I actually think war games are among the least fragile designs. Tactical and operational games will generally have explicit objectives a player must achieve for victory as a matter of course (e.g., the attacker must seize hill 314 by the end of turn 10 without suffering 50% casualties. Attacker also wins if there are no enemy units on the board at any time, etc.). These sorts of explicit goals prevent the situation of two players staring at each other across the board and refusing to do anything, or of one player retreating off-board to deny victory to the other player by ending the game early. The fragility of strategic or grand-strategic games, where there may be limited or no explicit conditions for victory given, are mitigated somewhat by the design and nature of the game itself. Players who take the time to set up this type of game and then refuse to engage each other wouldn’t feel too satisfied with how they had just spent their afternoon. Conflict is inherent in the game design and so players choosing to play that type of game will likely engage one another instead of doing nothing.
With TTRPGs, I think the same can be done without breaking the theme or immersion of the game for players. For instance, in the example of the players barricading themselves in a room and refusing to move, the designer could have set the condition that the players win by finding the exit from the building, or by finding the amulet that breaks the curse, or that the room they are in is slowly filling with water, etc. Pretty much any thematically appropriate device that would get them to leave that initial space after a period of time.
Thanks for the comment! I do think the explicit victory conditions (other than 'go fight') help make a game less fragile. It can be trickier with TTRPGs, but I guess that's where being a skilled and experienced GM comes into play!
I can see from the examples you list places where I think the fragility is a failure in design. For example, when I created a horror RPG, one thing built into every character is a reason the character will do foolish things like investigate scary mysteries - because I've run into the exact scenario where a player just nopes out of the scenario because it is scary and dangerous.
In reflecting on fragility, I find that my design approach is to have as little fragility as possible while still having strong themes and flexibility. But if something is necessary to the game for it to function, I very much believe that thing should be in the rules as written. You can hide them cleverly, maybe, or strongly imply them with character sheet design or card design or whatever, but there needs to be an in-game reason for the game to be played.
A game I recently Kickstarted, Fangelsehala, comes to mind. It is crystal clear framing - your community needs money to survive. There is no way to raise or earn the money in time. But there is a nearby dungeon that might have treasure that's worth the money you need. I suppose "We let our community perish" is an option, but it's one that's outside the clear purview of the game. It would be like playing Terraforming Mars, but at the outset saying you refuse to terraform Mars. At that point, it isn't fragility, it's just players declaring they refuse to play the game. (That's how I'd frame someone playing Tollund and saying at the outset they refuse to be sacrificed no matter what - not fragility, just the wrong game for that person)
I think it is a spectrum ranging from fragility at one end to (as you said) just outright refusing to play the game. The most interesting examples are the ones that fall somewhere in the middle!
I can see situations where some see the fragile points and give that as a reason to pay another game. For ex, D&D is a tactical combat game with some appended mechanisms, but lots of people use it for freewheeling shenanigans. They don't play a freewheeling shenanigan game, they use the empty (fragile) space in D&D for that purpose. Some would say they're misusing D&D, but it's a really common thing to do and so there is definitely fun to be had there.
Do you see this as something you realize after the fact when observing players, or is this something that is intentionally designed for?
I think a thoughtful design will try to identify how a game is fragile, and make decisions on if that fragility is desirable or not. But I also think that playtesting will reveal areas that can be missed during the initial design.
Interesting post. At the same time, this is a very classic dynamic in most story games. Of course, you can "break" Fiasco by trying to make only wise and reasonable choices, you can "break" Psi*Run by staying in place and letting the Chasers catch you, you can "break" any Carved from Brindlewood game by abandoning the investigation.
You can "break" Trophy Dark by deciding to safely return from Khaldur after the first encounter with the monstrosities of the cursed forest.
From my observations, these assumptions were more hidden in traditional RPGs, where someone prepared an adventure and hooks for it, and the whole table played under the illusory statement that "in this game, you can do anything!" (wink, wink), only to then start a game of cat and mouse, looking for hooks for the quests and following the quests or getting offended when someone ignored the hook and wanted to start a potion shop.
In the story game community, simple solutions were created for this, such as CATS, where A = AIMS, where we explicitly agree: in Fiasco, we want to tell a story of huge ambitions and foolish decisions that get us into trouble, in Psi*Run you want to escape from the Chasers and try to remember who you are, in The Between you will solve supernatural investigations threatening the Crown, in Trophy Dark you will play desperate treasure hunters who will likely die in the forest...
The agenda and principles in many PbtA games make this even more concrete, explaining what the GM and players should generally do to achieve the goals of the game. And here's an additional reflection: a game might say "negotiate a lot!" but it might also say "try to improve your financial situation," which will allow players to creatively come up with a lot of techniques to achieve this, and negotiations might be part of them, but they don't have to be.
So, the level of detail in the game's goals will matter in terms of the potential creativity of the players in achieving them.
PS. For me, Tolmund in the game's description communicates that the goal of the game is to make a decision between being a ritual sacrifice and refusing to take part in the ritual, realistically considering both options.
Thank you for the comment! I did try to make the expectations (aims?) clear in Tollund so that plays can best enjoy the game. But players enjoy different kinds of fun, so it is not for everyone. (I would argue no single game is for everyone.)
Whenever I've played D&D, one of the unspoken rules that I thought everyone used was that party members don't kill or seek to harm other people in the party, even if they are some flavor of evil. In fact, I know GMs who refuse to let people play evil characters because they can really disrupt the game and tick people off. But in college, someone in my group was playing an evil Drow rogue or something like that and killed my character with a flimsy reason behind it. I was ticked. I liked that character and if nothing else, it took me out of the game for a session or two and put me behind the rest of the party in XP and levels.
So for TTRPGs, you could say that the fragility is that everyone has their type of fun, so long that it doesn't impinge on someone else's type of fun.
I was looking at this after playtesting my onepage game for the first time. And my question was “how does winning looks like?” And I realized that as I fixed the game I could have the goal be to survive (the date with the supervillain lol). But you can win it by playing it safe, and this makes you “win” but makes the hame boring, so I made this get you into the “meh” zone, which your date dislikes and you die. Or you can go headstrong all in! But then you win with so many points you get into the danger zone and accidentally die.
I have a question that touches a bit on something one of the other commenters said -- are board games fragile? like if i think about monopoly, which is a game i hate playing (though maybe I'm just not a good guide since the only game I've ever loved is Fiasco, but still, i have to imagine monopoly is widely loathed...), is that because it's not fragile at all? like refusing to buy any properties won't break the game unless everyone agrees to do it, but chances are always high that someone will defect and become "the monopolist"....
I think high fragility seems to be correlated with games with wider player choice. At one end are TTRPGs with infinite choices, but are potentially very fragile. The other end is chess with extremely limited player choices but are presumably not very fragile.
Really great article! This is something I've never really put into words, but I'm hyper-conscious of when I'm running or writing games.
And for whatever it's worth, from a ttRPG perspective, I think the issue of "what if the players decide to just stay at the tavern" is often answered with "then nobody stops the evil sorcerer from destroying the town -- you die. Roll up some new characters who actually want to go on an adventure." 😉
Yeah, I think there is a certain element of "social contract" where everyone sort of agrees to play the game ahead of time. No one is forced to play, so it should be something players want to engage with.
The horror TTRPG example above was a strange one. They chose that demo out of the many that were available at the con. It's a one-shot so everything is wiped at the end anyway. Why not explore the game and see if it's for you?
Yeah, especially given that they either likely paid for the slot or had to make an effort to sign up before other folks. Who knows what goes on in the minds of players though?
Kidding aside, I did really enjoy the article. This reinforces in me the concept that there should always be some sort of time element to a proposed adventure - something to keep the players moving and to dissuade hunkering down.
Unless of course the game is all about hunkering down, which is completely valid too. I want to play in that game where the adventurers put down their swords and staves and decide to just fish their days away.
This is something I always think about when GMing but not designing I've now realised, I always pitch game with players and have them buy-in to the game and genre. If it's horror act like a horror film, be curious. If its action go hard.
But I've realized this is an assumption I put into games hoping the GM will understand the buy-in from the pitch and touchstones.
All Flesh Must Be Eaten has an Interesting pitch where to have the characters experience the horror "Do not let the players know that this will be a game of horror until they are surrounded by zombies hungry for their flesh."
Sounds like a great way as a GM to get alignment/buy-in at the start of the game. I wouldn't be opposed to putting tips regarding that (for GMs) in books.
It's definitely something I will think about in my future designs that "The game is about emulating X so here's so ideas and tips to lean in to that and play to the strengths of the genre", I did put some thoughts into my October Halloween newsletter (that is now 2 months late)
"Dungeons & Dragons is a very different game than intended if the players never accept quests, never explore, and instead just decide to spend their days fishing in a safe location."
From the board game side, this reminds me of the way my family played Catan. After the first few games, we realized that there was no reason to ever trade with anyone, since it almost always felt like when you engaged in a trade, the other party ended up ahead. In the years since, no one ever trades.
On the role-playing side, I feel like there is an inherent fragility in TTRPGs, but I think it has to remain unwritten. Sure, you can do anything, but when we sit down there is an unspoken agreement that we are going to engage with the adventure that the GM has prepared. If you wrote in the rulebook that you HAVE to go on the adventure, it would feel like we were playing a board game, not a TTRPG, even though the game might play the same in both cases.
"On the role-playing side, I feel like there is an inherent fragility in TTRPGs, but I think it has to remain unwritten. Sure, you can do anything, but when we sit down there is an unspoken agreement that we are going to engage with the adventure that the GM has prepared. If you wrote in the rulebook that you HAVE to go on the adventure, it would feel like we were playing a board game, not a TTRPG, even though the game might play the same in both cases."
This! This is what I was trying to express. The fragility is not a bad thing, and in fact removing it by writing more rules would diminish the experience. It's like this unspoken magic that vanishes if you explicitly discuss it!
It’s an interesting article. It made me wonder how much is “fragility” and how much is down to the social compact of engaging with the premise of the game? If someone signs up to a horror game but refuses to engage with any of the tropes of a horror game, the problem isn’t with the game so much as with the player who is at odds with the premise. For the person who doesn’t want to play Tollund because they are opposed to bog sacrifice, that just isn’t the game for them!
The first time I played Call of Cthulhu I played my character like a rational person and ended up safe at one end of the town while everything went to hell at the other end of the town. That was where the fun was, not where I was! I learned that if I want to enjoy a game of CoC it is best to engage fully with the premise.
Titanic was a hugely successful movie not because the ship sank (we all knew it was going to sink) but because we were interested and engaged with the stories told along the way.
D&D sometimes gets bogged down in rules by attempting to rule for every situation that could conceivably arise, but each rule introduces additional edge cases. That’s a situation where attempting to make something “less fragile” through “more rules” can actually make it more, say, “brittle”.
So I end up wondering whether the best solution to some of these problems is a clear pitch about what a game is about… so that potential players have a good idea of whether it is the kind of game for them, and ‘how to find the fun’ in the game.
Yeah, I don't see "fragility" as a problem to be solved. I think it's just something that exist when games are thematic, and in particular when there is a lot of freedom of choice and player agency (e.g. TTRPGs). Mothership RPG (see other comment) does a nice job of providing incentives to get players to play the way the designers intended.
Call of Cthulhu is a strange one. I remember when I first ran it for my group I explicitly said at the start “this is not a game about what you would do as a rational person in the real world. You need to engage with the supernatural mystery for it to work”. I’ve never had to say anything like that for any other games I run. Mörk Borg, Warhammer, Frontier Scum, Mothership etc. no player has ever needed prompting to participate in the spirit of the adventure
I played a lot of CoC in college and I think there are two basic ways you can approach it - Scooby Doo or traditional horror. If you're the Scooby Gang, you are curious "kids" and are going to poke your nose around where it doesn't belong. If you are playing traditional horror, then you go and investigate because everyone knows there's no thing as the supernatural and so there must be a rational explanation for all the weirdness.
My group would also start out new characters by saying why we are interested in the occult or supernatural or why we were with the party. Then everyone had a reason to go investigate and had a stake in the game.
Trail of Cthulhu addresses this up front by giving each character a ‘Drive’ which is the reason why they get involved with dangerous things. Different for each person, but a compelling in-character reason to risk ones life and get involved.
Probably because the set up is you are a person in an ordinary profession living in our (1920s) world. Other games are like ‘you’re a fanged deserter trapped in a gigantic cemetery and the world is ending’ or ‘you’re a marine assigned to a secret mission on a strange planet’. You don’t need much encouragement to engage with those scenarios
From the moment I read the Horror TTRPG example with players refusing to leave the room, I couldn't help but think about Mothership and how it uses game mechanisms to mitigate its own fragility and even more importantly, synthesizes it into another decision space for the players.
Stress is the equivalent of XP in Mothership since players can take shore leave to convert their stress points to save increases. Knowing they can do this gives the players a built-in incentive to engage in "horror movie" tropes that will cause their characters to accumulate stress. However, for it to actually work, the players do have to understand all of the above. Also, since Mothership is so incredibly lethal by design, this creates a dynamic of risk vs. reward decisions where the players have to ask themselves "is it worth it to go investigate that noise I heard, or crawl into that open vent?"
Agree. I think Mothership RPG does a lot of things really well, or at least does things in a way that I personally appreciate. I just ran a session of it recently, and once players realized that the way to improve their characters was to get more stress, they started taking riskier actions. Also the stress + panic mechanisms would help with the "We aren't leaving the room." scenario.
I feel like looking at the fragility in these different kinds of games and thinking about how we can convert those directly into a decision space is a ripe area for some interesting game design. As a proud owner of a (printed!) copy of Make your own one-page RPG (Thank you for making it - I'm still reading it, I am a self-proclaimed starter of too many projects), hopefully this is something I can explore more and share with others in the future.
I actually think war games are among the least fragile designs. Tactical and operational games will generally have explicit objectives a player must achieve for victory as a matter of course (e.g., the attacker must seize hill 314 by the end of turn 10 without suffering 50% casualties. Attacker also wins if there are no enemy units on the board at any time, etc.). These sorts of explicit goals prevent the situation of two players staring at each other across the board and refusing to do anything, or of one player retreating off-board to deny victory to the other player by ending the game early. The fragility of strategic or grand-strategic games, where there may be limited or no explicit conditions for victory given, are mitigated somewhat by the design and nature of the game itself. Players who take the time to set up this type of game and then refuse to engage each other wouldn’t feel too satisfied with how they had just spent their afternoon. Conflict is inherent in the game design and so players choosing to play that type of game will likely engage one another instead of doing nothing.
With TTRPGs, I think the same can be done without breaking the theme or immersion of the game for players. For instance, in the example of the players barricading themselves in a room and refusing to move, the designer could have set the condition that the players win by finding the exit from the building, or by finding the amulet that breaks the curse, or that the room they are in is slowly filling with water, etc. Pretty much any thematically appropriate device that would get them to leave that initial space after a period of time.
Thanks for the comment! I do think the explicit victory conditions (other than 'go fight') help make a game less fragile. It can be trickier with TTRPGs, but I guess that's where being a skilled and experienced GM comes into play!
I can see from the examples you list places where I think the fragility is a failure in design. For example, when I created a horror RPG, one thing built into every character is a reason the character will do foolish things like investigate scary mysteries - because I've run into the exact scenario where a player just nopes out of the scenario because it is scary and dangerous.
In reflecting on fragility, I find that my design approach is to have as little fragility as possible while still having strong themes and flexibility. But if something is necessary to the game for it to function, I very much believe that thing should be in the rules as written. You can hide them cleverly, maybe, or strongly imply them with character sheet design or card design or whatever, but there needs to be an in-game reason for the game to be played.
A game I recently Kickstarted, Fangelsehala, comes to mind. It is crystal clear framing - your community needs money to survive. There is no way to raise or earn the money in time. But there is a nearby dungeon that might have treasure that's worth the money you need. I suppose "We let our community perish" is an option, but it's one that's outside the clear purview of the game. It would be like playing Terraforming Mars, but at the outset saying you refuse to terraform Mars. At that point, it isn't fragility, it's just players declaring they refuse to play the game. (That's how I'd frame someone playing Tollund and saying at the outset they refuse to be sacrificed no matter what - not fragility, just the wrong game for that person)
I think it is a spectrum ranging from fragility at one end to (as you said) just outright refusing to play the game. The most interesting examples are the ones that fall somewhere in the middle!
I can see situations where some see the fragile points and give that as a reason to pay another game. For ex, D&D is a tactical combat game with some appended mechanisms, but lots of people use it for freewheeling shenanigans. They don't play a freewheeling shenanigan game, they use the empty (fragile) space in D&D for that purpose. Some would say they're misusing D&D, but it's a really common thing to do and so there is definitely fun to be had there.
Do you see this as something you realize after the fact when observing players, or is this something that is intentionally designed for?
Both. :)
I think a thoughtful design will try to identify how a game is fragile, and make decisions on if that fragility is desirable or not. But I also think that playtesting will reveal areas that can be missed during the initial design.
Interesting post. At the same time, this is a very classic dynamic in most story games. Of course, you can "break" Fiasco by trying to make only wise and reasonable choices, you can "break" Psi*Run by staying in place and letting the Chasers catch you, you can "break" any Carved from Brindlewood game by abandoning the investigation.
You can "break" Trophy Dark by deciding to safely return from Khaldur after the first encounter with the monstrosities of the cursed forest.
From my observations, these assumptions were more hidden in traditional RPGs, where someone prepared an adventure and hooks for it, and the whole table played under the illusory statement that "in this game, you can do anything!" (wink, wink), only to then start a game of cat and mouse, looking for hooks for the quests and following the quests or getting offended when someone ignored the hook and wanted to start a potion shop.
In the story game community, simple solutions were created for this, such as CATS, where A = AIMS, where we explicitly agree: in Fiasco, we want to tell a story of huge ambitions and foolish decisions that get us into trouble, in Psi*Run you want to escape from the Chasers and try to remember who you are, in The Between you will solve supernatural investigations threatening the Crown, in Trophy Dark you will play desperate treasure hunters who will likely die in the forest...
The agenda and principles in many PbtA games make this even more concrete, explaining what the GM and players should generally do to achieve the goals of the game. And here's an additional reflection: a game might say "negotiate a lot!" but it might also say "try to improve your financial situation," which will allow players to creatively come up with a lot of techniques to achieve this, and negotiations might be part of them, but they don't have to be.
So, the level of detail in the game's goals will matter in terms of the potential creativity of the players in achieving them.
PS. For me, Tolmund in the game's description communicates that the goal of the game is to make a decision between being a ritual sacrifice and refusing to take part in the ritual, realistically considering both options.
Thank you for the comment! I did try to make the expectations (aims?) clear in Tollund so that plays can best enjoy the game. But players enjoy different kinds of fun, so it is not for everyone. (I would argue no single game is for everyone.)
It looks great. It definitely goes on my list of solo games to play in 2025 :)
Thank you!
I'm also being a posty-McPosterson today but I just wrote up a short review of Tolland that includes Paul Czege's most excellent, "The Ink that Bleeds", which will probably give you a new perspective on solo journaling games. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tollund-game-review-thoughts-being-bog-mummy-deb-fuller-smz2e/?trackingId=4uEC2e%2BPRFSJAy79s4%2Boyw%3D%3D
Thank you so much for the kind words! I really appreciate it!
Whenever I've played D&D, one of the unspoken rules that I thought everyone used was that party members don't kill or seek to harm other people in the party, even if they are some flavor of evil. In fact, I know GMs who refuse to let people play evil characters because they can really disrupt the game and tick people off. But in college, someone in my group was playing an evil Drow rogue or something like that and killed my character with a flimsy reason behind it. I was ticked. I liked that character and if nothing else, it took me out of the game for a session or two and put me behind the rest of the party in XP and levels.
So for TTRPGs, you could say that the fragility is that everyone has their type of fun, so long that it doesn't impinge on someone else's type of fun.
Thanks for the great info!
I was looking at this after playtesting my onepage game for the first time. And my question was “how does winning looks like?” And I realized that as I fixed the game I could have the goal be to survive (the date with the supervillain lol). But you can win it by playing it safe, and this makes you “win” but makes the hame boring, so I made this get you into the “meh” zone, which your date dislikes and you die. Or you can go headstrong all in! But then you win with so many points you get into the danger zone and accidentally die.
Ha! Dating -- the most dangerous game!
I have a question that touches a bit on something one of the other commenters said -- are board games fragile? like if i think about monopoly, which is a game i hate playing (though maybe I'm just not a good guide since the only game I've ever loved is Fiasco, but still, i have to imagine monopoly is widely loathed...), is that because it's not fragile at all? like refusing to buy any properties won't break the game unless everyone agrees to do it, but chances are always high that someone will defect and become "the monopolist"....
There is probably something to that, yes.
I think high fragility seems to be correlated with games with wider player choice. At one end are TTRPGs with infinite choices, but are potentially very fragile. The other end is chess with extremely limited player choices but are presumably not very fragile.
Really great article! This is something I've never really put into words, but I'm hyper-conscious of when I'm running or writing games.
And for whatever it's worth, from a ttRPG perspective, I think the issue of "what if the players decide to just stay at the tavern" is often answered with "then nobody stops the evil sorcerer from destroying the town -- you die. Roll up some new characters who actually want to go on an adventure." 😉
Thank you so much!
Yeah, I think there is a certain element of "social contract" where everyone sort of agrees to play the game ahead of time. No one is forced to play, so it should be something players want to engage with.
The horror TTRPG example above was a strange one. They chose that demo out of the many that were available at the con. It's a one-shot so everything is wiped at the end anyway. Why not explore the game and see if it's for you?
Yeah, especially given that they either likely paid for the slot or had to make an effort to sign up before other folks. Who knows what goes on in the minds of players though?
Kidding aside, I did really enjoy the article. This reinforces in me the concept that there should always be some sort of time element to a proposed adventure - something to keep the players moving and to dissuade hunkering down.
Unless of course the game is all about hunkering down, which is completely valid too. I want to play in that game where the adventurers put down their swords and staves and decide to just fish their days away.
This is something I always think about when GMing but not designing I've now realised, I always pitch game with players and have them buy-in to the game and genre. If it's horror act like a horror film, be curious. If its action go hard.
But I've realized this is an assumption I put into games hoping the GM will understand the buy-in from the pitch and touchstones.
All Flesh Must Be Eaten has an Interesting pitch where to have the characters experience the horror "Do not let the players know that this will be a game of horror until they are surrounded by zombies hungry for their flesh."
Sounds like a great way as a GM to get alignment/buy-in at the start of the game. I wouldn't be opposed to putting tips regarding that (for GMs) in books.
It's definitely something I will think about in my future designs that "The game is about emulating X so here's so ideas and tips to lean in to that and play to the strengths of the genre", I did put some thoughts into my October Halloween newsletter (that is now 2 months late)
"Dungeons & Dragons is a very different game than intended if the players never accept quests, never explore, and instead just decide to spend their days fishing in a safe location."
Why does this actually sound like a good time?
I was hoping I wasn't the only one. :)
Great article!
From the board game side, this reminds me of the way my family played Catan. After the first few games, we realized that there was no reason to ever trade with anyone, since it almost always felt like when you engaged in a trade, the other party ended up ahead. In the years since, no one ever trades.
On the role-playing side, I feel like there is an inherent fragility in TTRPGs, but I think it has to remain unwritten. Sure, you can do anything, but when we sit down there is an unspoken agreement that we are going to engage with the adventure that the GM has prepared. If you wrote in the rulebook that you HAVE to go on the adventure, it would feel like we were playing a board game, not a TTRPG, even though the game might play the same in both cases.
"On the role-playing side, I feel like there is an inherent fragility in TTRPGs, but I think it has to remain unwritten. Sure, you can do anything, but when we sit down there is an unspoken agreement that we are going to engage with the adventure that the GM has prepared. If you wrote in the rulebook that you HAVE to go on the adventure, it would feel like we were playing a board game, not a TTRPG, even though the game might play the same in both cases."
This! This is what I was trying to express. The fragility is not a bad thing, and in fact removing it by writing more rules would diminish the experience. It's like this unspoken magic that vanishes if you explicitly discuss it!
It’s an interesting article. It made me wonder how much is “fragility” and how much is down to the social compact of engaging with the premise of the game? If someone signs up to a horror game but refuses to engage with any of the tropes of a horror game, the problem isn’t with the game so much as with the player who is at odds with the premise. For the person who doesn’t want to play Tollund because they are opposed to bog sacrifice, that just isn’t the game for them!
The first time I played Call of Cthulhu I played my character like a rational person and ended up safe at one end of the town while everything went to hell at the other end of the town. That was where the fun was, not where I was! I learned that if I want to enjoy a game of CoC it is best to engage fully with the premise.
Titanic was a hugely successful movie not because the ship sank (we all knew it was going to sink) but because we were interested and engaged with the stories told along the way.
D&D sometimes gets bogged down in rules by attempting to rule for every situation that could conceivably arise, but each rule introduces additional edge cases. That’s a situation where attempting to make something “less fragile” through “more rules” can actually make it more, say, “brittle”.
So I end up wondering whether the best solution to some of these problems is a clear pitch about what a game is about… so that potential players have a good idea of whether it is the kind of game for them, and ‘how to find the fun’ in the game.
Hi! Thank you!
Yeah, I don't see "fragility" as a problem to be solved. I think it's just something that exist when games are thematic, and in particular when there is a lot of freedom of choice and player agency (e.g. TTRPGs). Mothership RPG (see other comment) does a nice job of providing incentives to get players to play the way the designers intended.
Agree that games require everyone to come to the table sort of "knowing the script". Might be related to the concept of "player promises" too: https://www.skeletoncodemachine.com/p/is-kingmaking-cursed
Call of Cthulhu is a strange one. I remember when I first ran it for my group I explicitly said at the start “this is not a game about what you would do as a rational person in the real world. You need to engage with the supernatural mystery for it to work”. I’ve never had to say anything like that for any other games I run. Mörk Borg, Warhammer, Frontier Scum, Mothership etc. no player has ever needed prompting to participate in the spirit of the adventure
That's interesting! What do you think makes Call of Cthulhu different that it needed that, while the others did not?
I played a lot of CoC in college and I think there are two basic ways you can approach it - Scooby Doo or traditional horror. If you're the Scooby Gang, you are curious "kids" and are going to poke your nose around where it doesn't belong. If you are playing traditional horror, then you go and investigate because everyone knows there's no thing as the supernatural and so there must be a rational explanation for all the weirdness.
My group would also start out new characters by saying why we are interested in the occult or supernatural or why we were with the party. Then everyone had a reason to go investigate and had a stake in the game.
Trail of Cthulhu addresses this up front by giving each character a ‘Drive’ which is the reason why they get involved with dangerous things. Different for each person, but a compelling in-character reason to risk ones life and get involved.
Probably because the set up is you are a person in an ordinary profession living in our (1920s) world. Other games are like ‘you’re a fanged deserter trapped in a gigantic cemetery and the world is ending’ or ‘you’re a marine assigned to a secret mission on a strange planet’. You don’t need much encouragement to engage with those scenarios
Excellent article!
From the moment I read the Horror TTRPG example with players refusing to leave the room, I couldn't help but think about Mothership and how it uses game mechanisms to mitigate its own fragility and even more importantly, synthesizes it into another decision space for the players.
Stress is the equivalent of XP in Mothership since players can take shore leave to convert their stress points to save increases. Knowing they can do this gives the players a built-in incentive to engage in "horror movie" tropes that will cause their characters to accumulate stress. However, for it to actually work, the players do have to understand all of the above. Also, since Mothership is so incredibly lethal by design, this creates a dynamic of risk vs. reward decisions where the players have to ask themselves "is it worth it to go investigate that noise I heard, or crawl into that open vent?"
Thank you so much!
Agree. I think Mothership RPG does a lot of things really well, or at least does things in a way that I personally appreciate. I just ran a session of it recently, and once players realized that the way to improve their characters was to get more stress, they started taking riskier actions. Also the stress + panic mechanisms would help with the "We aren't leaving the room." scenario.
I feel like looking at the fragility in these different kinds of games and thinking about how we can convert those directly into a decision space is a ripe area for some interesting game design. As a proud owner of a (printed!) copy of Make your own one-page RPG (Thank you for making it - I'm still reading it, I am a self-proclaimed starter of too many projects), hopefully this is something I can explore more and share with others in the future.
Thank you so much for getting a copy of the One-Page RPG guide! Glad it arrived safely!
Ttrpgs are inherently fragile though right? They’re always that player trying not to engage with the fiction, like the horror game you described.
They absolutely are! I'd say most games have fragility baked into them. It's more obvious in TTRPGs because of the flexibility of player actions.
love this! super interesting concept.
Thank you! This is one of those concepts that really changed how I think about games. So glad you enjoyed it!
I'm not sure you are playing Crew very skillfully if you require illegal communication for the game to work.