What If There Was A TTRPG Where You're Only A Part-time Adventurer? So All Of Your Abilities And Toolkit

What if there was a TTRPG where you're only a part-time adventurer? So all of your abilities and toolkit are specific to your mundane job and you need to find ways as the player to apply them to dungeon crawling.

Finally playing Elden Ring and wow it has exceeded my expectations as a designer. From the ways the game handles difficulty scaling with summoning ashes, its diverse methods of player expression via a more comprehensive magic system, and the map design all have me impressed.

But I've got one (singular) thorn in my side about Elden Ring that has made me think about the pros and cons of... prose and cons.

So, From Software games have a reputation for cryptic lore veiled behind equally cryptic prose, usually squirreled away in item descriptions. In past From Software games, this has mostly been an opt-in experience for Players. Want to dive into analyzing that prose to find some interesting world building nuggets? Knock yourself out. Think that's too much work? That's fine too! Since past From Software titles are linear experiences with minimal narrative player choice, one could ignore the prose-veiled lore and just enjoy the game from a mechanical and power fantasy perspective.

But just like Elden Ring is different from past From Software games in a myriad of other ways, Elden Ring is different in this regard too. On one hand, the open world nature of the game helps couch this prose in a more intense sense of discovery. Instead of walking down a fairly narrow exploration space and then being delivered these nuggets of lore, you (the player) are actively venturing out to a location because it looks interesting to you. Therefore, there's a sense of personal investment in what you find there and what you learn! And that's really cool!

But on the other hand, From Software's tendency to veil its lore in this way can sometimes work against Elden Ring's nareative design. Specifically when what you find is a who and not a what. Sometimes those NPCs you meet will want something of you that requires you to make a choice between people, factions, or even cosmic powers in the world. Now of course in any story there is bound to be hidden information to the Player, but due to how From Software lore is presented, it can be difficult for a Player to make an informed choice about the actions their character is taking.

This can lead to situations where an NPC attempts to con a Player or undermine their belief in a faction in the lands between. But due to the cryptic nature of Elden Ring's prose, these important decisions can go right over a Player's head! And if the Player doesn't know what they're getting themselves into, they might feel confused or even cheated when their character does something that doesn't match the Player's expectation of how their Character has acted thus far.

For some Players, this could manifest as the Player being ambivalent and not particularly invested in the Characters within the story. But overall this is a minor bump in an otherwise pretty fantastic game, and I wouldn't be surprised if I received comments saying that this Player experience absolutely didn't happen to others.

The easiest way to fix this would simply to be a modicum more transparent to the Player about the choice they are about to make once said choice is in front of them. That way, Elden Ring could throw as much cryptic prose as they wanted at the Player, and then when it becomes decision time, the curtain could be pulled back juuuust a little bit to give the Players key context to what their deciding to do with their character.

Hell, doing this could even expand the design space From Software has to work with regarding their quest lines! It could allow for more meaningful and interesting narrative choices on the Player's part to foster further replayability.

*furiously taking notes for nostromo-inspired setting playbook in a sci-fi horror game I haven't even started*

part of the fun of the original alien is the horror of the nostromo itself imo. it’s a cell of corporate greed ferrying narrowly-trained workers across barren space. it’s huge and yet claustrophobic, cockpits crammed with machinery giving way to yawning berths dripping chains and water. the supercomputer is named mother in a stroke of human anthropomorphization, but instead of providing comfort or protection, it’s only a courier between its creator and its wailing brood. ripley yells “mother! mother!” at a matronly-voiced computer that speaks calmly over her helplessness. the ship is full of endless details and patterns and unlabeled buttons and dials the audience can’t entirely make sense of; to do anything on the ship is a rigorous, technical process, and we must depend on the characters to know it. the internal mechanics of the ship are so alien that a literal alien can hide among the bits and bobs and not be noticed. it’s great.

Just finished my first playtest of my wild west horror game, and my biggest takeaway is this:

It is equally important to be good at communicating your rules as it is to have fun an interesting rules.

Now, this is an obvious token of advice that any game designer worth their salt should be aware of, but it's not until I sat down to playtest that I understood the GRAVITY of it.

Because my poor players, my dearest friends who were willing to take time out of their day to understand my game and play it through, read the rulebook up and down multiple times. And each and every one of them came to the table with a sheepish admittance of guilt that they didn't understand the rules.

But they shouldn't feel guilty for that, that's MY fault as a communicator of the game's rules. See, I initially wrote the rules of my game for myself, as a designer. I made a step-by-step list of the procedures between the GM and the Player. But to someone that isn't a designer, my rules were described in a way that was positively USELESS.

My point is, it's very difficult as a game designer to communicate your mechanics to non-designers without hands-on demonstration. But you don't have that luxury when selling that game to strangers once the playtest is over. It's a skill you have to develop, a skill where you need to view your game from the perspective of someone who has never encountered it before. That's difficult.

Now, once the Players understood the mechanics, they actually got really into my game. And for that I'm very proud, and even more so relieved. I was worried I would have to rewrite my rules from scratch because the game wouldn't be fun.

Turns out I will be rewriting my rules from scratch, but not because the rules were bad, but because my communication was bad!

Ever since I learned about the concept of the Philosopher King during a greek philosophy class I took in college, I've implemented something adjacent to my worldbuilding on multiple occasions. It doesn't pan out exactly like the original concept of a Philosopher King, but normally it goes like this:

The Players meet the beaurocratic leader of a people.This leader has a scholarly background, usually having been mentored by a missing/deceased/retired great thinker in their youth. The leader demonstrates this background by introducing the Players to an ethical or philosophical dilemma that they are both familiar with, asking the Player Characters how the problem ought to be solved. The Philosopher King then shares their own insights, revealing either a different, but respectable perspective or a cunning and tricky solution.

Throughout the story, the Philosopher King acts as a mostly benevolent wild card character. Sometimes I'll pit the Philosopher King against a BBEG counterpart, typically a generically evil monarch. When I do this, the Philosopher King runs circles around the monarch with their wit, but there are always a few quirks about their philosophy that concern the Players.

This might manifest into the Players questioning who is truly the "good guy" in the scenario, or whether or not they can actually trust the Philosopher King to not betray them in service of themselves, their people, or some other value made clearly important to the Philosopher King.

I'm sure this "niche trope" might just be a sub-category of an already well-documented one, but I think the ethical/philosophical angle adds an interesting dimension in TTRPGs. Because of Player Agency, Players can really sink their teeth into the implications of said philosophy in ways that a passive audience member cannot.

At some point in time, a man used a deer antler to knock walnuts out of a tree.

That time was 2024. That man was me. I am the weirdo in the park.

I also don't pay corporations for walnuts. It's all about perspective.