Discrete Worlds II or The Tipping 'Scales' of the Game

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Tessellated Point Crawl...

When you look at the primordial history of the game Dungeons & Dragons you see that there is a clear trend to build on it with games that already exist. The obvious example here is "Outdoor Survival" as the rules for overland travel. But when you look at it there were many more - "Braunstein" and "Chainmail," "Don't Give Up the Ship," just to name a few. This makes sense when you think about it - if you need a system to model something, it is more expedient to find one that models that something than spend time crunching the numbers and building a system from whole cloth. And so what you get as time and printing runs distill the systems is really a game of games.

When you study the Hebrew/Christian scriptures in Comparative Religions 101 you quickly discover what the western world calls "The Bible" is really not a book, but rather a library of separate books just printed in one volume. It contains poetry, history, law, letters of instruction, letters of prophecy, history of law, etc. It is a book of books. And I use this to belabor the point above - When you ask someone to read "The Bible" you are really asking them to read many different books. And when you ask someone to play D&D, you are asking them to really play many different games.

While using multiple games tears down barriers in design it may build up barriers to entry. As the modern game stands in the "OSR" or in the "managed properties" you often have a "game" for creating characters, a separate "game" for exploring dungeons, a "game" for wilderness travel -which may include other "games," and a "game" for combat. What I am doing here is taking the "_______ system" of any role playing game and identifying it as a separate "game." Because really it is. The d20 grappling process is a prime example. And each "game" is complicated by the fact that some things in one "game" have to seamlessly work with the other "games" if they affect things in the other "games."

Where do we go from here? Let's talk about scale next. Each "game" operates on some sense of space/time scale which defines its granularity. In modern "managed properties" the space/time scale for combat is 5ft/6s. The OSR seems to hang around the 10ft/10sec paradigm. Combat is easy to keep discrete. Travel on the other hand, to name an example, quickly stops being discrete in some sort of geometric progression related to how far you travel. That's because you might not take the same route back and more "Cartesian" space needs definition the further you go afield.

Multiple games indicate the possibility of multiple scales which introduces complexity as the abilities of the characters have to be able to operate at all scales. A lot of this complexity is part of the assumption of RPGs and because it exists as the way things have always been done, it does not get noticed as a stumbling block to play and entry into the game.

Some might not see this as a problem. Which is fine - the Game - big 'G' - gets along in this way pretty well, and I don't want to discount that. And the first reaction I have is to try to see if there is a way to set up a resolution framework that is "retargetable." That is a framework that can be applied to anything to provide for procedural or dramatic resolution. And what this would do is reduce the number of games you need to learn to one which can be applied to different tasks and time scales and moving around point crawls. At first it sounds like a good idea.

The genesis for this comes from two places- first there was a post from 2010 on a stack exchange board that made the suggestion of 3 round combats using intent for each side and resolving those intents. Each round the sides that were successful in their intents scored points and the ultimate resolution was in favor of the side that scored the most over the three rounds. Then there was part 3, 4 and 5 of Justin Alexander's The Art of Rulings found here, here, and here. and this bit by The Angry DM.

All combined it gave me the idea of a "number of rounds" framework that would allow you to resolve any action with scale and time being applied as needed, but only requiring the players to use one set of steps to resolve their intents. This would be another step, along with the point crawl on making the world more discrete.

The issue with something like this is that it can threaten to make the game bland. You keep moving through the same seven steps, no matter what. Essentially you are taking a suggestion about the procedure for combat and mapping it to the rest of the game. This leads to issues. And its really not what Justin Alexander was talking about in the first place- no matter what madness I am inspired to when I read his posts. He is talking about presentation and response when a game has a particular arbitrator "resolution conventions which GMs habitually fall into."

The real solution is actually hiding in the set design and point crawls mentioned earlier.

Discrete Worlds or Why the 6-Mile Hex Can't Save You

Wow, Feb 2013. It has been a while. I hope people are still listening. What have I been up to? Largely revising my gaming Magnum Opus, ad infinitum it seems. Life stuff. I am a very very busy person. But enough of that. This blog has never been about whats going on in my life and keeping it “professional” is how it is going to stay.

I have been thinking about a lot of things gamey and mathematical. Like I usually do. One of the big things I have been doing with the math is putting thought into why time, distance and light are concepts that are difficult to track in the context of even the most basic form of the game and grow to near impossible when presented with “the rest of the world.” Or, to be more sussinct: why am I playing this game if its always going to get caught up in minutia?

The best way I can describe this is with the dungeon corridor. Imagine a corridor in an anomalous subsurface environment aka a dungeon. The corridor is 50 feet long and ten feet wide with a door at each end. Now either one of two things is true- either there is something special about the hall, like a trap, a clue in the dungeon dressing on the walls - something that makes the hallway important; or the hallway can be represented as a line on the paper. Its a conduit from “area 1” to “area 2.” If it is important the hallway is really just a 10ft by 50ft room.

And there lies the rub - characters are discrete. Whereas much of the made up world they inhabit is not.

What is discrete? In math discrete numbers whose values have a clear demarcation from one another. Integers. Character stats are probably the best example here. You have a strength of 17 or 18. There is no 17.234534 strength characters. And most things about a character are described in discrete terms. Probably the one thing that approaches being continuous (the opposite of discrete) is the character’s wealth, but only when the currency is decimalized.

The “world” has discrete elements but more often is interacted with and operates in a continuous way. Lets go back to our corridor - often when it just needs to be a line on a sheet of paper it is still handled  in a continuous “object” that is it is given space on the map, but not given a description, and thus becomes dead space that must be “exercised” through - it has to be explored without payoff - it is simply a passage that only matches the description of the default dungeon features at best.

And that is the ultimate conclusion: The world must be rendered in a discrete format.
And its corollary is also true: The hex (6-mile or otherwise) is simply the DM’s survey grid used to measure distance when setting up a point crawl.

Got ahead of myself here. Because see, Chris at Hill Cantons and C at Hack and Slash have done a lot of legwork on how to bring adventure worlds into the discrete. Point crawls and set design go a long way here. Read up on what these gents have to say.

And that leads us to the design part here- people don’t think of the world in a continuous way. Its all discrete. Think about how you move around your town or travel to other places. You think in lines and destinations and landmarks. Think about how you keep track of where things are - your mind is built for chunking - In your room is a dresser, and in the dresser are drawers, and in each drawer is some set of clothes or other thing.

Almost all travel is along some predefined line, be it a road, trail, path, ridge, river, hallway, etc. The added benefit of the point crawl, the set design and random tables is things become easier to handle. They are written out the way that you think about them, and you can make the world just big enough to build illusion that there is stuff over the horizon.

The byproduct of all this is that it opens up player agency which leads to easier play: You already know what lies down that road the players just took without warning and as a result adventures happen without heavy handed "design" but as a byproduct of action and interaction.