From Video to Table

The Ouroboros of Influence Among Games

The classic flow of influence starts with tabletop or board or card or children’s games and moves into video games. CRPGs are a prime example, but not the only ones. Lately I have been thinking about the idea that modern video games may have some thing to offer those we play on the table.

Attempting Innovation

Maybe I am the only one, but one of the predominant ideas I have had is that I need to do something different, maybe even new (if possible) to really stand out in this community. How many fantasy games are there? Scifi? Apocalypse? Investigation? A lot, of each, and many more covering a broad swath of other genres and playstyles.

A while back this formed into “VideoGame the Tabletop Game.” Catchy title, I thought. The concept was to take elements from modern video games and translate them in some fashion to create the foundation of a new tabletop RPG. At the time I didn’t know exactly how it would work, what rules system it would use, or whether anyone would even take it seriously. The truth is, a lot of people play video games these days, and there are some fundamental concepts that most people understand because of this.

So here are a few of my starting points.

Player XP

It is long established that players learn and grow in their ability to play games. There are whole genres predicated on players knowing how those games work, using that knowledge to influence the development and pacing of the game. The argument could be made that by simply having genres we speak to each group of people that enjoy and readily support the type of game being produced. You could say that this, in essence, is player experience.

There are some new games entering the space that speak directly to players, rather than just their characters. There are sections discussing rewards for showing up, bringing the snacks, helping other players, and a myriad of other positive reinforcement techniques that can be applied to the people that are outside the normal reward of character progression. If this is something that people appreciate, why not include PXP?

A quick argument here, things like Inspiration, Luck tokens, and similar mechanisms are often explained as rewards for good play and given directly to players, so this may just be renaming.

Information Transfer

In most video games, the player is given hordes of data. Each time they discover a new location, there is a new entry in the pause or character information screen. Whenever a new monster or adversary shows up there is a profile, sometimes with weaknesses or preferences entailed. Weapons or implements have art or models that can be examined as well as full statistics sheets to scrutinize when you find something to compare it to. Quest logs, plot discussions, world-building notes and images, there is a whole host of information given to the player.

Once again, this is done in tabletop games, but in very different ways. A lot of this information is reliant on player experience, where a group of veterans has instinctual knowledge about the owlbear before their character does. One of the lessons I have learned lately, and that I am trying diligently to take to heart, is that players never have enough information. I came across this idea first from Sly Flourish on youtube. Then I read about it in Mothership, and then Shadowdark. Kelsey Dionne talked about it as well.

The best argument I heard for giving players all of the information was put something like this, “people know about the world because all of our senses are telling us about it. The PCs don’t have that luxury, so the GM needs to be filling in all of those senses for each of the characters, letting them and players, especially the players, know as much as possible, so that the players can then filter that knowledge to their character and make meaningful choices.”

So why don’t we join the ranks of the video game industry? Now, an arbiter doing this on their own would be doing a lot of work, but I think it would be insanely fun. I would love making little flash cards for a town or a region that I can hand to my players so that they can look it over and reference it each time they need to.

As an aside, I think by now we all know that I sit down and write these on the spot, with little preparation other than thinking about a potential topic throughout the week. This info card idea came to me as I was writing this, and I am already in love with it, as someone who loves sitting down to create a world. I may incorporate this into my running game, I’ll keep you informed.

These cards could contain information that is delivered to them as a standard in the video game industry. As much as I was disappointed in Destiny for their Grimoire system, approaching storytelling as lightly as possible in the game itself, I did love going into them and reading a whole bunch at once. That game was so good. This would basically be a grimoire system for tabletop RPGs.

Pause

I know what you are thinking, just hear me out.

With a tabletop game there is already a built-in pause mechanism, people just standing up to grab a drink or use the restroom. All we have to do is stop playing and the game is essentially paused. But what if we instantiated the mechanism of pausing into the game.

The first idea I have here is in reference to timers. If you are unaware of timers, a lot of games and influencers and creators have been talking about using timers, that are visible to the players, to instigate faster paced play. Whether the timer is a die, an actual countdown on a clock, or a circle with different segments being filled in as parameters are met, the use of timers as an actual mechanism to aid play has been discussed a lot lately and implemented in a lot of smaller titles.

There have been many times when the action of the game is moving quickly and I want my players to move quickly as well. When a high stakes decision comes up they don’t act quickly, they stop and start debating or discussing, trying to find the correct answer when the situation is about just having an answer at all, and immediately. I don’t really care for this because it can bring the mood and the gathered stakes down to the floor. This is one of the issues that timers is supposed to fix.

So, if we are using mechanisms like timers, in whatever iteration we choose, to keep play moving at a pace, then we can also instantiate a pause mechanism, potentially only allowing so many in a session. If the players are out of pauses and they can’t make a decision, then play continues and they suffer a consequence. The consequence should not be outlandish, but that person that freezes up when a situation turns dire often does not have a good outlook.

Saves and/or Respawns

A major topic of discussion in this hobby is character death. I started in this hobby in a highly lethal game. I lost many characters before they ever made it out into the world to adventure because the GM was portraying a world full of evil and prejudice and uncertainty, a deeply medieval world with the extremes more pronounced by the presence of magic. I have always appreciated a game where I can feel the mortality of my character, and I become bored or uninterested in games where that threat is not present.

For the longest time, I thought that I needed a more lethal game in order for the players I was finding to have the kind of motivation and incentive to engage like those original games I was raised in. All of the players in those games pushed each of their own narratives forward, they had goals and ideas and things they wanted. The world was bared to us as we crested the hill in search of our objectives, it was not a curtain being pulled back to reveal the place we were supposed to go or the thing we should be after. Then I started trying different games.

A save mechanism could hold a character at a certain point, allowing the player to retrieve them should the worst come to pass. My immediate argument to this was the spoiling of whatever the player learned in the time before their character died, but as a lifelong player of video games, this knowledge has rarely turned me off of the game. One of my favorite genres is crafting survival games, and my characters die so regularly that I am accustomed to it and the progress made is never spoiled simply because I have to go back and do it again or try something else so as to not die.

Now, this mechanism could really make the arbiter’s life difficult, but that could be mitigated with a little bit of guidance and direction. Imagine that the party goes off to a dungeon and dies. However it happened doesn’t matter, but the fact that it did, does. So, the players say that in the next game they are going to load their save and either try the dungeon again or do something else.

If they returned to the same dungeon, they would have knowledge about it that their characters didn’t (unless a new type of character has some abilities to retain memories from their previous lives, exciting!). If this is a problem, which depends on the arbiter, then changing up some elements could solve that quickly. Grab a new map, grab a whole new dungeon, change out some of the monsters, alter rewards or traps, just change some of the elements around.

Now, if you do change some things around, what does that remind you of? Rogue-lights, yes! Or is it rogue-likes? Oh well, you get the point. There is a whole genre of games built around this concept, where the death of the player character is expected and prepared for, it is an integral part of the game! I am currently playing through Returnal, in my opinion the ultimate version of this concept, and I highly recommend it, amazing game.

Characters could respawn in the nearest settlement. The cleric in the party could unlock an ability where they can respawn in a temple that is closer or a wizard could set a spot in the wilderness, a camp perhaps, there could be any number of iterations exploring this concept. Imagine a teleportation focused spellcaster that can set their respawn points anywhere in the world they have been. I am just spitballing here, but this idea could be a solution to another problem that I have yet to see a comfortable solution emerge for.

Death of a Character

That last point ran right into something I have been pondering for a while. When I was running 5e and similarly heroic games, the lack of understood mortality gave the game a relaxed tone. Some people like this, I do not. When I come to game I want the story to be serious, the stakes to be high, and the motivations to be questionable. I want a drama, as well as a fantasy adventure, as well as a good-cop/bad-cop dichotomy, with fleshed out villains facing a group of bitter and hardened antiheroes. I do not like “beer-and-pretzels” tabletop RPGs, not one bit.

So I thought I needed to up the ante, to remind the players that their characters are indeed mortal in an uncaring and dangerous world. Even when they understood this, the sting of death persists. We moved to games like Mothership and Shadowdark, and we recently lost our tenth character to the Shadowdark in only five sessions, and the player took it a bit hard. He had lost a few characters already, but this one seemed to be different. I thought playing a more lethal game would encourage them to play more diligently, to take the game more seriously, as well as the work I put into it, and I think I may have been wrong.

But how do we solve this problem? It is a regular point of discussion that arbiters want a more lethal game and players want their characters to last longer and become vessels for development and growth. Maybe respawns, a given in video games, is the solution. There would have to be a penalty, such as experience and the gained treasure, kind of obvious, but the character they have invested in would continue.

A respawn system answers both the arbiters and the players problems with death. The world can be more lethal, for some arbiters it would have more verisimilitude, and the players can retain the investment in their character even though they had a run of bad luck. Characters only die in video games if they are not the player, why should these games be any different?

Character Complexity

One of the other regular discussions around tabletop games and their design is the complexity of the characters. For a game like Shadowdark, where the characters are expected to die pretty regularly, the creation process needs to be quick and simple. For a game like 5e, where there is no expectation of death, the characters can be more complex. If each respawn is indeed a death, and we are treating it like a save file, the characters and the world dial back the time before they left on the adventure, then this could be brought into the mechanics of the characters in multiple ways. Diviners and oracles could glean information about their potential future deaths by retaining something each time they respawn.

With the solution presented, character creation can become more complex. A lot of people are put off of this because of the amount of rules it takes for players to put a book down, but if your investment only takes a minor penalty when the character dies, there is so much room for additional growth. 5e characters can take on a whole new level of customization and personalization. I am not advocating for complexity just because, but there may be some new ideas on how to further tailor characters to the players wants that would make more sense in a game where the characters only truly die when the players and the arbiter decide to end their campaign or the final boss fight can only end one of two ways.

Hexploration & Map Markers

Shadowdark has pushed me deep into the hexcrawl side of the hobby, far deeper than I have ever been before. I have long been investigating hexcrawl influences and rules and iterations because I want the exploration part of the games I run to be as interesting and engaging as anything else. Hexcrawl seems to fit perfectly with both the video games influence and the instantiation of respawns. Each time the characters meet someone new or gather some bit of information, it puts a new marker on the map and gives them another choice for how they want their game to progress.

This is yet another heavily debated topic in our hobby, whether or not exploration or wilderness travel is worth more than just “hand-waving” between the important bits of combat slog here and combat slog there. When I make a ranger or similar character, I do it because I want them to excel at the outdoors and getting the party from one place to another using my skillset. That’s the character feel that I desire, and it is so hard to find that when everyone has been told that skipping travel is the best option, for whatever reason.

Just because the players have a map, and the characters have a marker, doesn’t mean they cannot get lost, experience hardship and difficult choices, or face some adversaries on the way to that marker. I debated whether or not I was going to put the map in front of my players during our hexcrawl in the first pamphlet of the diminished lighting. Then I looked at it, as an appreciator of maps, and thought that this beautiful little world representation needs to be seen, to be appreciated. During their last trek they asked if they knew where they were going, understanding the difference between player knowledge and character knowledge and respecting it.

Some New Books

Recently I have purchased two new games, both of which I have been curious about for multiple reasons. Both of these tabletop games are based on video games, and I have had this VideoGame the Tabletop Game idea for a while now. The first was Dark Souls, and the second Fallout.

Dark Souls the Tabletop RPG

This is a genre of games I have only tried once. As a previous Star Wars fan, I decided to try Jedi Survivor. I know that I am a person with a relatively low tolerance for mechanics designed to be frustrating, but I wanted to branch out in my video game exposure as well as my tabletop game exposure. I broke a controller for the first time in my life, and I have never looked back at this genre.

Other than that, I was extremely curious about what kind of experience this would be at the table. I have not played in a game or run one, but I cannot imagine the kind of the session that would happen, at least not until I thought about my average game of 5e in the wild. I am currently a player in an Adventurer’s League game run at a local hobby store. As part of the league, the game is published adventures, and we are currently at the tail end of Phandelver and the Depths Below.

Needless to say, every session is a combat. We do a few minutes of moving through an alien space, some short conversations with NPCs, maybe we find something interesting, and then we are back into a fight again. All I can imagine is that Dark Souls is that but without the pretense of anything else going on in the game. Although, it seems like it would be the perfect fit for a respawn system.

Fallout the Tabletop RPG

I love the Fallout games, namely the recent 3d action adventure ones. I tried to go back and play the originals, but as I covered above, I have no tolerance for a game that ruthlessly traps me in a corner until I learn the exacting esoteric pattern that will get me out. As for Fallouts 3, New Vegas, and 4, I love them.

Something else I love, is the post-apocalypse genre. Just the other day I got a notification from one of my latest Kickstarter projects that my the end of May I will be receiving my copy of Ashes Without Number, and I am so excited! Now, this book purchase, the Fallout one, was prompted by both my curiosity and the fact that our Adventurers League was suspended the last two weeks while the shop employees prepared for a local con. So, one of our players that occasionally fills in decided to run a trial of his Fallout adventure that he would run at the con, for us.

Given my love for Fallout I was so excited to play, and I had a great time. We planned to run the adventure for the two sessions our normal GM would be absent, so when I got to the store for our second session, I bought the book. During the whole session I let the younger more excited players take the lead and just perused the rules for ideas on how to run survival, and I got a few. Most of my book purchases are to do research, the good ol’ R&D, to find ideas and methods that I can steal, like most great arbiters do.

I haven’t fully read both of these books yet, but I plan on it. The last book I read cover to cover was BREAK!! RPG, and it is still worth recommending to anyone.

What Video Games Cannot Do

I started reading Storm Front recently, the first book in the Dresden Chronicles, as they have been highly recommended since I was young. Alongside that I have been rereading Mage: The Awakening, one of my favorite Pen-and-Paper RPGs in existence. The World of Darkness books are a whole other level of aesthetic and theme development that I think every designer could use some influence from. I love them.

Video games cannot do magic. I am not saying it is not possible, but they cannot reproduce magic in the fashion that I want magic to exist in my games. For years I have been trying to figure out how to incorporate Mage rules and Wheel of Time aesthetics into my fantasy games. Maybe it was just the group I was playing with, maybe it is the intentional design of the game, but the way we as players approached, and the arbiter reacted to, magic in the Mage games we played, was so empowering and thrilling that I want that in my other games.

For those who don’t know, the World of Darkness games use a dice-pool system, d10s, with a very light mechanical structure. The players explain their goal and the arbiter determines which combination of attributes and skills and magic powers are incorporated to determine your pool, and you try to get a number of successes. The primary focus of the rule books is the setting and the atmosphere. The pages are filled with art and fiction that engrosses the players in the world that is being built, offering questions and curiosities as opposed to answers and truths.

Their approach to mages living in the modern world is so richly developed, as well as their approach to the mechanics of casting spells, that it evokes a sense of empowerment and mystery, with a little trepidation and anxiety when it comes to using your power.

As I have been thinking about how I want to design magic for my game, I have taken to exploring the primary balancing mechanism, paradox, and its potential application to a fantasy setting. In Mage, the vast majority of people are “sleepers,” unaware of the magical world and powers that exist right beside them. They do not believe, and this collective disbelief empowers reality to push back against any changes that a mage would make with their spells. Thus, casting when in the presence of sleepers is extremely dangerous unless the spell is properly crafted.

Spell Duel in the Market

As an example, two opposing mages discover one another in a street market and a fight ensues. The first mage wants to use fire, so the player explains, “the food cart next them suddenly begins to hiss, a visible gas leak coming from the back of the cart right before it catches from the flames in the stove on top and explodes into a fireball!” This whole situation is plausible, even if it was the direct result of magic, so all the sleeper witnesses surrounding the mages think nothing is out of the ordinary, save for the sudden failure of the streetmeat wagon.

In response, the second mage has a large potted plant “slip” from their place on the second story balcony and drop into a kiddie pool behind them, splashing water up and into the path of the oncoming fireball, mitigating some of the burn, all the while using water magic to protect themselves. Both of these uses of magic do not appear to be magical to all those nearby, which mitigates the potential of paradox to correct their use of magic.

Frustrated, the first mage decides to take the risk of a direct assault. As the fire dwindles and the water drips down their foe, they call lightning down from the clear skies overhead in an attempt to end this fight. There are no clouds, definitely no storms, and there is little to explain the sudden thunderous roar as a flash of electricity strikes the seemingly lucky person who survived a freak food cart explosion. To the sleepers, this appears more like magic, and their collective disbelief in magic brings paradox to bear on the offending mage.

In this last case, the mage would roll essentially a save against paradox, the level determined by the arbiter depending on how offensive to reality and the nonbeliever this particular spell was. Electrical poles and lines are known to fail, so sleepers will leave the scene without any understanding of the reality, but it is still offensive. If they fail horribly, a mage can suffer debilitating conditions, or even be sucked out of reality into the abyss. Success means that paradox corrected their mistake, the nearby electrical pole suffering a failure as well and causing the arc that killed that random person.

Mechanizing the Unknown

The ultimate goal of my magic system is that the outcomes, as well as the consequences, are unknowns. More experienced spellcasters will have a good idea on what to expect, but the mercurial nature of an unpredictable and unknowable force remains dangerous to tamper with even into mastery.

There has been some movement in this direction from modern gaming, other than Mage having this in spades from decades ago. DCC and Shadowdark use roll-to-cast systems, adding some of the randomness and consequences into magic. Other systems retain the Vancian system of memorizing set spells, and some allow the players to create their own, but they are still defined within an almost scientific rules set, which diminishes the mystery. DCC has whole tables to determine the effects based on the result of the die roll, which is interesting, and I thought about incorporating this system, but tables are just as unpopular as rules that explain the nitty gritty of grappling, rather than leaving room for the imagination and interpretation based on the current circumstances.

The danger is leaving the system completely open, which puts a massive workload on the arbiter. Rules light systems and their proponents never seem to address just how much more work the arbiter has to do to fill in all the gaps that can be reasonably accomplished by just a few more rules. Why make an Athletics check, or maybe Acrobatics, (does your background come into this?), when your Strength score defines how far you can jump in one small paragraph. Yes, the paragraph is in the wrong place in the book, so everyone misses it, but that is one little thing that the GM doesn’t have to worry about while trying to maintain the tension at the table.

Finding the Middle Ground

In a fantasy world, there is the expectation that even the lay people that live in the villages and towns throughout the monster infested world know about magic, even though they rarely encounter it. Normal people live with the hope and expectation that when they wake up tomorrow, the world as they know it will not be dramatically altered, and this may form some sort of disbelief. Street magicians would be performers more than arcane aficionados, using sleight of hand rather than ancient language to ensorcel their victims.

Out in the wilderness though, where there is little sapient thought and the stranglehold of normalcy, magic could flourish. Maybe this is one of the many reasons mages put their towers outside of town, to avoid not only endangering the common folk, but also to keep their disbelief from hampering their experiments. In the halls of the king, someone who deals with mages and magical entities, most of the people would not have such a mental block, and although casting in front of the king is a bad idea, he does have court wizards to ensure his safety as well as validating the claims of those who engage him in council.

From the rules side, each type of spell or school of magic would need some brief, though clear, guidelines on what is and is not possible. Is this type of magic capable of harm or healing? Can it alter the world or does it just appear to those with senses that it is altered? How much of an area does it affect? How far away can the effects be experienced? Does it drain the caster or the victim, or does it use some limited resource that exists in the world in a realm “beside” it?

Needless to say this avenue of research has been going on for years. I have pages and pages of notes and organizational structures and influences and experimental executions. I tried the Force skill system from various Star Wars RPGs, I looked at the Wheel of Time RPG, Ars Magica, The Burning Wheel, Mage: the Awakening, Vampire: the Masquerade, and a whole host of other influences.

Conclusion

It’s strange that a few rather large topics seemed to all collide into my thoughts on learning from video games. Hopefully some of these ideas give you some inspiration, or at least remind you of a game you love and want to boot up again.