red-headed android

this is part 2 of my RPG mechanics hall of fame. mechanics are good and important and these are my favourite ones.

you know what players hate doing in RPGs? playing suboptimally. the rules can say that that monster just hit you with a fear ray, so you’re Frightened 3 and have -4 to attack rolls or whatever. the GM can say that the bad guys have dinosaur heads and are dripping the blood of their previous victims. but if you’re not afraid, neither is your character. if you decide it’s a good idea to keep going, so does your character.

isn’t that weird? doesn’t that go against our intuition that we’re portraying people in roleplaying games? why don’t we ever have a reason for them to act afraid? not give up and go home–then they wouldn’t be our heroes, obviously–but to act afraid.

it’s because we know that not feeling or acting these ways is the right decision. you don’t want to lose, do you? then why would you act like a real person when it’s better to act like a video game character? buckle up and save the ‘character’ part of your character for when there’s no drama or tension.

a lot of other character motivations get plowed over by this too. playing a self-centered narcissist? well, they can be as proud as they want–they’re still not gonna refuse to listen to someone else’s advice because of it, not if that advice is good. you heard that advice too, and you’re not your character, and you thought it was a good idea! playing a religious fanatic? you probably don’t believe in your character’s god, so when it becomes expedient to trust a heretic and all the other players are saying it’s the best way to finish the quest, you’ll come up with some reason to tone down the zealotry.

but wait, you might be saying. that’s not a flaw. that’s where you put the roleplaying in the roleplaying game. roleplaying largely consists in making suboptimal decisions because of your character’s motivations and personality. i personally do that, you might say, even when i know it hurts my chances of success. if someone else doesn’t, that’s a skill issue.

roleplaying games are games. roleplaying decisions do not need to be suboptimal to be pure. if you say “the fun of roleplaying is knowing you are being true to your character even if it doesn’t help you win”, i say “the best game is one where being true to your character makes you feel like you’re winning”.

games are built out of mechanics. sure, experiences are built out of your and your friends’ creativity, but games are built out of mechanics, and i’d rather play a game that forces me to roleplay if i want to succeed than one that tells me success and roleplay are independent of one another, or worse, opposed.

because i love roleplaying, and i love winning, and i want both. if a game’s roleplay elements and a game’s gameplay are at different angles, they get smaller when they multiply together. like vectors. the only way they can multiply together into something greater is if they’re facing the same direction.

and that’s why i love conditions from Masks: A New Generation, a game where you play teenagers who are also superheroes.

conditions do something very simple and effective that i’m shocked isn’t in every roleplaying game ever written. they let the player pull the trigger.

a condition is a feeling that the game says you’re experiencing. something happens and the game says, look, you’re an emotionally fragile teen, you just got rejected by your crush or berated by your mom or hurled through a skyscraper by a giant robot worm with the voice of JK Simmons. you feel like shit. choose one of these 5 conditions and that’s the specific way you feel bad about this.

the conditions are Angry, Afraid, Guilty, Hopeless, and Insecure, and once you’ve marked one it doesn’t go away. it sits on you and restrains you. it takes the basic rolls you make to succeed at all the things you want to do, all the progress you want your character to make in their relationships and their career and their fight with the JK Simmons worm, and it makes you worse at them. a lot worse! it’s a huge penalty!

if the GM is feeling especially mean, they can even tell you to mark a specific condition that hurts something you’re ordinarily really good at. or, they can put you in a situation where you need to, say, calm someone down–but you’re Angry, and you suck at doing that right now!

and what do you do to escape these massive, crippling penalties that seriously hinder you from moving forward in the game part of the game?

well, you do some stupid teen shit that reflects the condition, and it goes away! if you’re Angry you can punch a reporter or impulsively break up with your boyfriend. if you’re Afraid you can sell the team out to Zargon the Mad so he’ll let you go, or chicken out of the perfect opportunity to confess to your rival-slash-crush. these things are stupid! they’re bad ideas! they’re not what you want to do.

and they give you back the agency you need to kick ass, take names, and succeed later, where it counts. the game says “look, there is going to be an emotional beat here where you act like a complete fool. but if you do it, we’ll give you back your power to control the narrative later by succeeding at these awesome moves you currently have a penalty on. deal?”

and you know what? damn right it’s a deal. this works on me every single time. clearing conditions by acting like a hormonal little shit is like crack to me. and you know why? because it lets me roleplay and explore who my character is when they’re stressed, AND it gives me back my +2 to Directly Engage a Threat, letting me later punt JK Simmons Worm into the Halcyon River.

it’s a win-win. it’s a doubled force vector. it’s some of the best roleplaying game design of all time, and every other game that does a version of it, every other game that tells the player “dance for me and I will give you power”, shares in the well-deserved glory of letting the player pull the trigger.

there are other versions of this and they’re not as good. Flaws in GURPS and Vampire and a lot of other 90s and 90s-descended games do it; they let your character be a fucked up little rascal of some kind, handled by some roleplaying thing (usually), in exchange for being more powerful overall. but, and this is important: after character creation, the flaw, the cool but bad decision your character is now habitually making in the narrative, is handled either by a rule, or the honour system. and here’s why you can’t do that with these mechanics; here’s why that’s not letting the player pull the trigger.

if your ‘roleplaying’ action or feeling the character has to experience is handled by a rule, it’s not actually a prompt for roleplaying, no matter how it makes the character act. charmed by a fairy in D&D? that’s a rule. it means you won’t attack the fairy and that you have a good attitude towards it. but what does that mean? nothing, because the player’s priorities don’t change at all.

plenty of players will get charmed and immediately say “my character locks the fairy safely behind an iron door because they don’t want it to get hurt!” or they’ll get frightened by a fear ray and spend ten minutes arguing with the GM that cutting the support beams in the room doesn’t count as an aggressive action towards the monster standing under the nearly-caved-in ceiling.

they chafe, and struggle, and hate the rule. that’s because the game isn’t offering them a way forward. it’s putting them in a mechanical straitjacket. they aren’t being presented with a choice: rather, the choice they want to make is being taken away from them by a mechanic.

how, you might ask, is this different from “do Stupid Teen Shit or all your rolls suck for the next three hours?”

there are two critical ways:

• conditions let the player decide what they want and how they want to do it. they can do the Stupid Teen Shit now or later. they choose what it looks like. they choose if they want to do it at all! when the rule cuts off a course of action, or forces a course of action on the player, the player is not holding the gun. they do not have their finger on the trigger. it is a decision made for them, and human beings hate having decisions made for them.
• conditions give the player options instead of taking them away. you can eat the penalty if you need to, it’s just usually the wrong decision. when the rule does not offer a choice, but merely asks you to “flavour” some mechanical shit that is happening to you regardless, you are not the one moving forward; you are not the one making the decision to roleplay. it’s the difference between a cutscene in a video game and a story beat worked into gameplay. they are completely different. everyone hates cutscenes.

if your ‘roleplaying’ action or feeling the character has to experience is handled by the honour system, on the other hand, we’re right back to square one. sure, i could remember my Paranoid flaw here and not get on this stranger’s speedboat with my fellow spies to go hunt down the evil Dr. Yes in his Caribbean island bunker, but that would be SO stupid. i mean seriously, why would i do that? it’s just going to piss off the other players and cause a huge argument. it’s easier to forget about it and hope the GM does too.

the player isn’t pulling the trigger here because while they do have the gun, there’s no guarantee it actually has to go off. there is no incentive to fire it. they do not want it to happen.

if you get the power up front, and have to do the narrative thing later, or whenever you feel like it, that’s not going to incentivize the player to actually remember to do it–because it’s still going to be suboptimal! and if you enforce the penalty by saying “look, we gave you extra character points for being Paranoid, you have to be Paranoid once every session or i’m taking away your Deadly Aim perk”–that’s a rule! and suddenly the player is chafing and cheating and weaseling trying to get out of the requirement, trying to perform paranoia only when it’s minimally obtrusive, because to do otherwise would be suboptimal.

so what we’ve learned here is that conditions, and other mechanics that let the player pull the trigger on working negative character actions into the narrative in a cool, satisfying way, work because of four factors:

• the player gets to decide how and when they do the thing, giving them full agency and power over it
• there is a real choice to be made; the player can technically choose not to do this thing, but
• if they don’t, they keep taking a penalty or miss out on a powerful opportunity: it is optimal, or at least neutral in terms of your odds of whatever the game counts as “success”, to do the “Bad Thing”.
• meaning that it gives the player a mechanical reason to want to “roleplay” that is independent of them already wanting to act that way.

if the players get to pull the trigger, they do not have to be diehard theatre kids to constantly be making crazy dramatic decisions. this is the key. people who like success more than roleplay will do interesting, complicated, problematic, crazy, memorable things because they know that the reward of being a fucked-up little rascal is worth the agony of actually acting like one. people who like roleplay more than success will do it for the love of the game and find themselves rewarded, not punished, for exercising their creativity and desire to portray a complete character. people who like both, like me, are ecstatic that they don’t have to choose. everyone is happy. everyone wins.

all of this power, and it’s created automatically by a single mechanic. it boils down to a sentence, really. “you can get a significant reward that will help you succeed, and all you need to do is act like X or Y in a way that everyone agrees is cool and significant.” most games have a threshold on how major the action has to be to actually warrant the reward, of course, cause otherwise the game would just be people doing the same song and dance over and over. conditions solve this elegantly by only applying once they’re actually on the character, so being a hormonal little shit has no reward if you’re feeling emotionally well adjusted. just like in real life.

in the game i’m developing right now, BLOODY CAPES, you do crazy shit with your powers, and push yourself to fight and win against terrifying odds, using a resource called flares. if you’re full on those, it’s no problem. you can probably face anything and at least survive.

but if you’re empty on those? well, shit. you never know when you might need to blow through a bunch of flares to survive a supervillain’s attack, or save a teammate, or prevent a disaster. that stuff could happen at any moment, and you don’t get do-overs; it’s not called HAPPY CAPES. someone will die without those flares, and the game makes it real clear.

so, of course, the way you recover flares is by complicating your life or making poor decisions in a way that’s reflective of your character’s traumas and psychological flaws. and if the other players agree that the action you take is particularly extreme, particularly awesome, or particularly in line with what they think is cool about your character, you get way more flares back.

‘roleplaying’, as many players understand it, isn’t. playing a compelling character isn’t doing a goofy voice in lieu of actually acting like a hardened pirate, or talking about how proud and vain you are and then getting down in the dirt when the rules say it’s optimal. living in fear of the threat of failure hamstrings any attempt to portray a real-feeling character, and most mainstream rulesets encourage you to have this fear. roleplaying games can only cultivate fearlessness by making the real fuck-up stuff, the cool iconic stuff that objectively hurts the character’s position, the stuff people don’t want to do, worth it.

show the players the reward. tell them exactly what they need to do to get it. hand them the gun. when it’s in their hands, when they’re on stage, when they’re in control, when you’ve promised them that not only do they have nothing to fear but they’ll be rewarded for doing some cool shit with their character–that’s when the magic of tabletop games happens.

what makes condition-likes a hall of fame mechanic is that they turn ‘optimal’ gameplay and ‘roleplayer’ gameplay into the same thing, exposing that the dichotomy between them is, in a well-designed game, fundamentally a lie.

they are not the only mechanic in the hall of fame. stay tuned.