This month has had some controlled chaos for me. I’ve been kept quite busy with big changes in my day job and technical issues with my laptop, but I’ve made a lot of progress on some important but tedious steps in the layout for Far Lands. But the most important news: on Thursday June 25th and Thursday July 2nd, I will be streaming Far Lands with Open the Gates Gaming on their twitch page.
Open the Gates is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making accessible content and tools for TTRPG players, facilitators, and designers. I was lucky enough to meet them at Pax East this year and they had some amazing input into how I can improve the accessibility of the Far Lands book.
The first session, on the 25th will feature discussion of the game and some of the worldbuilding steps, and the second on the 2nd will feature gameplay. I couldn’t be more excited to share the game with them and with the world!
Accessibility features
It’s thanks to the folks at Open the Gates gaming that I knew what to do once I was done putting all the text of the game onto the book pages. I want everyone who’s interested in bonding with friends on the trail, making discoveries, and witnessing the sublime to play Far Lands, and that includes people who don’t experience the book in the same way I do.
It’s been important to me from the start that the book be both readable front-to-back and usable as a reference manual during games. For a long time I struggled to know how exactly to strike that balance. But it turns out, a lot of the same features that help people with different accessibility needs than myself will also make the book better for everyone.
First page of the Table of Contents for Far Lands, showing the introduction, game setup, and a selection of scenarios
Navigation features
As of this month, I now have a table of contents, and index with clickable links. I have a glossary of terms, and clickable page cross-references. It’s not perfect, but it exists, and that’s all that’s needed for this stage.
I’m currently working on adding a mini-table-of-contents to each section that summarizes and provides links to each of the sub-topics of the chapter. I’ve also added mini versions of some tables when they’re referenced in multiple places in the book, so that you don’t have to flip from one place to another as much.
Readable fonts
I’ve downloaded a few fonts designed for readability: Atkinson Hyperlegible and Lexend are my favorites. These fonts were designed through study and experiments of what makes text more or less readable by a diverse range of individuals. And the result is fonts that honestly also just look good to my eyes. While I’m not using these fonts everywhere in the book, having these available will help me make sure the text is as readable as possible.
Alt Text
For next steps, I will go through and add alt text to all of the art and images in the book. When I spoke with the folks from Open the Gates gaming, I learned that alt text for images can be more than just a literal description of what appears in the image- it should ideally serve the same purpose that the image does for a reader / listener. If the purpose of the image is to convey a feeling, the alt text can be written to accomplish the same!
“Bare Bones” / “Ashcan” edition
Finally, taking a cue from MÖRK BORG, I’ll be releasing a version of the book with a significant amount of graphic elements stripped out. While it’s not as strictly necessary as for MÖRK BORG, a game known for its bombastic and overwhelming visual style, it lets me accomplish a few things at once:
A minimalistic, high-contrast version of the game for folks with visual impairments or who use screen readers and don’t want to deal with alt text or funky page formatting
A stripped-down but fully functional version of the game I can use as a freebie for folks who want to try before they buy or can’t afford the full game (and don’t want to take advantage of community copies)
A quick, lightweight reference document with a smaller file size
This will also be a benefit I can provide to backers of an eventual crowdfunding campaign quickly after funding, as it will be easier to put together than the fully-featured version! It will still feature all the navigation features I described above, but the art and graphic design will be dramatically stripped down.
What’s next?
Over the next month, I plan to continue filling in holes as I find them and polishing up the accessibility of the game. I also have a few variations and minor tweaks to the rules to playtest, so expect some exciting updates as these pieces all come together!
Have you ever wanted to be bad? To break the unwritten rules?
The rules of etiquette around TTRPGs are critically important to keeping a game fun for everyone at the table. But at their most strict, they can be limiting for the story potential. The thing that makes the most interesting story isn’t always what’s the most fun at the table, and sometimes you have to compromise- and you should pretty much always choose player experience. But is it possible to have both?
There’s been a lot of talk lately about “safety tools.” What they are, what they’re supposed to do, the pros and cons of various specific tools. (My personal favorite right now is the Palette Grid by Jay Dragon). A lot has been said about them by other folks, but I’m interested in talking about a broader context they exist within: Permission structures.
Today I’m going to dig into what you’re allowed to do in a game. Not just by the rules of the game, but by the other people at the table. When, why, and how do we get permission to do stuff that we usually wouldn’t? Understanding when, why, and how we get permission will also help make anxious or new players more comfortable at the table.
“That Guy” vs the social contract
We’ve all heard the stories of “that guy” at the table. The player who has their own idea of fun and doesn’t care about the fun of anyone else at the table. I’ve been really lucky to only have that kind of experience once, but it was a catastrophe. Any good, experienced player will tell you the phrase “that’s what my character would do” is almost always an excuse to deflect the consequences of being a jerk.
In these cases, the players are acting without permission or without consent. While many of these stories come from personality clashes “above table,” a fair number of them come down to a violation of the social contract of the game.
What is a social contract?
The social contract is the set of rules, spoken or unspoken, that everyone agrees to abide by. A tacit agreement that as long as you follow these rules, so will I. And if you break the social contract, you are no longer protected by it, and will face social consequences.
By and large humans are terrified of social rejection and ostracism, so it’s usually an efficient enforcement mechanism.
When we say “contract,” we are being metaphorical; it’s not a literal contract anyone physically signs. But it is important be explicit about what is and is not acceptable, especially with new players or a new group. This is a defense mechanism developed out of necessity and something I highly, highly recommend.
This is one of the most pervasive sources of permission in games. If we’ve all already agreed that something is allowed, then it’s ok to do, even if normally you would hesitate for fear of social consequences.
Session 0: defining the social contract
One of the major reasons for running a session 0 is to establish the social contract explicitly, rather than relying on implicit assumptions. What are the expectations of player behavior and game content? This contract puts limits on what players can do above table and in game in order to make sure everyone has a good time at the table.
This is what “safety tools” are built to do- to pose questions to everyone at the table that force them to spell out the bounds of the social contract they will be bound by. Because every group redefines the social contract with every game, the things that are acceptable change every game, and so if you don’t perform this step, players can have wildly misaligned expectations, through no fault of their own!
Even with the same group of players, in a game about the tension between desperate criminals trying to survive in a corrupt and broken world, it might be ok to harm an NPC tied to another player’s backstory. But in a more lighthearted game, or a game focused on family, that would be totally unacceptable.
In this example, it’s not just about setting the right tone, though that is a factor. It’s also because different games have different sources of fun.
Social contract side-effects
People-pleasing
One major problem with using the social contract to enforce norms around a game is that the looming threat of social consequences casts an outsized shadow over some players. This can result in some unfortunate side-effects that can be difficult to overcome for both players and game masters.
For example, some players might diminish their own preferences to appease other players out of fear of stepping outside the bounds of the social contract. Or players might assume different unspoken rules. Either of these might lead to one player dominating the spotlight simply because they are less constrained in what they feel they have permission to do. In these cases, it’s important to find ways to give these players the permission they need to act.
This might seem like a challenge limited to particularly anxious players. But in some cases, every player might be overly cautious.
Consensus formation
I’ve had experiences like this time and time again. In a recent game of Doomsong in which I was a player, the GM confronted us with a simple situation: There’s an undead gravedigger standing in the middle of the road. It was our job as characters to deal with this, and we would be derelict in our duties if we didn’t. But we were worn down from an exhausting mission and weren’t confident we could deal with it unscathed. And so we discussed what to do… for what felt like forever. The game ground to a halt and the GM had to step in and push us forward, and in the end we left the road and gave it a wide berth.
In a post-session chat, multiple players independently admitted that their character would have wanted to rush in and deal with it head on. But nobody wanted to be responsible for putting everyone else in danger. None of us wanted to violate the social contract.
We didn’t feel confident enough to take a decisive action without consulting the table, and it hurt everyone’s fun and the pace of the game. We felt like we needed permission we didn’t have. This is because we each independently made assumptions about the social contract that was more restrictive than what made sense for the game. After that session we agreed: we were ok with individual player characters taking risky or reckless actions. We just might not always follow them into danger. We decided we were more interested in exploring the consequences of that in character than making sure the team is always of one mind.
A skilled GM can mitigate problems like this with good spotlight management. One tip I picked up recently is to always throw to a specific player, rather than to the table at large to avoid these moments of collective hesitation. But a well-designed game can go a long way towards giving the players permission without requiring that extra effort from the game master.
Why be bad?
So when do we want to push against the bounds of things we might normally assume are forbidden by the social contract or “anti-fun?”
The simple answer is that sometimes it’s fun to explore that kind of story. If all the players at the table agree, it can be a blast to play a game full of betrayal and interpersonal conflict. In fact, a huge number of indie games are built specifically to explore these themes. Look at Monsterhearts 2, a game that explores the messy drama and angst between teenage monsters. Many of the game’s rules are designed to push the characters pressure-cooker of emotions, and it’s delicious. The ways characters can hurt and manipulate one another is a core part Monsterhearts 2. But they certainly not be acceptable in a heroic party of fantasy adventurers!
But as is the case for any type of social norms, the answer gets more complicated than that.
A note of caution: Bleed
It must be said that many of the things experienced players assume as part of the social contract of being a “good player” are there for a reason. There’s a concept in tabletop games known as “Bleed.” (This is another topic that other folks have written a lot better about than I can right now, and if my laptop was working I would include some links here). Bleed, simply put, is when the emotions a player’s character “bleed” out into the real world, or vice versa.
The things we experience in a game can often feel just as real as the things that happen to us in our lives. So any time you peel back layers of that social contract to explore types of story, the risk of someone actually getting hurt increases. While it may be fun and interesting to tell a story about being betrayed by a friend, actually being betrayed by a friend feels really bad. And if you’re not prepared for that eventuality, it can lead to a bad time at the table for everyone.
This is part of why so many of the games that explore these types of themes come with well-defined safety tools. Systems like the X-card, Lines and Veils, and running a session 0 go a long way to help mitigate these risks.
So what can we do about it?
Permission and Consent
There’s an important distinction between permission and consent. Permission, by and large, comes from a position of authority. Consent comes from an agreement with a peer. For example, I might ask the game master for permission to use an ability in a way that bends the rules. I might ask another player for consent to steal something from their character.
In many cases, if a player has both permission and consent to take an action, it can even go outside the bounds established in session zero- though one should approach such cases with extreme caution!
Consent can only come from one place- the person whom the action affects. If you want to do something that affects another player, you need to have that player’s consent in order for that action to take effect in the fiction. This is true even if it’s been discussed in session zero, or even if it’s been allowed in the past. If I, for example, try to steal something from another player character, it only makes the game more fun if they’re also interested in the outcome of that action. If they’re not, it just makes me a jerk if I try to do it without talking it over first.
Permission, though, is a bit more complex, because there are numerous sources of authority in a TTRPG.
Authority & sources of Permission
The Game Master
The most obvious source of permission in most TTRPGs is fairly obvious- the game master. It’s a common truism in TTRPGs that the game master has the final say in what happens in the game, regardless of what the rules or any other player says.
“The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules aren’t in charge. You’re the DM, and you are in charge of the game.”
– 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide (2014)
But this isn’t a complete answer. Plenty of TTRPGs don’t have a game master or any kind of facilitator at all. And though it’s not obvious, there are other sources of authority in the game that can even supersede the game master.
The Social Contract
The second place we can get permission is something we’ve already discussed- from the social contract established by the group during session zero. For example, if we’ve all previously agreed that we want to allow PvP, as a player you don’t necessarily have to ask the game master for permission! They might push back if it isn’t an appropriate time (and you should still ask the target of your ire if they want to engage in that right now). But you already have permission.
In this way, establishing a clear social contract through your session zero is even more powerful than asking the game master for permission in the moment, because especially timid or unfamiliar players may feel they need permission before they even ask, or that being told “no” will come with social consequences. But if it’s already established that romancing an NPC is ok, someone who’d be embarrassed to ask might feel comfortable to just go for it!
The Game Designer
Finally, we come to the core of what I’ve been thinking about. How does the game designer signal to the players what they are allowed to do in a game?
The simplest answer is: Write a rule for it. In the original edition of Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts 2, sex is explicitly allowed by default through “Sex Moves.” By implementing unique effects for each playbook which trigger when your character has sex, it grants players permission to explore that topic in the game, unless the players agree to re-flavor or ignore those rules (for example, I’ve seen groups that reflavor those moves as “intimacy” moves rather than specifically “sex” moves).
As another example, a rule could have a special case when acting on a player character; for example, in Dungeons and Dragons, there is no rule for persuading another player character, but in Masks: a New Generation, the move “Provoke someone” has a special case for being used on another player:
For PCs: On a 10+, both. On a 7-9, choose one. • if they do it, add a Team to the pool • if they don’t do it, they mark a condition
This gives the players at the table permission to make this move against other players’ characters. Importantly, this move does not actually require consent of the target to initiate. Why? Because the target of the move still has the choice whether to act or not. A success on this role does not force the target’s hand, it gives them an incentive to take that action.
And that brings us to an important part of permission structures in a game. Incentives.
That’s right, this whole post is a sneaky way for me to talk about designing incentives again.
In my recent blog post about incentives in horror TTRPGs, I talked about the different effects different types of incentives can have. Incentives can give a player something or take something from them. And that thing could be good or bad for the character. But no matter the incentive, if it encourages people to act in a particular way, it creates implicit permission to act in that way.
(As an aside, this is part of why not all systems are right for every table. If a player is given permission and incentivized to take some action forbidden by the social contract, it creates friction between the players and the game. At best, it makes the game less fun than it could be, and at worst could cause real conflict and hurt between players.)
For example, to go back to Masks: a New Generation, if a character has marked the condition Angry, they suffer a -2 penalty to the moves “comfort or support” and “pierce the mask.” This character is too angry to consider other people’s emotions or motivations- and the mechanical penalty incentivizes the player to play along. For a player in this situation it might be more polite to help someone who is hurting or try to understand a situation. But because of the penalty to doing so, the player is given permission to act rashly and disregard others’ feelings.
Doubling up on the incentive, however, is the way it is cleared: “To clear Angry, hurt someone or break something important.” This is effectively two incentives: You gain something bad if you act against the condition (a -2 penalty) and you lose something bad if you play along (clear the condition). But it also gives the player permission to hurt someone or break something.
Denying permission
The game designer can also deny players permission. As easily as we allow something we can forbid it. As above, we can strictly deny something: “Player characters cannot attack other player characters” is a very easy rule to imagine putting into a game.
However, as a designer, we have to be careful what we accidentally deny through implication. This is a huge pet peeve of mine, and something I see frequently in older TTRPGs and games from inexperienced designers.
The pitfall is this: If you explicitly allow one character to do something, you implicitly disallow all other characters from doing that thing.
For example, in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the Thief class had the ability to pick locks. However, because this ability was given to the Thief, no other character would be able to pick a lock. If the Thief wasn’t given this ability, in theory any charactercould attempt to pick a lock. Without specific rules for picking locks, a game master could grand permission to a player to attempt it making a ruling based on the existing rules. But because this ability is given to the Thief and them alone by the game designer, it would be unfair to the Thief if just anyone could do it!
Likewise, if a game has, for example, an ability that any character can take that grants the ability to drive a car, by implication any character that does not have that ability cannot drive. Without that ability in the game, one could make the assumption based on context whether a given character would know how to drive.
This can be used to positive effect as well- in Blades in the Dark, a character can unlock the ability to punch ghosts. By implication, this means that a character without that ability cannot punch ghosts. (The actual rule is a bit more nuanced than that). It’s a very elegant way to tell a player something that they can’t do: Tell them they can’t do it yet.
But when we give specific characters permission to do something as part of character creation, we also deny all other characters permission to do that thing. So we have to be careful what abilities we make exclusive!
Awkward denouement
Unfortunately, my laptop is in the shop and I’m not going to get it back until next week, so I don’t have a great conclusion written up to put here. BUT! In my next game design post (after the next Far Lands update) I will break down the different types of incentives you can put into a game and the effects they each have.
For now, open up a game you like and take a look at some of the rules. Ask yourself if the rule allows you to do something you wouldn’t assume you could do or forbids you from doing something you would have otherwise assumed you could.
I hit some huge milestones this month and have some amazing stuff to share!
Layout first pass is done!
Every bit of text I had written for the book is now laid out! For the first time, I have an approximate page count at 132 pages. I expect that number to change as I create the index, finalize the appendix, and add in the final art pieces.
As I approached the end, getting through the final section was tough. Even knowing I was approaching the finish line, it was difficult to press on because i had saved the work I was least excited about for last. When I finished the last page, I expected to know right away that I was done, but it was hard to convince myself that I hadn’t forgotten something! I went back through the book and discovered that I was, in fact done.
It feels amazing to have hit such a large milestone so far ahead of what I had anticipated. So now I’m planning out my next steps.
What’s next?
For now, I’m taking a short break. Nothing too long, just enough to refill the well. I’ve been inspired on a board game project and wanted to practice making and playtesting with paper prototypes, a skill which is very relevant for all my game design!
But for Far Lands, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Polish: My first pass was rough in places, and it’s going to need a fair amount of polish. Text and page element alignment, style consistency, spot art, copy editing, and filling in a few blanks I left. You can see a few rough spots here:
Final testing: I am planning on playtesting some variants and tweaks to streamline the rules and terminology slightly. Now that the rules are all laid out visually, it’s easier to see that some of the terms I use are clunky, or ideas that could be explained more concisely.
Sensitivity reading: In the near future, I hope to contract a sensitivity reader to look over a few specific passages as well, as I want to make sure to communicate clearly and compassionately about the real-world history of imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation of indigenous peoples by historical “explorers.”
But in addition to this polish work, I have a few exciting events to talk about!
Upcoming live stream!
In late may, I’m going to be streaming a Far Lands demo with Open the Gates Gaming on their twitch channel. I met them at Pax East late last month at an accessibility office hours event they hosted and they had a lot of amazing advice I am excited to put into practice. Expect more details as the date approaches!
First convention demo
I facilitated a game of Far Lands at Somercon over the weekend! It was my first time running a convention game, and the nerves were intense, but I could not be happier with how it went!
The players created an archipelago of islands caught in a time loop. They scaled the crystalline cliffs of the island they believed to be the source of the loop, were lured into losing time relaxing a hot spring cavern, and finally found and slew the Time Worm that was slowly devouring the world.
During the journey, the chronomancer Solomon used up the last of his time to hold the sands of time still for long enough for the team to reach the mysterious cabin where it all began. The soothsayer Athyar finally understood the lesson that Solomon had been trying to teach him- that there’s more to life than always preparing for the future. The vanguard Brigg finally forgave himself for Solomon’s death in a past iteration of the time loop, an event that Solomon had long since forgiven him for. And Brigg and the automaton he crafted, Tau, finally came to see one another as father and son.
The narrative arcs these players crafted really made me fall in love with Far Lands all over again. My goal has been to make a games that allow people to tell the kind of stories I love, and I think I’ve made something really great.
I did learn a lot about running convention games though! There are a lot of little things to tweak about how I get set up and how I facilitate the game when under a tight time constraint. But I couldn’t be more excited for next time.
There’s an adage in economics that seems obvious, but highlights something that’s critically important to understand in game design: “People respond to incentives.” I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately, and while the examples I use here are largely horror rpgs, the lessons are applicable to just about any tone of game.
I had the opportunity to play Delta Green recently, a game inspired strongly by Call of Cthulhu. It was an amazing experience, thanks to a game master dedicated to creating an immersive experience that responded to our characters. It had just enough real-world details to make it feel like something that could plausibly happen. the tension at the table was palpable at times. However, during the game, I noticed something interesting: we were all playing our characters very cautiously.
After the game, I had a chat with the game master about it, and he said he’d noticed that every time he ran the game. It’s hard to tell stories about characters who push through the fear to investigate further, or who do something that a genre-savvy player might know spells their doom. Part of this is because people get attached to their characters and don’t want to see them suffer- which is understandable, but we all knew what we signed up for.
And yet: we never went into the spooky house, we just burned it down. We never investigated the sounds from below the ground, we just collapsed the entrance. We never learned what was really going on and were happy to get out alive. It was an immensely satisfying play experience… but it was not a good story.
This isn’t a problem that veterans of this type of game have, or of any hyper-lethal old-school RPG, for that matter. But why is that adage of “drive your character like a stolen car” is much easier said than done?
There was a trade-off made in the design of Delta Green: Creating the right feeling at the table and making it easy to tell the right kind of story. And to find out why it works out the way it does, we have to look closer at the incentives the game provides to the players.
What are incentives?
An “incentive” is anything that motivates someone, for good or ill. Something that spurs someone to action. Incentives make you want something (or want to avoid something). There are broadly two types of incentives, described aphoristically by the phrase “carrot and stick.” If you want someone to do something, you can offer to reward them if you do… or punish them if they don’t.
Incentives, importantly, always provide a choice. Unlike a rule which says “you must,” incentives always propose “if you do…” (If you take the gold, you will be cursed. If you betray your friends, you will be paid). They’re more subtle than a hard-and-fast rule, however they can be very powerful yet deceptively easy to overlook when designing a game.
So what were the incentives doing in Delta Green?
Incentives create a feeling
Following in the footsteps of “cosmic horror” games before it, like Call of Cthulhu, each character has a pool of sanity points. Whenever a character encounters something frightening, mind-bending, or supernatural, they may permanently lose some amount of sanity points. And while it’s possible to gain them back one or two at a time, you lose them much faster than you could ever regain them.
This fits the concept that the cosmic horror genre has of sanity- when you know too much of the truth, your grip on reality becomes more and more tenuous, and you can never un-learn what you’ve learned, never un-see what you’ve seen. And if you run out of sanity points, your character is permanently removed from the game. Whether they flee, or die, or just become an NPC under the GM’s control, they are now no longer playable.
The largest effect of sanity points is the feeling it creates in the players. That feeling that something is being lost that can never be regained. And that feeling instills in the players some of the fear and dread that their characters experience. This is a part of what created that atmosphere of tension and dread at the table that made the moments of release when we made it out all the more cathartic.
But if it evoked the right feelings, why didn’t it create the right kind of story?
Feelings create action
It’s simple, when you think about it: The fear of losing our sanity points made us behave more cautiously. As the economist say, we responded to the incentives. Even though it was our characters in danger, not us as players, we feared losing our characters through the proxy of losing sanity points.
It might have been a more interesting narrative if we investigated further, but that wasn’t the pattern of play the game incentivized us to pursue. Doing so would be directly against not just the interests of our characters, but against our own interests. If we did decide to look further and our character witnessed something traumatizing, we as players would be punished with the threat of losing our characters!
But why is this simple thing, ticking down a number on a sheet, so powerful at creating fear in the players at the table?
The Endowment Effect and Loss Aversion
People by and large hate to lose things they have. If you give someone $5 and then take it away, they will feel like they have less than they started with. This is known as the endowment effect (or “divestiture aversion”), and it’s a well-studied phenomenon in psychology. People tend to value more highly things they already have than things they could stand to gain, and so letting go of things hurts more than it should.
Likewise, loss aversion tells us the simple truth that people just hate to lose. It feels worse to lose something that it is to gain it in the first place. Losing two sanity points feels more bad than gaining two sanity points feels good, so the outcome is net negative.
A graph of perceived value of gain and loss vs. strict numerical value of gain and loss. A loss of $0.05 is perceived as having a greater utility loss than the utility increase of a comparable gain. (From Wikipedia)
These psychological effects seem to be very consistent and powerful across numerous studies. This is incredibly useful to us as designers, because it gives us our stick from the “carrot and stick” aphorism.
It’s clear to see now what was going on in Delta Green. Our fear of losing sanity points made us feel some of the fear of our characters. This created the right feeling at the table, but caused us to act in a predictably over-cautious way.
Can you have both?
But is it possible to get both the right feel at the table and the right kind of story? Absolutely! I mentioned previously that experienced players in this genre don’t tend to have this problem. So why is that?
This is largely because experienced players have learned, after much demonstration, that losing your character is the point of this type of game. It’s inevitable. For many, it’s a lot more fun to enjoy the ride down and go out in a blaze of glory. Or, some might learn to lean into the paranoia and revel in outsmarting the horrors without succumbing to them.
But it’s generally true that newer players of any TTRPG are much more likely to become very attached to their characters, and experience a lot of painful bleed when their character suffers. By contrast, more experienced players have often learned to separate themselves from their characters more. They’ve experienced their characters suffering, and know that they, as a player, came out ok. And they tend to be more comfortable taking on an authorial role, looking for the most interesting outcome, which isn’t always success.
And so through focusing on the overall narrative, experienced players can overcome the trade-off and get both a good story and the right feeling at the table. You can feel the fear created by the threat of the stick, but push through it and do the more interesting thing anyway. But is there a way to make it easy for new players to get both?
Let’s see what happens if we invert the incentives.
Carrots (and other little treats)
Fear and Panic, by Lyme is the perfect game to contrast with my experience playing Delta Green, because it almost perfectly reverses the incentives created by the sanity points mechanic.
In Fear and Panic, when you see something that challenges your sanity, rather than losing sanity points, you gain fear points. This flips the loss aversion on its head: we’re no longer losing something, we’re gaining something, even though for our characters , the situation is the same.
And unlike in Delta Green, where running out of sanity points causes a massive punishment -losing your character forever- in Fear and Panic, fear can be spent for bonuses to rolls or to activate special actions… but only for actions that demonstrate your fear or instability like fleeing, lashing out violently, obsessing over a task, or having a prophetic vision. But gain too much fear and you might pick up scars that permanently change your character.
“A survivor can go the whole game without ever being scared, but with no fear to spend, they may not survive for long.”
Fear and Panic, p. 14
Suddenly, it’s easy to imagine as a player wanting to go investigate that sound. Being excited to go into a spooky house in the woods. Because we want those fear points to spend; they just seem fun! So our investigators are suddenly curious, risk-taking, and getting a lot more up close and personal with the horrors.
But fear points get us both coming and going: once we have the points, we want to spend them. Because we want to succeed, we want the bonuses, so we’re more likely to act in a way that will let us spend the points. And now our investigators are also erratic, self-destructive, obsessive… all the things we as an audience would want to see from a character who’s seen too much.
Another example:
The only other game I’ve seen that use points so effectively like this is Apocalypse Keys by Rae Nedjadi.
In Apocalypse Keys, each character contains a monstrous nature that threatens to overcome them. You as a player can earn points by leaning into your character’s monstrous nature- any number of points you want. And you can spend those points for bonuses to rolls. But spend too many and roll too high, you overshoot your target in a destructive way: a “catastrophic success.” And if you hold onto too many without spending them, you risk losing control to your monstrous side, with disastrous results.
So… can you have both?
It seems like using something like Fear and Panic completely fixes the problem we have- it’s now easy for players to create a story that matches the genre expectations. But there’s a critical difference in the tone of the game. Where players had been afraid to investigate too closely, now they’re excited. This source of easy tension is gone. And depending on the player, that might be ideal. In a lot of horror games, the goal is not to scare the player, but to scare the characters. But some players might want to be scared, to feel that tension, for the same reason a lot of people love horror movies.
Fear and Panic addresses this somewhat by making most high-stakes challenges more difficult. So much so that they’re unlikely to succeed without some fear to spend. That fear of failure is a handy motivator, but it’s less powerful that that ticking clock of sanity. Some other games, like Dread, us other means to build tension. (Like a physical tumbling block tower, in the case of Dread).
But most often, it simply falls to the Game Master. skilled GM can evoke a horrifying tone through skillful narration and writing. Does the ease of pushing players towards their character’s fears rather than away make up for the loss of that feeling of… loss? I don’t know yet. And I’m sure it is different from group to group, but I’m very excited to find out.
So as before, creating the right tone and the right type of story requires a degree of skill and experience… just this time more from the GM than the players. The game has focused its attention towards structuring incentives to create the right type of story, and less towards creating the right feeling in the players. It’s doing more of its work in a different place, so a different part of the game is easier to run.
Where does that leave us?
I am left trying to imagine a game that tries to do both. Would it work as well to build a game where a character loses something meaningful if they don’t go investigate further? Perhaps if you don’t go investigate that noise, you lose more than just an opportunity to find out more. You’re giving in to the way things are. Letting them be. You lose some of your passion. But maybe if you go investigate, you may keep that passion and curiosity, at the risk of physical danger. In this case, we get a game about the fear of complacency, of ennui, of giving up and becoming unimportant to the story.
For now, it’s just a thought exercise. All of the games we’ve discussed today achieve what they set out to do with flying colors by creating the right incentives. We can create tension and drama by threatening consequences. We can get players to take actions they normally wouldn’t by promising a reward. Even acting against what’s best for their own character for a more interesting story.
As designers, one of our great powers is to get people to have fun in ways they wouldn’t think to do on their own. Knowing how to create the right incentives and understanding the incentives your mechanics are creating are the key to shaping the experience of the game and the structure of the story.
Take a look at a any game you have on hand. Pick just about any mechanic and ask yourself: What does this mechanic make me want to do? What does this make seem fun? The answer may often surprise you.
I didn’t make nearly as much progress this month as I did for my previous updates (December, January and February), but that’s because I was occupied with the two things that inspired the game most: Travel and conventions. Specifically, I spent two weeks in New Zealand, and then attended Pax East!
As I write this now, I’m exhausted, but at the same time my mind is buzzing with ideas and motivation. But as I talked about last month, I have to let myself rest, too. This month has been a whirlwind, but it’s done so much to refill my creative well.
So I want to take this chance to talk a bit about the specific trip that inspired Far Lands in the first place.
Olympics National Park, 2021
Five years ago, I went to visit Olympics National Park, to the northwest of Seattle. The park is home to three very intensely varied landscapes: the rugged coastline, featuring beautiful jagged rock formations; one of the only temperate rain forests in the world; and spectacular mountainous alpine forests with meadows of wildflowers.
It was hiking up Hurricane Ridge when the idea first struck me. I was talking with my brother about diceless games.
“In a diceless game,” I remember saying, “The source of randomization for each player is the other players. You never know what they’re going to say. Like in a game of Microscope, you have to adapt to the other players ideas on the fly.”
“But I feel like you need some direction,” my brother said (Paraphrasing significantly- I don’t remember exactly who said what). “If you’re just dropped in without guidance, it can be really hard to come up with good ideas on the spot.”
(you may recognize this idea from my post about white space in game design)
“Yeah, I think that’s what random tables are good for,” I said after some thought. “One of my favorite things in worldbuilding games like Microscope and The Quiet Year is justifying stuff that seems contradictory. It’s what I love about random tables too, especially when you combine multiple elements and explain how they fit together.”
(This idea would eventually become the core of the way regions are created in Far Lands!)
The Distance
As we continued to hike, I mulled over that idea and looked out over this view:
I remember distinctly the feeling I had. I looked down into the valleys and wondered: what’s hidden by those trees? What would it be like to wander through that forest? I realized that, in theory, I could go find out. But the splendor of the view put into me that feeling of the sublime, that combination of awe and terror of the power and beauty of nature.
The snow-capped mountains across the valley seemed so large as to be unreal. They dominated the skyline, their presence a physical weight on my mind, as if their mass exerted its gravity on me across that distance. What would the world look like from their peak, I wondered. What would I see on the other side?
And for a moment I felt as if I was looking in a mirror. If I were to stand on that mountain peak and looked in just the right direction, I would see the very spot I was standing on now.
And as I imagined looking back at myself from that mountaintop, exhausted from the climb, I realized I would feel the same awe and curiosity about the land I was traveling through now. Everything around me would blend together from afar into one landscape, and the same drive I feel to climb that mountain would push me to explore here.
That thought spurred me to look closer at the landscape immediately around me, and what I saw was nothing I had expected.
The Details
This trip happened to coincide with 2021 Western North America heat wave (a horrifying and tragic extreme weather event precipitated by climate change). At the time when we were hiking up hurricane ridge, it was 80 degrees. We were hiking in shorts and t-shirts or even tank tops, and sweating profusely in the heat and sun.
And yet… there was snow on the ground.
The temperature gradient between our heads and our feet was unreal- I could feel the cold in the air up to the level of my shins. One clever hiker scooped up fistfuls of snow in a shirt, tied up the ends, and hung it around his neck to slowly melt and cool him off. It was unlike anything I have ever experienced then or since.
And with the heat wave came an unseasonably early bloom of the wildflowers on the mountain.
And we encountered a black-tailed deer quite closely!
A Discovery… and a challenge
As we hiked through the snow, our feed freezing and our heads sweating, we noticed something that made us worry:
We had heard rumors setting out that one or more mountain lions (cougars) had been spotted in the area. I would learn years later that only a few weeks after our visit, a hiker was attacked and badly injured by a hiker on that very trail. I don’t believe we were ever in any danger, traveling in a group as we were. The threat felt real in that moment, but it was also exciting to know that there was so much more going on in that place that I couldn’t see, revealed only by hints and clues.
The next day
The rest of the trip was just as incredible. I’ll gloss over the details, but the temperate rain forest felt utterly surreal and alien to me, and we encountered countless surprising moments that caused me to re-evaluate the world around me. A stray beam of sunlight illuminating a duckling. A waterfall producing a double-rainbow as it cascades into a crevasse, utterly invisible until you’re right upon it. A row of cairns built on the beach where they would be swept away by the incoming tide.
I came back from this trip with a large part of the game already formed in my head: a GMless game about building a map first by what you see in the distance, and then by what you discover when you actually set foot there. I wanted a game that let you wonder what will I find there, and then go find out. And I wanted a game where you could talk with your companions along the way and learn more about eachother as you discover the world around you. That’s what Far Lands is to me.
And as we approach the five year anniversary of starting to work on this game, it’s nearing completion- at least of the first draft of the layout!
Last month, I wrote about how I had completed more than half of the work that I expected me to take all year. As of today, I’ve I’m almost completely done with my initial layout pass! All that’s left is the long-form sample of play and the appendix. But there’s still a lot left to be done after this initial pass! Alignment, consistency, copy-editing, and accessibility are all extremely important.
This post is going to be shorter because it’s a short month, and also because I’m going getting ready for some travel. But I still want to share some of what I’ve learned this month in work on Far Lands
One of the quick-start scenarios
What I missed
Doing layout for Far Lands has forced me to reckon with every single word I wrote, and it’s been revelatory. I have noticed a lot of gaps in the manuscript I had totally missed. Tables with empty slots, TODOs I’d forgotten, paragraphs that I’d intended to re-write. I am very grateful that this process has forced me to look over every single part of the game. If I had passed it off to someone else at this point, those gaps could have presented a real problem!
I talked last month about using white space in your game design, but this space was not intentionally left blank. Oops! But it’s been exciting to re-engage with the game design part of the process
Leaving the best (worst) for last
When I started, I laid out my plan for the year, putting things in an order that I felt made sense to me. That order changed a bit as I went, but I realized at some point that I had put them in order of my confidence.This helped in some ways… and hindered me in others.
The first sections I laid out I was very confident in the text, the rules, and had a clear vision of the layout. This really helped me build my familiarity with the tools. I was able to implement my vision without worrying about having to edit the text too much. By the time I got to the more challenging sections, I already familiar with the tools and the style of the book. As a result, the work shifted from figuring out a visual identity to figuring out how to organize a challenging text.
But it’s also meant that as I go, I’m feeling more tentative about the text. I knew the narrative journal entries were going to have to be edited for length to fit on a page. I knew some of the scenarios needed content filled in. I knew some of the tables were going to be challenging to make readable. And so the work got harder to engage with. So I needed to give myself a bit more grace. Which brings me to my next point:
Don’t push too hard
I talked in my previous far lands update about weaponizing my perfectionism to make steady, incremental progress. I mentioned that I was worried I would push myself to burnout. I’ve been continuing to approach this system cautiously, and as expected, I started running into the limits. Some days, I just end up fully booked with things that are very important to me. Trying to push through to get just a little bit done will keep me up too late or pull me away from stuff I will really miss if I have to decline. And on those days, knowing that I haven’t gotten it done weighs on me all day. It prevents me from fully enjoying stuff I know I could otherwise enjoy more!
And what I realized is it’s not hard to see those days coming- from looking at my calendar, it’s not hard to know what days I’m going to struggle to fit it in time-wise. So I can designate a day when the reminder doesn’t pop up and know that’s a “rest day.” Or more realistically, otherwise occupied. Because it’s not really a rest day. And that’s kind of a problem…
Gas, Steam, and Battery
There’s a theory that I’ve seen a lot about how do deal with limited energy called spoon theory. A lot of folks may be aware of it already, but it breaks down to the metaphor that each day you have a limited amount of metaphorical spoons. Each task costs a spoon, sometimes more than one if it’s a hard task! And every day you have a different number. It’s a practical metaphor that really helps conceptualize how you’re spending your energy and how much energy different tasks take.
I have a personal distinction I like to make between three different kinds of tired: Out of gas, out of steam, and out of battery. They map pretty well to classic TTRPG stats (and philosophy, but we’re here to talk about ttrpgs) of body, mind, and spirit,
Out of gas is physical exhaustion. You may want to keep going, but your body says no. This could be in the form of tired muscles, your natural circadian rhythm telling you it’s time to sleep, or the body shutting down when you’ve carried too much stress for too long.
Out of steam is mental exhaustion. You are out of willpower, have no more drive to continue. Whatever you’re doing isn’t fun anymore, and any effort you put in is going to be halfhearted or pull from internal reserves that borrow from tomorrow. It’s hard to make choices or take decisive action.
Out of battery is social or sensory exhaustion. You don’t have the battery left to engage with people in the way you want to. Conversations get hard to follow and it’s easy to get overwhelmed or confused. You may still want to be around people and be interested in what’s going on, but just don’t have whatever it is you need to comport yourself or keep yourself together in the moment.
Far Lands uses Health, Supplies, Morale, and Orientation as the resources. Though I’m actually in the process of playtesting a change to simplify this system down to a single track!
This system has served me well in deciding when it’s time to head home from an event- am I out of gas, out of steam, or out of battery? The way I recover from those is very different! Out of gas I can stretch, drink water, eat some food. Out of battery I can step outside and get a moment of quiet. Check in with myself, do some solitary activity until I feel centered enough to re-engage. Out of steam, though, is often the what signals the end of the night, or just means I need to shift to a new activity. Many times I’ve found myself tired and disengaged, out of steam, but found myself having a conversation with someone about one of my passions and suddenly be reinvigorated.
The only way this works is to check in with myself, to determine which I’m feeling and know how to respond. Like the spoon theory, I have a different amount of gas, steam, and battery each day, and different activities take a different amount of each, and like spoons sometimes they can be easier or harder to recharge.
Expanding the theory
I’ve been reading Structuring Life to Support Creativity, by Sandra Tayler, which has a lot of amazing advice and journaling exercises for creative folks. Some of those, I have found instantly useful. After taking some time to identify my priorities, personal values, and the core pillars of my life, one of the exercises had me list tasks and rank their cost on five categories: Willpower, decision fatigue, tracking, emotional burden/guilt, and anxiety. Another had me categorize tasks that refilled my creative energy or drained my creative energy.
It’s always the case that some days leave you feeling more drained than others in energy, focus, creative juice, and passion. And some days might be draining in different ways. A day full of stressful news might leave me emotionally exhausted. A day of meetings might leave me socially exhausted. A day of solving complex technical puzzles might drain my creative energy.
This system struck me as really similar to my Gas, Steam, and Battery theory, but it has a few more categories. I don’t have clever metaphors for those resources though. I’m going to have to keep thinking about how to poetically categorize the different types of mental energy that those represent!
Refilling the well with intentional rest
Putting the pieces above together, moving forward I want to build in for myself periods of intentional rest. I mentioned above that it was hard to enjoy things because I felt like I was falling behind on my goal. But in the same way, it was hard to rest and refill my creative well, my spoons, my battery, my steam, because I felt a degree ofguilt and/or shame that I was leaving some work un-done.
So instead, I’m making an alternate “win condition” for my daily goal. Either make progress, or intentionally rest. And some days are going to be set aside for one or the other, based on what I feel I need. One day I might decide to do more because I’m energized to work, but one day I might designate as a rest day because I’m feeling burned out.
But what is intentional rest?
Intentional rest is distinguished from unintentional rest. Which is to say, not accidental, and with a set intention. It’s different from just taking a break, because while that can give a needed respite from an intense or boring activity, it can often lead you to activities that don’t really recharge you. And often these breaks can feel like a failure, like something shameful. But with intentional rest, you are setting yourself up for success, because it has a goal.
Imagine dedicating yourself fully to rest. Lower the lights. Put on comfy clothes. Get warm. Make your favorite tea. Settle down with a book or a show. Whatever you do may be mindful or mindless- whatever works best for you to refill. But the important thing is to acknowledge that this will help you achieve your other goals. This rest isn’t an embarrassing failure, it isn’t something you’re forced into by running yourself ragged, and it isn’t a shameful indulgence. It is strategic and necessary (to quote Everything Everywhere All at Once).
Self care, as I have been trying to internalize for quite some time, isn’t selfish when it helps prepare you to care for others and fulfill your other responsibilities.
Customize your rest
Eating well, sleeping well, chatting with friends, whatever mindfulness practice you care to implement, different activities recharge different types of energy. And you can build your rest time with that in mind. Consider for yourself which activities cost you the most of your different types of energy, and which activities replenish different types of energy.
A lot of activities will have a cost in one type of energy but replenish a different type! Hanging out with friends costs me social energy, but replenishes my creative energy, but writing is the opposite! I run low on creative energy… but get excited to talk about what I’m writing, so those activities complement one another perfectly!
As a result, your personal intentional rest may not look like rest to an outside observer. For example, I find intense puzzle games very restful, despite requiring a lot of mental energy and focus. But because the stakes are low, it recharges me emotionally to deal with anxiety and difficult decisions. Running costs me physical energy but recharges my focus. Doing chores diffuses anxious jitters but costs me some willpower to get started.
What does your rest look like? How do you recharge different types of energy?
Next month, I hope to report back with the approximate final page count of Far Lands, but currently it’s just over 100! That’s about half the length of Masks: A New Generation. I’m interested to see how much that changes as I go through the next stages!
This is part 2 of my series about making mechanics easier for players to engage with. For the previous part, check out part 1: Cognitive Load
A few years ago, I sat down with to run Masks: A New Generation with a new group for the first time. After introducing the players to the basic mechanics and making characters, we got started. As things kept rolling along, the hero team confronted a giant robot terrorizing a city park, and I noticed one of the players, a veteran of Dungeons and Dragons, had barely spoken up in the fight. Shifting the spotlight, I asked them directly what they wanted to do to try to stop the robot. They looked at their sheet, at the list of, moves, and back at me, and said:
“I don’t know. What can I do?”
This is a difficult spot as both a GM and a player. If you have ever asked your players “what do you do next?” only to get blank stares, you know how this feels. “Anything you want,” is not a helpful answer. In a Dungeons and Dragons style of game, players might have an explicit list of skills and abilities.
But in a Powered by the Apocalypse game like Masks, your choices are left totally open. Instead, the moves are written to trigger based on the narrative situation within the game. You can’t simply choose from a list, you have to invent a course of action, and then see what move, if any, is most relevant. And to a player used to a more constrained set of options, this wide-open decision space was paralyzing!
I’ve grown a lot as a game master since then, and in hindsight, I could have done a better job presenting courses of action (the robot is about to stomp on an ice-cream truck! A building nearby is in danger of collapsing!) But this experience is what lead me to recognize a critical difference in design philosophy that has shaped how I design and run games ever since.
What is white space?
This space was left blank on purpose
White space in design is, quite simply, where there is nothing written. Not just blank space on the page (though this may be the case), but also where there are gaps in the rules or setting. You can see this most clearly in any well-written setting book or adventure module. If the designer knows what they’re doing, they’ll intentionally leave gaps for the players (the GM is also a player) to make it their own at the table.
But in designing rules and systems, it can be a bit harder to notice.
Out-of-scope whitespace
There are a few places you can spot white space in a design. The most obvious is around the edges, outside the scope of what the game is about. Because a game or an adventure is finite, there will always be things left out. Deciding what to leave unwritten can be easy: You don’t need sailing rules in a game set in a desert. You don’t need to explain what’s on a continent across the sea in a module set in a single city.
Sometimes, though, a designer will leave a gap in the design that is surrounded by content. A space where something should be, but there is nothing. And those decisions can be much more difficult, and much harder to use effectively.
So why do we do it? And why is it so important?
Why leave it blank on purpose?
We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable
Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell, chapter 11
The high-minded philosophical reason
When designing a game, it’s easy to take on the view that the rules are the game. That the players at the table will execute on the rules, and in so doing, experience the game as intended. But there’s something fundamental missing from that perspective.
I mentioned previously that white space lets players tune a setting or a game to their individual group and preferences. But that’s something of an understatement: White space is what is unique about tabletop role-playing games. Without it, you have not created a tabletop role-playing game; You’ve created a board game. It may have random elements, or choices to make, but every option would be proscribed.
Rules in TTRPGs are different from rules in a board game. Rules are generally clear and rigid, but TTRPGs are flexible and open to interpretation by design. It’s not the rules that are the game, it’s what happens in-between the rules. It’s the conversation.
The rules in a TTRPG are not a merely set of steps to execute, they are sturdy skeleton that supports the wobbly organic bits in-between. They are a vessel that shapes and contains the fluid conversation that pours out of the players.
The blank space you leave within your game is what defines the shape of the game. The part of the game that is not written in the book is the part that is played. And discovering what fills that empty space is a large part of why we play.
Your job as a designer is to structure the conversation so that engaging with it will create the experience that you’re inspired to share
Nathan D. Paoletta, RPG Design Zine
Example: Character sheets
For a concrete example, think of the spaces that are blank on a character sheet:
Look how much of this sheet is just lined paper
The name, stats, abilities, these are all degrees of freedom in the design of a character because they are left blank on the sheet. But even there, there are rules for how those are to be filled in. But look closer on many sheets and you will see something that doesn’t have rules associated with it: a box with lines for notes, character details, backstory, personality, and so on. Things that go beyond and between the rules to explain why and how this character is the way they are.
Even on sheets that don’t have this feature, (Powered by the Apocalypse games are frequently guilty of this), I’ll see players adding notes into margins, the back of the sheet, or even a separate page that explain the details of their character that aren’t enforced or even supported by any game system.
This blank space is what lets a player feel they own and inhabit a character. Even games have characters already defined for you, like Yazeeba’s Bed and Breakfast, have blank space to fill in as you explore the characters through play.
The Practical Reasons
Well-crafted white space is in ttrpg design has very practical benefits:
White space allows for customization. While choosing from a list is quick and easy, there’s nothing that provides more freedom in a design than allowing a player to make up whatever they want (within reason & the bounds of the game) to fill a space. Like with character sheets and settings as described above, when something is left unwritten by the designer, it falls to the players to write it. And the players at the table can often (but not always) come up with an answer that is better for their specific table than a designer trying to make an answer that works for every table could.
White space gets buy-in. When you’ve had the chance to create part of a character, the world, or part of the game system, you naturally feel a sense of ownership over it. You’re intimately familiar with that part of the game because you had a hand in creating it. You feel authority to make decisions about that part of the game. You feel invested in seeing what happens to it next. This is why collaborative worldbuilding at the start of an RPG is so powerful, but it can work the same magic in so many other places.
White space gets you thinking. There’s something compelling about the space on the map that just says “here there be monsters.” The thrill of curiosity and discovery is a huge part of what drives people to play TTRPGs. Just like I mentioned about customization above, the blank space naturally prompts players to imagine what could fill that space. What could possibly explain everything surrounding that gap? To use Blades in the Dark as an example, Lord Scurlock is presented as a mysterious, seemingly-immortal figure whose personal influence is so powerful that he is on an even playing field with some of the most powerful factions in the city. But exactly what he is or what he wants is left totally ambiguous. As a result, the players almost always want to find out, and the GM gets to have fun crafting his sinister plot. As a result, everyone at the table is engaged.
Putting it all together
There’s a rule in horror that the moment you show a monster to the audience, it instantly loses its emotional power over them. When you can’t see it, you’re forced to imagine what it could be. And what each individual imagines is going to be more powerful than anything a writer could come up with or an artist could create.
As long as the space is left blank, the audience/player is compelled to engage, to imagine what could be there. Everyone has their own monster, and the monster can be different every time. That’s the magic of white space.
The Catch
Unfortunately, there’s a big problem with white space. It turns out, can sometimes be really hard to think of an idea on the spot that’s as cool and interesting as you’d like. Sometimes, it feels like breathing. There’s an obvious answer, or, even better, one that violates expectations in an exciting way. But sometimes it feels like being thrust into the spotlight on stage without knowing any of the lines. Like sitting down for test without studying.
Experience helps, but the experience is still highly variable even for the most skilled improvisers. So why is it sometimes so stressful, but sometimes it feels so natural?
Planting seeds: How make white space green
The secret to making white space work is planting seeds. Prompting players so that by the time they’re asked a question, they already have ideas for the answer. Immersing them in the vibes of the game. Showing them the shape of the gap in the puzzle so they know how to craft the missing piece.
This is green space. Rather than a barren field, the blank space is crafted into fertile soil for ideas to grow. What might look like an empty field actually has seeds of ideas already planted under the surface.
Example: For the Queen
The best example of this I’ve ever seen is For the Queen, by Alex Roberts. For the Queen takes the form of a set of cards, each of which has a simple prompt. It begins with the players being told “The queen has chosen you for this mission because she knows you love her.” Players take turns going around the table drawing a card and answering the prompt on it. At the end of the game, everyone responds to the prompt: “The queen is under attack. Do you defend her?”
I was deeply skeptical of this game when I first heard that premise. Surely, I thought, if the cards are the same, even in a different order, the game would play out largely the same way every time! But I could not have been more wrong. Even though the seeds planted by the designer are the same every time the players sit down to play, they will grow differently every game.
I had overlooked an important part of the game. I hadn’t noticed what was missing: For the Queen has zero character creation. The characters are completely blank at the start of the game. Even the eponymous Queen, though you may have a piece of art to inspire you, is a totally blank slate. As I said in a earlier, the part of the game that is unwritten is what part that is played. The characters are left blank, so the game is about discovering who they characters are.
But how does this work? How could you create a character from a completely blank slate with no rules to guide you? When designing the prompts, Alex Roberts had the mantra: “Tell them something they don’t know, then ask them a question about it.” That simple mantra is an incredibly powerful tool for game design, and it’s the secret to making white space into green space.
A sample card from For the Queen
For example, the prompt on this card might look totally open-ended at first, but it actually tells you a great deal: You have a special relationship with the queen, it is known to others, and those others are envious of that relationship, so it must be worthy of envy. But it doesn’t tell you anything about what that relationship is.
The card above brilliantly hides the prompt within a question. It buries the seed, making the hand of the designer invisible while constraining the space of answers to the question. The player no longer has to decide if the relationship is good or bad, or if it’s secret or public. The prompt feels completely open. But when the player starts to answer that question, their answer will naturally fall within the constraints created by the premise of the question. The result will feel as though it is completely their idea.
And yet the player is never alone in crafting their answer to the prompt. They’re guided by the prompt, by the previous answers they’ve given, and by the very premise of the game (the Queen chose you because she knows you love her, after all).
Consider the alternative cases:
What is your relationship with the queen?
Some others at the royal court are jealous of your relationship with the queen.
In the first case, the question feels absolutely impossible to answer, especially if it’s the first card you draw! It’s so wide open, there’s nothing to latch on to. There’s no seed crystal to grow your idea off of.
But in the second case, a player would likely feel they’re being dictated to. This is the way it is- no room for debate! Simply accept the premise and move on.
But when both are put together, the magic happens.
The takeaway: Ask leading questions
The secret is leading questions. I was first introduced to the power of this idea at a seminar at GenCon, and it’s totally changed the way I GM. Whenever you have the chance to ask an open-ended question, you can gently constrain the answers to prompt the other players with ideas for how to answer. If you practice this skill, it will make your a better designer and a better game master.
This instantly fixes the “what do you do next?” problem. To steal an example from that GenCon seminar, instead of asking “what do you do next” until the plot advances, decide on something that would advance the plot, and ask the players a question about that.
Instead of “what do you do before the party,” ask “How long do you wait before arriving at the party? How do you get there?” Is this railroading? No. Because players love to be contrarian, and just as easily as it might prompt the players to answer the question you asked, it might prompt them to say “what if we don’t show up at all?” But that answer still moves the narrative forward.
In the Masks example I gave right at the start, I might have said: “The robot is barreling out of control towards a group of civilians. What do you do to stop it?” The player might choose to prioritize something else, but by doing so they are making a major decision about the direction of the narrative.
No matter the situation, tell them something they don’t know, then ask them a question about it.
Expert mode: Begging the question
A leading question doesn’t necessarily have to be a literal question. In fact, the most challenging but rewarding way to make this happen is to get the players to ask the question themselves. To make this work, you have to beg the question.
To make this work, you need two things:
Craft a compelling hook. Present the players with something so compelling and mysterious that they simply must engage with it. Enough details that they can easily imagine what might go there. This is the seed that the players’ ideas will grow from
Then, resist the urge to explain. It’s so challenging as a designer to leave those spaces blank because we get pulled by our curiosity to fill it in just as strongly as the players, if not more. But you need to leave enough blank space to fit a wide variety of options.
For example, in Wanderhome, by Jay Dragon, one of the items the Ragamuffin could start with is “The Heavenblade, lost after slaying the Slobbering God, that you would never use to hurt another soul.” This immediately prompts questions: What is the Heavenblade? What was the Slobbering God? How did you of all people end up with it?
If you fill your game with interesting hooks, but leave them unexplained, like the horror movie monster, players will be compelled to imagine what fills that space. And whatever they come up with will be better for them in that moment than anything you could write.
This is how you plant seeds. This is what makes your white space into green space.
