Side note: I was going to go with “Two Games, One Rant” for the title, but I decided to go with a way more obscure and way less disgusting reference. Yes, the title is an allusion. Just not a very good one. 

And now for something completely different.

Today, I’m talking about two games. Games that aren’t even role-playing games. Why? Maybe because it’s good to branch out sometimes and see how other media deals with its issues. Or maybe because I get bored always writing about D&D. Or maybe—just f$&%ing maybe—this will all tie into the thing I’ve been dancing around for weeks. I don’t know. Maybe you’ll just have to trust that this actually has some kind of bigger point.

Not only am I going to talk about two different games—and certain specific mechanics of theirs—I’m going to start with an aside that isn’t really related to anything else and actually serves as a warning not to look for answers in games that aren’t TTRPGs. Why? Because there’s something I have to say to you all about RPG mechanics. Because I’ve been reading all your ‘feedback’ and watching a bunch of discussions in my supporter Discord community and there’s something you all need to f$&%ing hear.

I could find a way to tie that first bit into the second bit, but I’m tired okay. I finally got that f$&%ing module off to the editor. And that means I have to finish AngryCraft before the module comes back for polishing and publishing. Meanwhile, I’m trying desperately to put together all the different pieces of Angry’s System for Presenting Towns and Between Adventure Crap in TTRPGs in a way that makes some kind of sense. Not just for you, but for me. Because the whole thing was spawned from a haphazard jumble of random bits and pieces that all kind of clicked together. And it doesn’t help that Angry’s System is actually two different—but mostly complete—systems that do two different things.

And that is why you have to read my rambling about two other games’ mechanics. After I tell you why you shouldn’t do what I’m doing without safety glasses and a parachute.

Playing Other Games

If you read the Long, Rambling Introduction™ you know what a mess this article is going to be. But if you skipped that, you’re really in trouble. Because I actually have no idea how to introduce this article without rambling a little.

Here’s the deal: I want to talk about two games today. Two non-role-playing games. And how they inspired me to think differently about town presentation and downtime in D&D. And originally, I was going to introduce it with this long spiel about how important it is for GMs to respect other media, like board games and video games, because all games media are basically trying to solve the same problems and board games and video games are much bigger industries with much bigger budgets and much more academic clout so they tend to innovate faster than RPGs and it’d be kind of stupid for us to ignore that.

But…

The problem is that the answers you find in other kinds of media usually just won’t f$&%ing work in TTRPGs. Not without some heavy modification. And lately, I’ve been watching people talk about game mechanics—both the ones I make and the ones they make up themselves—and I’m realizing that the hackers and homebrewers and even the indie developers and the professional f$&%ing game designers are all losing sight of something fundamental.

So, before I tell you the latest story about how I’m ripping s$&% off from other games, translating it into RPG mechanics, and then passing it off as original work—do not steal—I’ve got to tell you why that’s a really bad idea.

Two Approaches to RPG System Design and Learned Blahdy Blah Blah

Basically, there’s two ways to make mechanics and systems in RPGs. And as is usually the case, everyone puts them on opposite ends of a spectrum. Because that’s the cool thing to do now, right? Spectrums are the new vogue. Everything’s a spectrum. Sure, it might seem like two things are total opposites, but they’re actually basically two extremes of the same thing.

Well, no. Everything is not a spectrum. You can’t just put two opposing ideas on other sides of the room, say they’re basically the same, and then insist there’s an infinity of right answers somewhere in between. There’s lots of ways to arrange two different things. Remember axes? Have we forgotten those? Poor Rene Descartes.

And what about sweet and sour chicken? Come on.

But I digress.

There’s two approaches to RPG system design. Most people see them as endpoints of a spectrum and then insist the ‘right’ answer—whatever the f$&% ‘right’ means when you’re talking about Pretend Elves: The Game—and then insist there’s a perfect magical right answer for everyone somewhere in between. But they’re very different ideas. And while they are almost always mixed together, you can never, ever split the difference between them. You can sprinkle sea salt on caramel, but it’ll just taste both salty and sweet. It won’t taste like something partway between.

What are these two approaches to game design? Well, they’re really hard to pin down definitively. But I’ve never given much of a f$&% about being definitive, so I’ll just describe them in that loosey-goosey, subjective way that drives all the pedants crazy.

First, there’s the sort of design you see in broad RPG mechanics that are designed to resolve anything and everything that might come up. It’s the sort of design you see in the d20 core mechanic and in games like Fate. And it’s the sort of design that PbtA games like Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark like to pretend they’re all about but really aren’t. The idea behind such mechanics is that the players can imagine their characters doing whatever they can imagine their characters doing and the rules only step in to resolve anything whose outcome isn’t self-evident.

There’s one game mechanic, more than any other, that exemplifies this approach to mechanical design. It’s the GM. The GM is a reactionary mechanic. Apart from providing narration and setting up conflicts, the GM exists to evaluate whatever bats$&% insane actions come out of the players’ diseased brains and determine the outcomes in the fictional world.

I’m going to call these fiction-first mechanics. The imaginary world comes first, the rules appear only as needed and in response to the imaginary world.

The second approach is the one you see in D&D’s combat and spell system. It’s also the one that’s accidentally emphasized in D&D’s skill system and in most PbtA games. And it’s also the approach that most hackers and homebrewers seem to glom onto. Mechanics designed under this approach define and constrain possible actions and spell out precise resolutions for those actions and nothing else. Initiative rules, for example, determine who can go when. No matter what the characters do in the world, they’re still slaves to the initiative count. The closest they can come to breaking away from it is catching an opponent by surprise, in which case, they don’t so much escape the initiative count as prevent other creatures from coming into it. For one round. At least in older editions of D&D, you could take all sorts of actions that let you f$%& with the initiative order. Not anymore.

The magic systems in most RPGs are the same. Magic can do exactly what it can do. And what it can do is spelled out precisely in paragraphs of text. And no, this isn’t a hard-magic vs. soft-magic thing. I’ve seen the video, thank you. That ain’t what I’m talking about.

These systems are mechanics-first systems. They’re systems where you have to check with the rules before you know what decisions your characters make.

As an example, imagine you’re a new TTRPG player. You’ve never played D&D before. And I’ve fed you the standard line about how you don’t need to know any of the rules. Just do whatever you can imagine your character doing and I—the kindly GM—will figure out how to make it work. So, you dick around town a bit, talk to some people, and then you head off to the dungeon and manage to finesse your way across a pit with some clever thinking. Oh, sure, I tell you to roll dice sometimes, and you roll them, but mostly you’re just playing let’s pretend. And then combat starts. And suddenly, it turns out there are rules you need to know. Because you can’t do anything. You can’t, for example, defend yourself in any way when you’re attacked. Which is something a lot of new players ask me, by the way.

“The goblin hits you for 5 points of damage,” I say.

And they say, “can I dodge out of the way?”

“You already failed. It’s in your AC.”

“Well, what can I do?”

“You can subtract 5 f$&%ing hit points from your total so we can move on with the game!”

Point is that suddenly when combat breaks out, there’s a lot of rules between you and just imagining what your character does. And if you want to make good, sound, tactical decisions, you’d better know them. You’d better know how much you can do on a turn and what each action does and what all your specific special abilities do too.

So, there’s fiction-first rules that react to the fiction of the game world and there’s mechanics-first rules that determine what can happen in the fiction of the game world. And the reason those things aren’t on a spectrum is that you can’t have a middle ground between two different things going first. Either you’re considering the fiction first or you’re considering the mechanics first.

That said, most RPGs have a layered approach. More or less. The core mechanics—the GM and the basic action adjudication system—are fiction-first systems. And then there’s these other mechanics-first systems that sit on top of the fiction-first system to handle certain things. Which is why, no matter how hard you try to run it narratively and even if you dispense with initiative rules, you’ll always feel a clunky transition between D&D combat and the rest of the f$&%ing game.

I’ve half-joked about the initiative roll being the combat swoosh of TTRPGs, but it really is. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the initiative roll. It has to do with switching from fiction-first adjudication to a mechanics-first minigame. And mechanics-first systems are spreading. In D&D and Pathfinder, there are more mechanics-first minigames and systems than ever before. And even the parts of the game that should be fiction-first are presented such that they get treated like mechanics-first by more and more gamers. And when it comes to designing homebrew systems—like social interaction and downtime—most gamers end up starting with mechanics-first first.

Now, I ain’t saying that mechanics-first systems are bad. It’s just that fiction-first systems are basically the single most important defining aspect of tabletop role-playing games as a medium. So, you know, fiction-first systems are kind of important.

See, the fiction-first thing—the open-ended ability to do whatever you want in the fictional game world—is basically what sets TTRPGs apart from board games and video games. Board games are almost entirely mechanics-first. In fact, board games are so mechanics-first that you don’t even need to know most board games’ themes to actually play them. And video games? Well, they’re mechanics-first because they’re run by computers. That’s the only way computers work. But they sure try their damndest to cover it up. Most of the evolution of video games as a medium has been about finding ways to get around the mechanics-first thing. And entire video game genres only exist by maintaining a fragile illusion of being fiction-first.

Now, I’m not saying that TTRPGs can’t learn from video games and board games. They absolutely can. And I’m not saying TTRPGs can’t have mechanics-first systems. They definitely can. But I think TTRPG designers need to be more aware of the dichotomy. Especially the homebrewers and hackers. And I think they need to veer away from mechanics-first systems whenever possible. Every mechanics-first system weakens a TTRPG as a whole. So, they should be included deliberately and sparingly.

And now that I’ve said all that, let’s analyze some board and video game mechanics and see what can rip off and cram into TTRPGs.

Do as I say, not as I do, okay?

Lords of Waterdeep: Location, Location, Location!

Let me start by saying that I’m not a board gamer. I play board games occasionally, but not as often as I’d like. I own a lot of board games, but I haven’t played them all. And I don’t hang out on the Board Game Geek forums yelling about roll-and-write mechanics or b$&%ing about dutch priority auctions. I don’t even know what those phrases mean. And I pick my board games based on the coolness of the premise, the board, the pieces, and the box.

Lords of Waterdeep isn’t the only game with the mechanics I’m talking about. It’s not the first game with them. It’s probably not the best game with them. But Lords of Waterdeep is a game I personally like. I’ve played a lot of it. And so, it’s the one whose mechanics inspired me to rethink TTRPG town mechanics.

So, LoW takes place in the city of Waterdeep. And the players portray the city’s rulers. And now you know how the game got its brilliant title. For reasons that won’t be apparent unless you’ve read way more Forgotten Realms lore than anyone should, the game’s titular nobles keep their identities secret. They exercise control through subtle machinations. In the game, the players’ influence is measured in victory points which represent renown, popularity, favors owed, investments, and political clout. There’s lots of ways to earn victory points, but the easiest way is to hire adventurers to complete missions for you.

Basically, in Lords of Waterdeep, you’re playing as the people who hire the characters you play in TTRPGs.

But LoW is really about gathering the right resources. The primary mechanic is this thing called action drafting or worker placement. Now, I’m sure there’s a subtle difference between those two terms I’m f$&%ing up here, but I don’t actually care.

Action drafting works like this. There’s a common pool of actions all the players can undertake. But each action can only be taken by one player each turn. The actions yield up certain resources that the players need specific combinations of. So, the players are fighting to claim the right to take specific actions.

In most games like this, by the way, the players have little tokens representing characters who actually take the actions in question. And they plop their token on the action to claim it. Hence worker placement.

In Lords of Waterdeep, the actions are represented by locations in the city. There’s shops, arenas, wizard towers, back-alley taverns, temples, all sorts of things. Each round, players take turns assigning their agents to different locations, each of which offers a specific action. Agents can shake down shops for money, recruit adventurers, put various nefarious schemes into action, or even fund the construction of new locations. And when a player funds a new construction, that location is added to the board so that any player can send an agent there on future rounds.

Why the hell am I describing the well-known mechanics of an eight-year-old board game? Well, because those mechanics as they’re presented in Lords of Waterdeep got my noggin’ joggin’—as the kids say—about how towns are presented and used in TTRPGs. But only once I stopped taking the mechanics too seriously.

See, the focus in action-worker-drafting-placement games is on the competition for resources. Because each action can only be claimed by one player per turn there’s all sorts of strategic plays around the drafting game. Most such games let you give up resources in return for taking the first choice of actions next turn. Most also include lots of hidden information so players don’t know what resources other players need. But they can guess, sometimes, if they pay attention. Which means they can block players from getting the resources they need if they’re clever. Which means it’s sometimes useful to bluff. Or change strategies so that you can use resources no one else is grabbing for. Until they start blocking you. And so on.

But if you put that drafting crap aside and look at what Lords of Waterdeep is about, suddenly, it can solve all sorts of other problems. Because what LoW is really about is preparing for and then embarking on adventures. The whole game is about building parties of adventures and then sending them out on adventures. It’s about gathering the resources for adventure. And each resource is available at a specific location on a city map. And as the game plays out, new locations appear on the map. With new resources available.

And doesn’t that just sound like something I’ve been harping about for weeks?

Could you use the LoW approach to represent heroes killing downtime in fantasy cities? Could you present players with a city map that’s basically just a list of locations and services, each tied to specific downtime activities, and each with a specific payoff useful in future adventures? As the players explore the city, chase down rumors, befriend NPCs, and build contacts, could the GM not add newly discovered and newly available locations to the map?

Moreover, if a character went looking for a specific service the GM hadn’t thought of, could a GM pull a location out of his a$& and add it to the map easily? Could the players even build their own locations? And customize the benefits they provide?

And could the GM use such a system to differentiate settlements from one another in the game world? Small settlements would have small lists of offered services; big cities would have big lists. Trade cities would have lots of opportunities to buy and sell and trade and do crime. Theocratic cities would have lots of opportunities to heal and buy divine magical items and gain magical boons and blessings.

Could not a location-based approach to city design actually allow GMs to easily design cities without writing dozens of pages of prose descriptions of streets and buildings and NPCs the players will never see, visit, or meet?

I’ll leave you to answer those questions while I move on to the second of the two games I want to yammer about.

Persona 5: So Much to Do, So Little Time, And Sometimes You’re Screwed

Let me start by saying I’m not a Persona fan. I’m not even an anime fan. And I haven’t been a turn-based JRPG fan since I was in high school. And that was a lot of years ago.

Persona 5 is part of an ongoing series and also a spinoff of another series which itself spawned other spinoffs. It’s not even the first game it’s own series of series to do what it does and it’s certainly not the first video game to do so. But it’s the one I played. Well, I only played it for about 30 f$&%ing hours which means I wasn’t even a fifth of the way done with it. But I enjoyed what I played of it. I’d just had enough of it by then.

And no, I didn’t play Le Royale with Cheese edition or whatever the f$&% it’s called. I buy video games once.

Persona 5 is a turn-based, anime JRPG. But despite those shortcomings, it’s actually pretty fun. It has a lot of style and panache. It’s about one-half Japanese high-school life simulator and one-half dungeon crawling, fantasy, turn-based RPG, and one-quarter Jungian pop-psychology for Dummies. Oh, and it’s about three-sixteenths guillotining Pokémon. I s$&% you not.

Basically, you’re a high-school teenager with a phone app that gives you access to a demon-infested otherworld from which you can enter the minds of various sociopathic a$&holes and give their psyches a solid a$&-kicking. And that’s about the best description I can give.

What caught my attention though wasn’t the misuse of discredited psychological theory combined with mythological archetypes and it wasn’t the demon-collecting-and-beheading minigame. It wasn’t even the dungeon-crawling and the combat. It was actually the life-simulator crap between the dungeon crawls.

See, Persona 5 tries to present this illusion that it’s actually more heist game than dungeon game. This means there’s this heavy emphasis on preparing for your dungeon crawls. During the game, you’re tasked with invading the mind-dungeon of the a$&hole du jour before a specific deadline on the in-game calendar. You can invade the dungeon any time you want and you can even make multiple trips, but if you haven’t beaten the dungeon when the game’s calendar hits the deadline, you lose. Game over.

When you’re not dungeon crawling, you can spend your time however you want. But your days are pretty busy, what with high-school and all. Ultimately, each in-game day offers you two time slots in which you can do things. One right after school and one after dinner. There’s lots of ways to fill those time slots. You can make money working your part-time job, you can build up your stats, you can spend time with your fellow Psychonauts to build up the power of friendship, and you can craft tools to help you out during your dungeon crawls.

Now, I know what you’re all screaming at the screen right now. “Filling timeslots with downtime activities is nothing new, Angry! The Adventurer’s League has their downtime day awards and the perfect RPG ever made, Blades in the F$&%ing Dark, exists.” And you’re right. Except you’re not. Because P5 manages to do what both of those things don’t. P5 makes you actually feel like you’re managing your time. And that’s despite the arbitrary stupidity inherent in P5’s system.

First, unlike D&D’s downtime tasks, every task fits into one and precisely one timeslot and provides its benefit automatically. There’s no uncertainty about whether you’ll succeed at a task or whether you’ll have enough time to complete it. Just do the job, get the reward. You finish what you start.

But second, in P5, there’s always a complication waiting to f$&% you up. Some activities are only available on certain days and in certain timeslots. There’s a spa, for example, that’s only open at night and some places are only open on weekdays or weekends. Some activities become unavailable without warning, too. Like places being unreachable during a subway strike or outdoor places being closed down when it’s raining. Some activities offer different payoffs depending on the day. The spa adds secret herbs and spices that enhance the experience on certain days of the week and you’re always better off studying at the café downtown on rainy days because the main character concentrates better in the rain or some s$&%. You can plan around some of this stuff, but some of it just f$&%ing blindsides you.

Speaking of being blindsided, sometimes P5 just takes your time away. Sometimes, you get swept up in scripted events, sometimes for days at a time, and you can’t get away to hang out with your bestie at the local arcade or return your stat-boosting DVD on time. Sometimes, if you wait too long to invade the psychdungeon, you’ll miss the deadline because a whole bunch of other s$&% happened and kept you from it. So, while you do have a deadline, you never know how real the deadline is. And you never know whether the weather or some other world event is going to screw up your plans. Or when a sudden opportunity will arise that makes it worth changing your plans.

In the end, there’s more to managing your time in Persona 5 than merely allocating hours of downtime to specific tasks or being able to do exactly X number of things before the next adventure arbitrarily starts. It’s about coming up with a list of priorities, trying to get the most important stuff done first, and hoping to hell you have enough time to do everything. And, of course, adapting when the world f$&%s over your time-management plans.

And you know what? That actually feels like actual time management. Sometimes you have deadlines, sometimes you don’t, and you can always makes plans and set priorities. But the real world is going to f$&% with your plans more often than not and you never how much time you’ll actually have. So you have to learn how to adjust. And how to crunch and scramble when time runs out.

It helps in P5 that there’s always more useful things to do than you have time for. Everything feels so f$&%ing important. Everything provides a really useful benefit. And everything hurts when you can’t do it. And that also feels like time management. Because time is the one resource you never have enough of and that you can never get back once it’s gone.

Yes, the whole one day, one task, one payoff thing is abstract as hell and strains credibility sometimes, but it’s a useful abstraction. It’s a hell of a lot better than D&D’s approach where some tasks take a random number of weeks while other tasks take however long they take, we don’t know. And the idea of never knowing how much time you have is hard to deal with, yes, but it also forces you to prioritize and sometimes push your luck and also sometimes just hope and pray in a way that having an exact number of time slots never will. It sure as hell makes it hard to optimize things. Basically, there’s a difference between “what three things do you want to do between now and the next adventure” and “okay, what do you want to do today?” And when random opportunities and mishaps and the effects of an in-game calendar are all f$&%ing up your plans, it makes the world feel like a real, living place. Meanwhile, the whole one day, one task, one payoff thing makes it easy to adjudicate actions. A GM can burn through a bunch of days of downtime very quickly and drop back to the adventure time-scale whenever he needs to. It’s all very clean.

And did I mention that P5’s downtime stuff is also location-based? That is, performing a specific activity is usually a matter of going to a specific place. In case you wanted to combine it with any other systems that might have been mentioned a bunch of paragraphs ago.

Just food for thought.

Putting it All Together

The point of this article was just to highlight two promising game mechanics that could be stitched together like discarded corpses into a different way of handling town exploration and downtime. A system for handling everything that happens between adventures. Of course, they’re just inspirations for now. But with a little massaging, they could be something more. And yes, I am comparing RPG system design to giving a monster sewn together from dismembered corpse parts a backrub. There’s a lot of similarities.

Now, I’ve got to massage Frankenstein a little more. But if you want to see how the very early draft of all this crap looked at my table, have a gander at this (and click for a bigger view):

Yes, I know it’s not particularly location based. Yet. Give me some time. I’m still working on the presentation. And tweaking the rules.

Ignore the city name. No, I wasn’t running f$%&ing Desecration of Avernus. I was running a game in Elturel before it was uncool. And filled with manic pixie angelephants.

F&%$ing WotC.