Picking Over The News And Some Thoughts On GMs Making It All Up

A balanced encounter for a x-sized group of level y.

You are reading the TEETH newsletter, by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies. It’s about table-top role-playing games. Our own, that we’re publishing over here, and those by other people that we are excited about.

Hello, you.

TEETH has had a little holiday the past couple of weeks as we sorted out things on secret projects, revealed projects, and released projects, none of the TTRPGish, of course, but we can’t have everything. 

Now though the toothy eye of Sauron swings back upon the indie RPG scene, which has had some of its biggest news ever, not least with the announcement of a Blades In The Dark TV show?! Unholy gods, that was one we did not see coming. We are going to tune right in.

This landmark event in TTRPGs shows, in a very real sense, how the tabletop RPG scene really does have reach beyond that wielded by D&D. It also shows how our ecosystem should do as much as possible to shine a light on that creativity. Sure, Blades is the breakout success, but you don’t get breakout successes without the work to create, support, and popularise new games.

Anyway, with that in mind - links!

LINKS

• This link to a thread about TTRPGs that come with their own soundtracks has been in my links file for a while, but it’s still useful to have a browser. And fairly inspiring. Obviously we’ve always commissioned soundtracks for our videogames, so perhaps we should be doing that for the paper ones, too.

• The Avatar Legends Kickstarter has certain raised a bit more than its $50,000 target having now passed nine million dollars. Nine million. Jesus fucking Christ. I have nothing else to say on this topic.

• We don’t tend to cover Warhammer much on here, for that world is well served by others, but this blogpost on how anything much can be Adeptus Mechanicus caught our attention, and ou grimly pulsing biomechanical heart.

• Planet Of The Horses is surely the winning of This Month’s Most Disturbing Artwork award, as well as being one of the more attention-commanding games to have appeared lately.

• Fascinated and puzzled by this article on the “Six Cultures Of Play”, which intends to create a taxonomy whereby those who have read it can understand and discuss what the author believes are “six main cultures of play that have emerged over the course of the roleplaying game hobby.” This sort of academic approach to TTRPG terms will doubtless become more serious in the coming years, so it’s interesting to see people tackling it like this, whatever the flaws in that approach might be.

• I am hugely interesting in surrealist fantasy RPG Lisergia, although I would contend that it should actually be called ‘Lysergia’? The brief is a challenging one: “You play as a Drifter, wandering around a dream land, experiencing nonsensical encounters in impossible scenarios. There is no point in your expedition. You don't have a goal here. No one needs your help. You have no obligation. No tasks. This is an invitation to confront common sense, reject productivism, unlock the door to the unconscious and enjoy some moments where you are allowed to just be. Nothing is expected from you.” Can a game really like that? I suppose I will have to play to find out.

• A neat travel system for 5E. I like the look of this (and I am super interested in travel systems right now.)

• VERY into the subject matter of Black Hole Era, which is space war in the heat-death of universe, based on the Lumen system. “In this game you will portray one of the mighty vessels called into being to defend your home. Sentient and self aware, you are equipped with space bending engines, exotic energy weapons, and nanoscale fabricators for self repair. However, resources are scarce and must be scavenged from your foes or rationed carefully from the homeworld vaults. You will have to weigh the benefits of bringing home materials or using them in the field.”

• I was left misty-eyed at the end of this account of creating Runequest, as that generation of creators are leaving us. A fascinating account, and a big sigh. (Thanks to Failbetter’s Chris Gardiner for pointing me at this.)

• Chris Bissette’s Feast brings home the fungus horror. “It inhales, tugging on the mycorrhizal networks that vein the land, pulling in everything it needs. Life. Sustenance. People.”

• The World is Ending and We Are Very Large Dogs. Actually, maybe this trumps the horses thing. “The world is ending in one week. This we know for a fact. It is too late to stop it. It cannot be slowed down anymore. Especially not by you, because you are just a group of large dogs.”

• Finally this week, research led me to this name: I could not have invented a better one, and I am excellent at making up names. Prussian anarchist and world federalist, Anacharsis Cloots. According to Wikipedia he was “nicknamed “orator of mankind", "citoyen de l'humanité" and "a personal enemy of God".” We should all be so lucky as to leave such a legacy… Unfortunately for old Cloots, he was caught up in the French revolution and got sent to the guillotine. An ignoble end for such a title.

  

Some GM Lessons From The 2020s So Far. (Or: Why I’M Not Doing Much Prep.)

Well, I am very lazy. 

But actually I’d like to make an argument that it’s more complicated than sheer idleness. The past couple of years (starting well before 2020) have broadly changed my attitude towards what I should be bringing to the table as a GM. There are no great revelations here, but I feel like the changes in my own GMing are ones that I needed to learn and that perhaps others can, too.

It’s not, of course, about there being no prep at all, but there’s a vast qualitative and quantitative difference between the prep that I tend to do now (scribbling down some random ideas and reading a related book) and the prep I used to do (working out what would be a balanced encounter for a x-sized group of level y, and then figuring out some plot points and non-combat encounters that would test and inspire my precise group of players). 

The most obvious context for this difference is found in the type of games we tend to play in 2021. For Blades In The Dark and related games prep is less critical. In fact, the reason I played it at all was due to Quinns (of SU&SD) telling me that he never did any prep at all once he’d learned the system. “I just play to find out what happens”, he enthused. And that has been my experience. Back when we played D&D and related games, preparation was inevitable.

Subsequent to this shift in systems it’s been interesting to talk to GMs who have never left the ecosystem of D&D, Pathfinder etc, because they do not seem to know that another world is possible. A friend, who works in video game development and is around my age of middle 40-something, was lamenting that to get his group to the table he would have to do “so much work”. Reading modules, working out what would be a balanced encounter for a x-sized group of level y, and - oh man, do I have news for you, my friend.

The structural capacity of games like Blades (and other indies in the same coloured locus of the Venn diagram) to alleviate this need for prep, and to use prescriptive systems to enable improvisation (think of Blades’ downtime or faction systems and the extent to which they self-propel activity from both GM and players) really does change how we have ended up thinking about playing these games. The speedbump to just getting the table is less formidable, because the anxiety associated with having to have time to prepare beforehand is diminished. That’s an enormous thing simply because it reduces to initial cost of even thinking about RPG sessions, digital or otherwise.

Yet despite all that, this missive from my desk is not about selling you, my overworked friend, or anyone else, on the virtues of Blades In The Dark or any of its precursors or spiritual successors. Hell, I know GMs who still run that style of game with meticulous prep. Instead, I want to say that I don’t do prep because I simply GM differently now. Mostly, I have really just realised that I needed to ask a lot more questions. 

GMing has always been about asking questions: “What do you want to do now?” “How are you going to do that?” “How does your character feel about that?” It’s at the core of the thing. But I find myself asking a wider range of questions than before and about things that might have been the GM’s job in previous campaigns: questions that don’t just need to be about player actions, but about world-building and story-telling as a broader structure. AGON and DIE both formalise this well: their stories, and their context for adventures rely on the right questions quickly creating the universe. And, having played both of those last year, there was an immediate and explicit realisation for me that I could do this all the time. Don’t know how something in the world should be? Ask a player. I’m going to have them start naming NPCs - “you know this guy, what’s his name?” - rather than lifting them from the author names on the shelves next to me. 

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to using narrative techniques from story-driven games (often GMless games) in literally anything we play: games where other people picking up the mantle of storyteller and running with the scene is more than just their actions as a player. Everyone is responsible for the entire world around that player. Can’t think of a thing? Just ask the players. Where possible, I now default to an improvisational mode which just invents things on the fly. While I am glad to participate in a pre-written module, or to play in people’s pre-written worlds, when I am GMing I am increasingly inclined just to make shit up as I go along and rely on the players to catch me when I run out of road. 

Crucially, I used to feel like the reward for GMing was in my clever plots or dramatic encounters working out as planned, but now it’s clear that the more improvisational the session, the greater the reward: making shit up as we go along feels like GMing at full power, and pulling it off the rails is the reward I am looking for from play. RPGs have always been about improv with constraints and randomness under the hood, and so why not lean into that as seat-of-the-pantsly as possible? 

The reason I am thinking about this at all is because the game our group is currently playing, an adaptation of The Vast In The Dark, running on the ultra-thin Knave ruleset, and for that I had prepared a story. When it came to this week’s episode, I simply didn’t tell the story I had prepared. I completely went off the track and created an entire main NPC that didn’t fit in the story I had planned. Why? I don’t know. I think the improv part of me just took over. It very nearly didn’t work, and there were moments where I thought the session was going to grind, but it swooped and then flew, and reached a place where I could end on a cliffhanger. And there’s seldom anything better than that.

Perhaps there’s a GMing technique here that applies in a whole host of extremely lightweight games. I feel like I should be able to write a guide to living without prep. Perhaps I should.

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More soon! x