Little Games, Pseudomaths, Precept-Inversion: Three Tools for Game Designers and Worldbuilders
It's been a slow month, because A) I've started a new job and B) I've been working a lot on worldbuilding for my actual, y'know, games. I wonder how much there's a relationship between running simpler or less GM-centric games and maintaining a blog? That'd be interesting in terms of what it implies about the TTRPG blogosphere - it's certainly notable that indie games (often low/no/distributed GM, procedurally-driven) and OSR (procedurally-driven, often well-worn core conceits) dominate the space.[1] Both also tend to have light or modular worldbuilding, so that anything new you write for your home game can be put up online as well. The amount of explaining I'd need to do to get one of my settings across in order to share stuff I made for it puts me off a bit - not because they're exceptionally weird or unique, just because the value I get from them is in the depth and complexity of interrelated elements and they therefore have years upon years of near-constant worldbuilding.[2] Also, I'm not so proud of them as to think somebody's going to actually use my fantasy pastiches rather than make their own that fits their sensibilities; I'd encourage them to do the latter, in fact, which is hopefully where these tools come in. These tools! Which I'm rattling out of my brain onto the screen in what is virtually a stream of consciousness, so sorry for any non-editing issues...
These are tools I sometimes use in my own worldbuilding and GMing processes. All of them have a broad theme of adding a sense of underlying structure and complexity to a setting or game. All are explained mostly as examples but I think it will work, since none of them are especially complex concepts. They're not laws to be followed, just things that might help sometimes with different aspects of a game.
1. Little Games
Design microgames or play pre-existing games to determine worldbuilding elements.
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| Custom Diplomacy map I made to determine the outcome of a war in my home campaign world. Starting positions, Year 2305. |
Societies, wars, economies, ecologies: all are theoretically comprehensible systems. Doesn't mean we can actually comprehend them, but working out some basic guidelines, sufficient to simulate their outcomes or emulate the feel of histories of their outcomes, is often very possible. A lot of games are made to do one or both of these things.
RPGs tend not to provide rules for such large-scale events and processes, but they do often matter to them. If you're running a dynamic game, prepping situations rather than plots, it's useful to know what big events are going on in the background of the world. If your players ask an unexpected question (who are the factions at court, and what are they doing?) then it's useful to be able to come up with an answer with some depth for them to dive into. Even when it comes to map-making, following a process will often produce more plausible outcomes than just putting elements wherever you feel like.
So why not use other games, games which focus on such themes? Take their elements, and interpret them to fit your world. These might be 'games' you design to fit a specific situation - 'I need to resolve this battle where I know the differences between the two sides are as follows; I'll make a simulation that centres those differences' - or they might be something that's already made. Other examples:
- Make a custom Diplomacy map of your world's major powers to determine what happens over a decade or so of war between campaigns - or in the background of an ongoing campaign! (I've done this, and it had very interesting results. Can strongly recommend giving each faction an appropriate 'special power' that's a bit game-breaking.)
- Build your medieval fantasy continent with a game of Settlers of Catan for a hopeful peaceful tone, or Spirit Island for a grimy imperialistic one.
- Create a weird alt-hist setting to a high degree of granularity with a Paradox grand campaign playthrough (as many as you want of Imperator: Rome>Crusader Kings III>Europa Universalis IV/V>Victoria III>Hearts of Iron IV>Stellaris). Yes, video games can sometimes work for this!
- If two powerful schemers are manipulating a continent's affairs between them, play a chess game against a similarly-skilled opponent. Assign each piece to an organization, major settlement, subordinate of one of the figures etc. When taken, it is removed from their schemes in some way appropriate to the piece that took it. Each turn represents an appropriate period of time.
- When players enter a mysterious unknown area of your world, create an ecosystem with Evolution.
- If you need to generate rival factions for a court on the brink of collapse, play a game of Coup. Base each faction's 'personality' on the way its player plays during the game. Each full turn represents a season's worth of scheming.
- This entire blog post.
I'm sure you can think of more and more inventive ways. Ideas in the comments please!
Importantly, a lot of these games can symbolize events over a very long period of time with a single session of play. They also tend to be abstract enough to leave lots of room for inserting specific outcomes to your taste.
Practically, working with these will often require recording the game played in order to recall precise moves, which you'll obviously want to talk the the other player/s about unless you're playing in a medium with automatic game recording like some chess apps. If you like collaborative worldbuilding, you could play with the players who are part of the campaign you'll be using it in.
Incidentally, IMO a lot of explicitly worldbuilding-centric games, like Kingdom, Ex Novo, and so forth, are less useful for these purposes. They tend to emphasize the creativity of the players rather than underlying tensions, processes, and mechanics. This probably makes them more fun, but detracts from any sense of structure or rationale they could provide to a setting. Things are not usually happening because it was the logical decision for a given actor or force in the setting to make in response to circumstances, but because the players thought it'd be cool for that to happen, a decision which may or may not have factored in internal consistency, and, even if it has, may have introduced inconsistent standards of consistency due to multiple players' different ideas of what would make sense. Different processes can of course interact, and unexpected things can happen, without breaking with plausibility, but I'd suggest that interweaving the results of multiple more mechanics-laden games might more interestingly represent this.
Endmap, Winter 2314. Game ended in a six-way tie, but with universal acknowledgement that a seemingly-unbreakable four-way alliance of the Republic of Tele, Hekenrauan Hegemony, Scorpion Principalities of Kolkur, and Itani Empire had won the day handily. The Teleans and Itani led on supply centres, whilst the Teleans took home most of the set of 'moral objectives' I'd given each player. Yes, the Kolkuri player has a great, potentially winning, stab which they haven't taken here on their allies here. Fear the honest Diplomat.
2. Pseudomaths
Use quick numbers and estimates to build setting elements if you don't have the time or knowledge to calculate complicated ones; it'll still produce more verisimilitude than improvisation.
If a thing is unique in a setting, it can have almost any impact you like and be justified. Events have strange consequences and phenomena manifest in strange ways. When one becomes many, however, consistency becomes more important. One falling flying fortress might plausibly create a crater of almost any size; if the setting has legions of flying fortresses - or had them in the past and is now scarred by their fall - it might be damaging to verisimilitude if the players start poking around some craters and you haven't made them consistent sizes. Equally, it might be downright odd if they're all the same size.
Let's assume you don't have a degree in maths or physics, though, or an understanding of the effects of a magical explosion from said fortress. You can use rough numbers to work out the effects, and as long as you use the same ones you'll be fine!
For example: if you're calculating fortress craters in 5e (or anything really, but I find it makes things intuitively work better if you improvise off the back of numbers already in the system) then the DMG presents damage numbers for 'hit by a crashing flying fortress': 8d10 damage. Throw in an extra 8d6 (fireball equivalent) for the magical explosion. A few pages away are rules for object HP; huge or larger objects are broken into Large chunks, so let's say the earth is destroyed in 10x10 ft. segments and has HP as per a Large Resilient object (5d10 or 27(.5) avg.) If we use the 'cleaving through enemies' rule so that damage carries over from one earth-chunk to the next, we can represent the earth destroyed as (8d10+8d6)/5d10, or (44+28=72)/27.5, *1000 ft3 per 10x10 ft. area beneath the fortress that'll impact on the earth. We have a volume!
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| Thanks AnyDice! |
But craters aren't made of squares and nor are they nice convenient spheres. If we instead assume a downward-facing cone about four times as wide as it is deep, we can plug the volume into an online calculator and put in heights until we get the right value (I get 21 ft. wide for 5 ft. depth assuming impact on a single 10 ft. square using the AnyDice average.) Then just generalize that! Don't bother calculating for every impact, unless you want to. It's bad maths, but it produces consistent outcomes. You have a rule: a crater is 21 ft. in radius and 5 deep per 10 ft. square area of flying fortress that crashed. If the flying fortress is twice the normal height or made of a heavier material than usual, just double it.
This entire process took me 20 minutes. Cleverer people than I could probably do it right in the same time, but probably not for everything, and this amount of working still produces a result which feels better, to me at least, than the alternative of trusting my gut. You'll need to make gut calls in play, but if you're running a campaign where something like this might be a key element a bit of pseudomaths can be a super quick element of prep and provide answers which will hold up enough when some player decides to be a bit of a smartarse that it won't pull people completely out of suspension of disbelief. (Hopefully your players aren't religiously going through your settings with a calculator. If they are, maybe ask them not to, unless you're confident enough in what you've got).
This is perhaps a poor example because the down2earth impact calculator exists, but it gives me a chance to show some of the slipshod and erroneous thinking you can get away with and still produce decent results using some decent numbers. The best example I've used in play that isn't entirely boring to explain is this:
Working out the number of vampires in an area for a VtM game by drawing on a line from the Midnight Siege sourcebook that suggested vampires of all factions prefer high-crime areas. I keyed the average UK violent crime rate to the 'standard' vampire numbers of 1/100,000 mortals, then worked through local authorities comparing their crime rates and populations. Anywhere with too low crime and population to have any vampires was ignored as rural, potential lupine territory. Since vampires tend to be sociable, I divided the country up around 'poles' of any centre with 10 or more vampires and clumped half of those in the peripheries into the nearest pole. Then, any who were by themselves were moved to be with at least one other. Then I added a few extra to represent vampires sustaining themselves with herds of loyal mortals (I worked out that at normal blood cell replenishment this needs a Herd rating of 5 to keep the herd healthy, so I assumed lower ratings would just balance the effect of the overconcentration this effect had already produced.) I worked backwards from the likelihood of a randomly-statted vampire having Herd 4 or 5 to determine their incidence. (Assuming that many would later increase it with XP). Does any of this accurately represent how easy it'd be to hide blood-drinkers from the security state amongst the background noise of mundane violence? No idea. Nor does the urban concentration reflect any particular logic beyond vaguely mirroring the game's lore and feeling correct. But it certainly does feel correct, to me at least, and produces more nuanced results than a flat 1/100,000 without changing that core number too much beyond the overpopulation the game already hints at.
(I'll be talking about the results for this in an upcoming Folkloresque-Ritterian Northwest Mageckrawl post)
3. Precept-Inversion
(For game design, which is not not worldbuilding) Determine the GMing principles you run your games/specific types of game by regardless of system and build rules around them.
You probably have some ways you tend to run a game when the system doesn't explicitly tell you to do otherwise. Boil down your thinking - consider what you'd say if you had to succinctly (let's say no more than ten points) get somebody else to run a game that feels like one of yours, but you didn't get to pick the game.
For example, I might express my GMing style as the following:
Simulate the world as true to what would plausibly happen as possible. Maintain consistency religiously. Be impassioned but dispassionate. Follow the rules and don't pull punches or force situations.
Success is (comparatively) easy for PCs to engineer – the consequences of success are where things get interesting.
If you turn over a rock, there's always something underneath it BUT...
The world is full of contests you can't win, now or maybe ever. You will not always know which ones these are in advance if you aren’t paying attention.
You cannot have a meaningful campaign if strict records of the following are not kept:
Time (at least to the day, ideally to the five minutes)
Population of all significant settlements, regions etc. including military population and individuals of significant power
The relative locations of resource sites and routes of travel and trade
Violence is a messy, dangerous last resort which will leave permanent scars.
These are normally things you do around system - but now, FLIP THEM so that the system is there only to arbitrate these things. Nail down your procedures into rules and build out a game from these points like bacteria blooming in a petri dish, tendrils from each pipette-drop intermingling to fill out the space between.
So for example, from the above I might make a game with fairly strong systems that give fairly definite answers to a wide range of circumstances, including giving timeframes for types of activity [1, 4, 5.1] whilst also being open-ended enough that it can handle it when PCs do things you weren't expecting [2, 3]. Rules for conflicting powers would be present and would cover a wide range of options, not just those to enhance violence. Settlements and economics would be modules in the game. In fact, it'd probably look at least a bit like Mongoose Traveller, which I do in fact love. Not to say Traveller is close to my ideal game; obviously the reasons we like games don't just centre around them aligning with our GMing instincts/invisible rulebooks/whatever. The point here isn't so much to make 'your best game ever' as to provide one angle on a way to design things that work for you. You might find that having your natural processes taken off your hands, being inverted, frees up a load of empty outside space for you to expand your creative horizon; you might find it annoying if doing those things manually are the reason you enjoy play; you might find that it works well as an autopilot but you don't want to use it all the time. Hopefully it helps you understand what you like in a game better.
Two more specific use cases I can think of too:
- If you want a friend to run a game that feels like one of yours, say because they're running a tie-in in your world, this game is more likely to achieve that than throwing whatever rulebook you were originally running with at them. They'll be expanding on your core style rather than trying to hone in on it in a territory mapped by somebody else entirely.
- (The one I've used it for so far) this is great for designing specific elements of a game you're making. Consider whether something you've created fits these principles.
Obviously this needn't just be applied to exporting your own style. Hey, TVTropes, what are the defining features of Surreal Horror?
- 'It's not just nightmare-inducing; it's nightmarish in a literal way, by being, well, surreal, disjointed, dreamlike, and filled with bizarre imagery' TRANSLATION: the game's pacing is broken into scenes which can be initiated at any time, and which don't need to follow on each other. Random tables introduce strange aesthetic elements.
- '[It] usually say[s] goodbye to all logic and sanity ... You cannot reason with a nightmare — something that exists only in the illogic of a dream.' TRANSLATION: the rules don't always produce consistent or obvious results. If you succeed at some kind of check, you roll on a table for results, one of which is you failing at the check anyway, and at least one of which shifts the scene through a 'pataphor into another kind of story entirely, for a time at least.
- 'In some cases, though, it might not always work. [i.e. this genre won't scare everyone]' The game design isn't attempting to present itself too seriously or to mandate particular emotional experiences. There's no 'this is a horror game and you need to be prepared to accept fear' sidebars, no mechanics for character reactions even perhaps. It presents the mind screw, and lets fear take its course.
This'd be a very odd game, but one that I think would undeniably capture the feeling of the genre better than running a module, say the nevertheless-excellent Silent Titans, which draws on features of the genre in a non-specialized system system, or than making a game from the starting point of 'I want it to be both surreal and horrifying.' (In this sense it's just 'try to do the same things the genre does, adapted for medium, to create the same effects,' which feels a bit of a truism, but I've never claimed to be highly innovative.)
Note: all three of these tools are a product of precept-inversion, taking things I do anyway and codifying them so that they precede my instincts rather than naturally falling out of it! This is a concept with application well beyond ttrpgs: it can also be applied to ttrpg blogs!!
Anyway, that's all for now. Happy new year!
[1] Well, I mean, I guess 5e dominates the space if you're counting all blogs, but that's probably just a byproduct of its overwhelming size.
[2] I'm definitely a product of 'traditional' or maybe 'neo-traditional' GMing modes in that way, if not in how I actually run the games.
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