opinion, no matter how much you might disagree.

The issue becomes even more complex when you start stating subjective opinions as objective observations. If subjectivity is how you feel about a game—or better yet, how the game makes you feel—objectivity is something defined and measurable.

Consider these four statements about a weapon I just made up for a game that doesn’t exist:

1. The X-4 repeating laser cannon inflicts way more damage than any other weapon in the game. That’s objective.

2. The X-4 repeating laser cannon is the coolest weapon any character can wield. That’s subjective.

3. The X-4 repeating laser cannon is the best weapon in the game. That’s objective, but it might not be correct. (Maybe the weapon is so difficult to wield properly that it is actually not very useful.)

4. The X-4 repeating laser cannon is broken. That might be objective, if you can present evidence that it somehow throws balance all out of whack. Otherwise, it’s an opinion and therefore subjective.

See how it gets kind of murky?

Where this becomes even more problematic is when people are discussing a game’s design in depth. Breaking down a rule and discussing why it is good or not is one thing. But in the middle of that conversation, someone might say, “Well, I had a lot of fun when we used that rule.” That’s a fine thing to say, but it belongs in a different conversation. It’s as if two people were discussing the best way to prepare fondant potatoes and someone else says, “I think potatoes are delicious.” Okay, great, but not relevant.

This is even more true with RPGs than with other kinds of games. Because in roleplaying, there’s a lot of emotion, a lot of worldbuilding, and a lot of flavor that, say, a game of chess doesn’t have, and of which a game of Settlers of Catan only has a tiny bit of (comparatively). Once you start injecting how a game can make you feel—not just by winning or losing, but through the stories being told and the characters being represented—subjectivity becomes as important, if not more important, than objectivity. I’m sure we can all think of games with less than stellar designs that are loved because the world is cool or the stories being told affect us deeply. We’re letting our subjective opinions outweigh our objective ones.

And that’s okay. It’s perfectly valid to talk about subjective things like “fun.” These are games, after all.

Realize That You Don’t Have Knowledge About Everything

I cringe when I see or hear people say things like, “This is the best adventure of all time.” Every time, I’m thinking, “Really? You’ve played every adventure ever and determined this one is the best?”

You can legitimately say, “This is my favorite adventure of all time,” or, even better, “This is the best adventure that I’ve ever played.” You’re saying that you’ve weighed all the options available to you and made a (subjective) judgment. That’s a fine and intelligent thing to do.

But otherwise, it’s just meaningless hyperbole, and you look a little silly.

Be Aware That Positive Observations Are More Difficult

It’s relatively easy for someone to point out flaws, or to look at game mechanics and claim they don’t work, whether they even understand the game or not. We think that being critical about a product makes you look like you really know what you’re talking about.

But people who do know what they’re talking about recognize that describing why or how something works requires a greater command of the subject matter. I’m not talking about just saying that you like a thing, but explaining why it works as intended, or what exactly is great about it.

You don’t have to like everything, but being critical doesn’t make one look as smart as some believe, and always being critical makes you look inherently negative or biased. It’s a really easy way for someone to dismiss you, not just in the current discussion, but in future ones too. Your friend (or online acquaintance) who always rags on a particular game at length whenever it comes up develops a reputation of not just being a downer, but being repetitive. And being repetitive on any topic is never a good tactic. Don’t be that person.

Next time, Part 2, with more thoughts on talking about games.

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Your magic sword makes you hit more often, and probably for greater damage. Your special ability with climbing makes you more likely to succeed at a difficult climb. This is true in most games and, in those games, it’s expressed with some kind of mathematical mechanic, like a bonus to a die roll. And that’s great. It probably is satisfying to the player and speaks to the narrative need of being “better” at things you are more likely to succeed at. Most roleplaying games are grounded in math, because most often die rolls ultimately determine success or failure, and dice give us numbers. In some fashion, determining success or failure is what the game’s mechanics are for.

But here’s the problem—it can be sort of dull.

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That is to say, is the difference between Aragorn and a typical Gondor soldier really just that Aragorn has higher bonuses? Maybe—but what if it’s not?

What if a game’s mechanics gave a player more (and more interesting) options than just +1s (or more applications of Advantage, or further reductions in the difficulty, or extra dice to roll, etc.)? Perhaps a character who is good in combat (like Aragorn) can wield a torch as well as any weapon in combat? Or use their skill with a blade to more easily or accurately size up a sword-wielding foe? Slice through one foe and into another? Disarm a foe?

Yes, many games grant characters the ability to do these things. I’m not proposing something terribly new here. The point is, though, that these benefits are a way to make a character better without just using math and, at least in some cases, these narrative “bonuses” make both the character a

nd the action in the game more interesting.

But designers fall into the trap of simply handing out mathematical bonuses all the time, and they have done so since the dawn of the hobby. (This can lead to rules clutter.) This is not just because bonuses are easy, but because they’re universally applicable to any skill or task. Good archer? +1 with a bow. Good with locks? +1 to lockpicking. Good at flying a starship? +1 to piloting. +1 is a +1 is a +1. It has the advantage of conveying instant meaning. It’s the game’s way of saying in the briefest way, “you’re good at this thing.”

Sometimes, however, a designer might want to consider giving players a narrative way to show they are good at a thing. The archer can loose arrows from horseback. The lockpicking character can pick a lock much faster than normal. The starship pilot can coax speed beyond the ship’s limits using a clever maneuver. The problem is that such advantages are bespoke. A designer needs to create different advantages for different types of actions.

Narrative “bonuses” add color or flavor and generally don’t affect gameplay at the table, though they can slow down the game. Adding a number to your die roll is quick, but sometimes reassessing narrative options in a particular situation is not. However, in terms of making the game more interesting, the narrative approach worth it. If a fire wizard’s special ability isn’t simply +1 with fire spells, but the ability to make all of their spell effects seem fiery, the only thing that might slow down play at the table is giving the player the chance to describe how they use a fiery charm spell, or create flaming wings when they cast a spell that lets them fly. And that’s just interesting and fun.

In a game where treasure or gear can add bonuses, narrative effects are perhaps even more welcome. Want another +1 sword, or a sword that lets your character leap high into the air like a wuxia hero? Want a computer interface that adds +1 to hacking attempts, or one that disguises your online identity so you always appear to be the observer’s own mother?

The same is true for narrative penalties—they make the game more interesting and fun, and may be even more important to game design than narrative advantages. Arguably, just making a character less likely to succeed makes the game less interesting. It draws out what should probably be a brief and exciting encounter. Two hampered warriors lumbering about and swinging swords fruitlessly at each other gets to be a slog. Instead of using math to make success less likely, we use narrative penalties to change the parameters of the situation.

If you use narrative penalties, and you’re a fantasy fighter operating in a confined space, your attacks don’t suffer a -1 penalty, you instead have to choose a small weapon, like a dagger. If you’re firing your blaster at a foe that’s right next to an ally, you don’t suffer a -1 penalty, but there’s a chance you’ll hit your friend, so you have to decide if the risk is worth it. If you’re trying to disarm a trap in near darkness, you don’t suffer a -1 penalty, but your attempt will take three times longer than normal. Forcing characters to use different tactics, weapons, or styles can make the encounter or scene unique and more interesting.

From a design perspective, making narrative bonuses and penalties a part of a game is more work. It makes things more cumbersome and fiddly, and it slows down play.

And I think it’s a great thing to do.

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