Competing artists in TTRPGs
Sunday, October 6th, 2024 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stepnixI'm going to describe two habits I notice in myself, and have also observed across multiple TTRPG communities. I tend to associate them with "system designer mindset" and "Game Master mindset" in my head, but that's not entirely accurate, so instead I'll call them the illustration tendency and the collage tendency.
The illustration tendency is the impulse to create a game that does what it says it does. You successfully create the game that you mean to, a captured experience that can be recreated by following the given instructions, or a seed that grows into a range of experiences you consider worthwhile and interesting. If the rules result in an experience outside of the intended one, well, time to fix that before you publish. I don't mean perfect scripting here, but if the major goal of the system is tactical combat challenges, and there's some quirk of the rules that makes combat trivially easy if you know the right combo... by this metric, at least, that's a failure of design (in the sense that, you did not succeed at creating the experience you wanted to, with this design).
The collage tendency is the impulse to use a game for what you've decided you want it to do. This could be a simple reflavoring (I've heard that Lancer converts to a magical girl game pretty easily), or it could mean borrowing mechanics back and forth between several different games, to give yourself just the right set of tools for the campaign you want. It doesn't have to be a hack or houseruling, though. Many games are even designed with this tendency in mind, and have pages and pages of rules that are optional or meant to inspire rather than restrict. One of my favorite games even encourages its players to break the rules, and not in the bog-standard Rule Zero kind of way, as part of an intentional position that the play culture, the people you feel comfortable around and the ways of playing you feel comfortable with around them, are more important than the words on the page.
Of these two attitudes, I feel a more conscious affiliation with the illustration tendency. If a system paints a perfect picture, even if it's not really my idea of fun, I will acknowledge it as Good Design. When I dabble in system design myself, this is the consistency of outcomes is what I'm looking for. When I GM a game I'm interested in, I take that attitude with me, trying to get an appreciation of the system itself, not just my own ideas for the campaign, or the company of my friends.
...but I still feel the pull sometimes of "maybe I can adjust this one-shot game for campaign pacing," or "it would be cool to do this kind of story with it" or "if I change things just a little, my table will have more fun." And these aren't bad things! But if I view the game as a means to an end (a cool story, a fun time, an excuse to hang out with friends) I can lose track of the artistic merits of the system-in-itself.
A collage doesn't devalue the artistry of its component parts, an illustration is not a superior work of art for being formed as a whole. It's fun to take bits and pieces and put them together, and it becomes even more satisfying when they cohere into a work you can be proud of. But a game that resists having its own voice drowned out by the voice of its players, a game that refuses to let you turn it into something that it's not? That's the type of game I'm looking for.
The illustration tendency is the impulse to create a game that does what it says it does. You successfully create the game that you mean to, a captured experience that can be recreated by following the given instructions, or a seed that grows into a range of experiences you consider worthwhile and interesting. If the rules result in an experience outside of the intended one, well, time to fix that before you publish. I don't mean perfect scripting here, but if the major goal of the system is tactical combat challenges, and there's some quirk of the rules that makes combat trivially easy if you know the right combo... by this metric, at least, that's a failure of design (in the sense that, you did not succeed at creating the experience you wanted to, with this design).
The collage tendency is the impulse to use a game for what you've decided you want it to do. This could be a simple reflavoring (I've heard that Lancer converts to a magical girl game pretty easily), or it could mean borrowing mechanics back and forth between several different games, to give yourself just the right set of tools for the campaign you want. It doesn't have to be a hack or houseruling, though. Many games are even designed with this tendency in mind, and have pages and pages of rules that are optional or meant to inspire rather than restrict. One of my favorite games even encourages its players to break the rules, and not in the bog-standard Rule Zero kind of way, as part of an intentional position that the play culture, the people you feel comfortable around and the ways of playing you feel comfortable with around them, are more important than the words on the page.
Of these two attitudes, I feel a more conscious affiliation with the illustration tendency. If a system paints a perfect picture, even if it's not really my idea of fun, I will acknowledge it as Good Design. When I dabble in system design myself, this is the consistency of outcomes is what I'm looking for. When I GM a game I'm interested in, I take that attitude with me, trying to get an appreciation of the system itself, not just my own ideas for the campaign, or the company of my friends.
...but I still feel the pull sometimes of "maybe I can adjust this one-shot game for campaign pacing," or "it would be cool to do this kind of story with it" or "if I change things just a little, my table will have more fun." And these aren't bad things! But if I view the game as a means to an end (a cool story, a fun time, an excuse to hang out with friends) I can lose track of the artistic merits of the system-in-itself.
A collage doesn't devalue the artistry of its component parts, an illustration is not a superior work of art for being formed as a whole. It's fun to take bits and pieces and put them together, and it becomes even more satisfying when they cohere into a work you can be proud of. But a game that resists having its own voice drowned out by the voice of its players, a game that refuses to let you turn it into something that it's not? That's the type of game I'm looking for.
