How TotK Lost the Plot

Time for another brain-purge post: I've had these thoughts taking up space in my brain with nobody but my partner to express them to, so maybe if I barf them out onto the internet I can free up some brain space. The thought in question is how Tears of the Kingdom took an existing story and made it bad.

Now, hang on, let me say a couple of things: first, I like TotK. It's a really good game! And some of the story is good (Zelda's long con is awesome, for example). But the core plot is a modified, and worsened, version of an existing plot. And when I say it's a worse version of an existing plot, I don't mean in the extremely vague sense where some folks say that every Zelda game is just a retelling of the same events by different people. Some of the games have a much more specific relationship than that, and this is one of those cases.

So let's talk about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. And to do that, let's first talk about The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Why? Because TotK is a remake of LttP.

A Familiar Story

Link to the Past is the SNES Zelda game from 1992 (or 1991 in Japan), and is arguably the quintessential Zelda game of the 2D era. The plot wasn't anything super deep (remember when games were for playing?) and as I'm sure you can guess it was about Link recuing Zelda from Ganon. But it did get a little more specific than that, and that's what I want to look at. Between the game's brief prologue and the dialogue of several NPCs, the story goes like this: 

Long ago, a thief from the desert named Ganondorf managed to get into the Sacred Realm to steal a sacred relic. This gave him immense power, and those he fought couldn't defeat him, so the seven sages "wise men" sealed him away. But now his power is growing, and his triumphant return is imminent. This returning threat is the impetus for Link's quest to get the Master Sword and save the day. This adventure will not only take Link all over Hyrule, but also into The Dark World, which exists as a dark reflection of Hyrule's landscape, and is where Link will face Ganon in his lair.

So, uh, does that seem maybe just a little bit familiar? It should, because it's the same plot as Tears of the Kingdom. (Astute readers will also note that the backstory of both games—what TotK dubbed "the imprisoning war"—is also the plot of Ocarina of Time, making OoT a prequel of the other two. But that's not what we're talking about today.)

Tears of the Kingdom takes that story from LttP and makes a small number of changes, and two key changes in particular are why that perfectly serviceable story became Kinda Bad, Actually.

Problem #1: Powerful Artifact(s)

The first change is the nature of the powerful artifact that Ganondorf stole. In Link to the Past, the power-granting MacGuffin is unique. It's the iconic Triforce (more commonly called "the Power of Gold" within the game), and it's the reason Ganon was too powerful to defeat. Nobody else had that kind of power. It's a mysterious, sacred power that can grant the wishes of your heart. Of course somebody who snagged it could beat a troop of normal people, even if they're the best of the best. It tips the scales and makes him a dangerous villain.

But in Tears of the Kingdom, the artifact is a Secret Stone—not "the" Secret Stone, but "a" Secret Stone. It's a power-up rock, but it's one of several. The entire team of sages each had the exact same power-up rock, so why the fuck couldn't they beat him? You're telling me this guy solos a squad of the world's best fighters who all have the same power boost he does? It makes the battle feel nonsensical.

Problem #2: Unfinished Business

There's an aspect of Hyrule worldbuilding that changes sometime between LttP and TotK, which has a huge effect on the story. In the old-school version of Hyrule, the Triforce resided in a place called the Sacred Realm, which was transformed into the Dark World when Ganondorf got hold of the Triforce's power. Importantly, this realm was something like an alternate dimension, not a geographical location. You couldn't just go there, you had to find a magical portal. The impending doom was that Ganon was nearing the point where he could breach the veil between worlds. By contrast, current Hyrule worldbuilding says the Sacred Realm is just land in the sky, and the dark place is just a very deep cave called The Depths. It's all one world.

This difference absolutely breaks the story—a story that was written under one model and then ported over to the other, apparently without thought for the consequences of that change. See, originally, "We sealed Ganon away" meant "We were fighting in Hyrule, then we teleported him into a different dimension where he can't get to us but also we can't get to him." But in TotK, "We sealed Ganon away" means "We were fighting and then we paralyzed him so he's helpless right in front of us and then we just??? Walked away???"

Ganon's ancient sealing and gradual return to power makes sense when he's been pushed to another dimension that's nearly impossible to reach. It makes a lot less sense when he's just standing there, helpless, right in front of you, forever. You're telling me that a room full of the greatest warriors, who 30 seconds ago were trying with all their might to kill him, saw their enemy rendered helpless at their feet, and NONE OF THEM had the idea to maybe just decapitate him right then? And for the next untold millennia, with enough time and safety to build a fucking castle on top of him, not one other person thought of that either? What the fuck?

So Anyway

I guess the lesson here is that if you do a remake of an existing story, maybe have literally anyone look at it to see if your changes completely fucked up the core plot points.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully there will be more space in my brain now.

Yakko's TTRPG List

 This morning I was stricken with the insane whim to answer someone's "Other TTRPGs besides D&D and Pathfinder?" question over on BlueSky by listing about 100 of them to the tune of the "Nations of the World" song that Yakko sings on Animaniacs. 

Since I went to the trouble of doing that, I figured I may as well transcribe it here, where it will be ever so slightly less ephemeral than on BlueSky. Enjoy.

< Verse 1 >

Lancer, Ryuutama, Fabula Ultima, anything PbtA;

Ironsworn, Tidebreaker, Against the Darkmaster, Cyberpunk, Journey Away;

Dungeon World, Dragonbane, Vampire the Masquerade, Mothership, BESM;

Avatar Legends and Over the Edge and Forbidden Lands, Smallville, Lumen!

There’s Shadowrun, Sword World and Stars Without Number and Star Wars and Star Trek and Masks;

There’s Worlds Without Number and Tails of Equestria, Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast

< Verse 2 >

There’s Mutant: Year Zero and Wretched-and-Alone and OSR hacks black and white,

There’s Sentinel Comics and Mutants-and-Masterminds, Apocalypse World and Firelights

The Quiet Year, Daggerheart, Break, Basic Roleplay, Deadlands, Coyote and Crow,

Dungeons: the Dragoning, also The Dragon Prince, Dungeon Bound and Wanderhome

There’s Marvel Heroic and Edge of the Empire and Shadowdark and Gubat Banwa,

There’s Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer Fantasy, Heroic Chord and Those Who Wander

< Verse 3 >

There’s Legend of Five Rings and Animon Story, Knave and Cairn and Into the Odd

Stacks of Goblins and GURPS, Tales of Myriad, Locus and Cortex Prime, Diesel, Stonetop

Against Fall of Night and Five Torches Deep, there’s TMNT-and-OS,

Urban Shadows, Exalted, Pendragon and Earthdawn then Blades in the Dark and Vortex

There’s Burning Wheel, Elric and Scion and OSRIC and Mork Borg and Earthdawn and Cypher

There’s Mage: the Ascension and Golden Sky Stories and Megalos and Terminator

< Verse 4 >

Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and Dungeon Bitches, in charity bundles galore

Monsterhearts, Genesys, Magical Kitties, and Rangers of a Broken World

Take 5 and Traveller, Remarine, Rolemaster, Gumshoe and Songs-and-Sagas

Solarcrawl, 13th Age, Fist, Hard Wired Island, and Heroes of Cerulea

There’s Aether, Godbound, Armour Astir, and Beacon, Core 20, Bolt, Quest, and Arise

Leverage, Fellowship, Fate Core and iHunt and…

His Majesty the Worm, 

Monster of the Week, 

Feng Shui and 

Foxfire and 

Mouseguard and 

Runequest and 

Solo But Not Alone 5!

Pocket Deckbuilding Theory

Let's talk about building decks in Pokemon TCG Pocket (which I'm going to abbreviate as "Pocket" from now one, because holy heck what a title). If you didn't know, Pocket is not a 1:1 digitization of the card game that's existed in physical paper for years. It's more like a digital-only reboot of the card game. The rules have been tweaked and the card pool started from scratch, so what I'm talking about here will NOT be applicable to the paper game.

I'm going to assume you've already learned the actual gameplay mechanics: energy, attacking, retreating, etc. If you don't know how the game works, go back and do the tutorials (which also gets you some useful rewards and a free deck). This post is about learning enough about gameplay to inform your deckbuilding. We'll cover a mix of theory and practical application.

Pacing and Pendulums

The absolute biggest thing to understand is that Pocket battles are won and lost by pacing. Gameplay has certain rhythms to it. The biggest ones are the production of 1 Energy per turn, and allowance of 1 attack per turn. These rhythms produce a sort of "pendulum swing" that can be observed, predicted, and acted upon. This forms the foundation of Pocket battle gameplay. For illustration, consider a hypothetical battle between a fighting deck and a fire deck. We open with the following two cards in the Active Spots:

You may notice that these are basically the same card. Pocket keeps the math of HP, damage, and energy costs on a pretty tight leash, which creates a firm "core" for the pacing we're going to illustrate. Hitmonchan will be given 1 Energy and reduce Heatmor to 50 HP, and then Heatmor will do the same to Hitmonchan. This process repeats for a few rounds, until whoever went first (Hitmonchan) will KO their opponent. Then that KO'd Pokemon is replaced, and the replacement continues the rhythm by getting to KO the already-weakened Hitmonchan. But then Hitmonchan is replaced and we start all over again, repeating until we reach 3 points for the win. This back-and-forth is the "Core Pendulum" of Pocket battles, and every decision you make—both in play and in deckbuilding—is about predicting, disrupting, or enforcing this rhythm, such that the final swing of the pendulum is in your favor.

Surplus Turns

The second thing to understand is that the Core Pendulum creates a secondary phenomenon that I call "Surplus Turns." When you started fighting with your Heatmor, you had to devote your first turn to setting it up (playing it and devoting one turn's worth of Energy to it). However, it doesn't get KO'd until the third turn—and it doesn't need any of the resources (cards or Energy) that are generated by those extra two turns. In other words, every turn a Pokemon is active without requiring resources, is a "Surplus Turn" generated by that Pokemon. You can then spend those Surplus Turns on other things, like powering up a Pokemon on your bench. More powerful attacks require more Energy, and possibly some evolutions—both of which are resources that you get once per turn.

Every strategy interfaces with this concept.

If you're the Heatmor player in the above example, you can see from the beginning that you'll lose the game if the Core Pendulum is left unmodified. So how do you modify it? By overpowering it with a bigger, stronger Pokemon. Instead of continuing the initial rhythm with a second Heatmor, you can spend your two Surplus Turns energizing and evolving, say, an Arcanine. Since Arcanine has more HP and deals more damage than Hitmonchan, you've created an imbalance in the Core Pendulum: you only need one turn per KO, while your opponent needs several, and that means you win.

Of course, your opponent also had two Surplus Turns to develop something, so maybe you're still at equilibrium. That's when you start getting into the interesting deckbuilding choices. You can try to break the equilibrium of the above Heatmor-into-Arcanine example in basically two ways: go bigger, or go faster.

Big or Fast

If you opt for the "go big" route, then you're looking to overpower your opponent with large amounts of HP and damage on a single Pokemon. As such, this usually means you're looking for a big, beefy EX Pokemon, like Charizard EX or Gyarados EX. This comes with the drawback that your opponent gets two points instead of one for a KO, but you're usually so all-in on that Pokemon that you were never going to come back from losing it anyway, so it doesn't matter. What matters is that your game-ender needs a lot of setup. You can accomplish this by trying to inflate the number of Surplus Turns you get, usually by putting out a "wall" (ie, Druddigon) that requires no investment but holds off your opponent for a while. Alternatively, you can try to reduce how many Surplus Turns you need in the first place, usually by generating extra Energy via cards like Moltres EX, Misty, or Manaphy.

If you instead opt for the "go fast" route, then your goal is to reduce how many Surplus Turns your opponent gets to benefit from—though this inherently limits your own access to Surplus Turns as well. This means you're looking for Pokemon that can deal a lot of damage with minimal investment. Sometimes this is an EX Pokemon like Pikachu EX or Starmie EX, but sometimes it's a regular Pokemon like Ninetales, Skarmory, or certain versions of Primeape.

Deck Composition

Pocket battles are usually not just a slugfest between whichever Pokemon just happen to be out in front, and your deck likewise should not just be a pile of Pokemon. In fact, in most cases only around half your deck should be Pokemon cards: 2-4 for your early game, and 4-6 for your late game. More Pokemon beyond that will tend to feel like "clutter" that just gets in the way, leaving you wishing you'd drawn something else instead. You want to draw Charmander, Charmeleon, and Charizard every game; not spend half your games with Charmeleon, Magmortar, and Infernape sitting uselessly in your hand.

The rest of your deck should be Trainer cards, which you can think of as tactical maneuvers. They'll let you make moves to better your position, without using up your precious turn-based resources (like Energy or attacks). For example:

• Potion (or Erika) can buy you another Surplus Turn if it changes how many attacks it takes to KO your Active Pokemon. Alternatively, you can extend the life of your game-ender if it suffered from early pressure by a faster deck.
• Giovanni, when used at the right moment, can let you KO a Pokemon a turn sooner, denying your opponent an entire Surplus Turn with one card.
• Sabrina can send your opponent's Surplus-Turn-generator to the bench and expose a would-be game-ender to an early KO. Alternatively, it can bench an early threat and replace it with something that's not ready to attack or retreat, thus buying you another Surplus Turn.
• X-Speed and Leaf are incredibly important. If what should be on the bench is instead in the Active Spot (whether because of an unlucky opening hand, or your opponent's Sabrina), these cards let you correct the situation without using up your precious Energy, thus preserving your Surplus Turns. But you can also use them to switch from your opener to your ender without waiting for the KO (especially relevant in matches between decks of similar speed), or to replace an injured Pokemon for one that's still fresh, allowing you to "skip" a game point on the Core Pendulum's swing.
• Professor's Research and Poke Ball just help you get the cards you need, as consistently as possible. There's a reason they're easily-accessible promo cards instead of requiring packs. Put them in every deck. Do it. Eat your vegetables.
• Pokemon Communication helps smooth our your draws. If you're ever sitting on a handful of evolutions without their Basics (or vice versa), PokeComm will help you straighten that out.

There's More... But Not Now

I think that covers the core principles of Pocket deckbuilding. Every deck can be extrapolated from these core concepts—even the wacky ones. You're ready to start building! Keep these principles in mind (in both building and playing), iterate enough that you can adjust your list thoughtfully, and eventually you'll have decks that are effective while still feeling like they're "yours." Happy battling!

Literalist Roleplay-Gaming: a Primer

Let's talk about my favorite way to engage TTRPGs: a philosophy of play (and by extension, design) which I've lately taken to calling Literalist Roleplay-Gaming. I recently wrote about how there are actually multiple separate hobbies sharing the name of "TTRPGs," and I used Literalist Roleplay-Gaming as a quick example. Today, we're expanding past that two-paragraph synopsis and giving this model a proper explanation (and since it's my favorite, a bit of sales pitch will probably bleed through as well).

The Basics

As the name implies, Literalist Roleplay-Gaming is the literal approach to roleplaying games. Whereas some of the fields under the TTRPG umbrella only use that name due to shared history, we're using it as a literal description of what we're doing: we're playing a game, specifically of the roleplaying type. For us, a roleplaying game is exactly what it says on the tin: a game of roleplaying.

Note that "game" here means something more specific then just any recreational activity. Just because you do something for fun doesn't make it a game—sort of like how nobody confuses ordinary recreational drinking with playing a drinking game. There's loads of people who do recreational roleplaying as its own thing, but we're talking about using roleplay not as a standalone activity but as a core component of playing an actual game.

For us, the term "roleplay" likewise means something specific. Much like in many non-TTRPG contexts, "roleplay" means stepping into the shoes of an imaginary person, and engaging an imaginary scenario through that lens. It doesn't mean performing the character as an actor would, and it doesn't mean authoring the character as though you were writing a story, it means experiencing that person's situation in an imagined reality. The beating heart of roleplay is, "Here I am, what will I do?"

Finally, LRG wants "roleplay" and "game" to be integrated. To use the drinking game analogy again, nobody thinks they played a drinking game just because beer was served at game night; the gameplay has to be centered on the drinking for it to be a drinking game. Similarly, Literalist Roleplay-Gaming (which I hyphenated for a reason!) views the imaginary space of roleplay and the mechanics of the game rules as inextricably linked. If play drifts away from mechanics entirely, we LRG fans feel we've stopped playing the RPG; but also, if the mechanics don't feed directly into the imagined space, we likewise feel robbed of our roleplay. Our favorite experiences come from the synthesis of the two.

The Implications

Let's have a look at some of the things that tend to be true of TTRPGs under the Literalist Roleplay-Gaming model, especially those things which set it apart from the other fields under the TTRPG umbrella.

Channels of Agency

Folks in TTRPG spaces talk a lot about "player agency," often in the context of new and interesting ways to let players influence the play experience. Literalist Roleplay-Gaming, however, tends to channel agency almost exclusively through the character. In other words, we would rather notice that a chandelier exists and spend a point of our character's Stamina to swing from it, than to spend 1 Plot Point to add a chandelier to a scene so our character can swing from it. The former is grounded in the roleplay, while the latter circumvents it, pulling us out of the world and putting us back at the table.

Obviously this concern applies to the designs of the games we play, but it also applies to the informal play culture. There are innumerable bits of advice on the internet about adding looser versions of the above example to games that don't natively support it. Perhaps the most famous is the "Rule of Cool," in which a player can be allowed—on a case-by-case basis—to do something their character isn't quite capable of, as long as it's sufficiently awesome. However, in addition to being a meta-decision rather than a roleplay-driven one, this delegitimizes every past decision and worldbuilding detail that culminated in this situation where the action isn't possible. To the LRG way of thinking, the Rule of Cool actually reduces agency rather than supporting it.

The above is mostly about player agency, but GM agency matters too. The GM is in a bit of a different situation, since they're populating the world from nothing. How does the LRG philosophy of play apply when there's no objective reality to align with? The key is internal consistency. Yes, the GM could put "anything" into the path of the players, but should try to align with whatever else has already been established, to keep things cohesive and believable. This also means that there's no "fudging"—meaning you don't secretly change the outcome of rolls or the stats of an obstacle in order to curate the experience on the fly. Once you put something in place, it is what it is. As the saying goes, the dice fall where they may. The un-curated outcomes are part of the desired experience.

Dual Nature of Rules

Speaking of letting the dice fall where they may, the rules of the game serve two very important functions in the Literalist Roleplay-Gaming model. First, of course, the rules are important because it's a game, and a game is defined by its rules. But the rules also pull double duty as the voice of the world. When a character in a story succeeds or fails, it's because of the author's decision. But when you succeed or fail in a TTRPG (at least, under the LRG model), it's the product of how your characteristics intersected with the characteristics of the world—and that intersection was created by the game's rules.

To put it another way, the rules create tangibility in the imaginary world. They give it substance. The ability to push back on you, to require something of you before you can work your will. Literalist Roleplay-Gaming enables worlds that are more full of life than those of narrative media. In effect, the world becomes a separate entity in the roleplay. Rather than only being acted upon by you, it can also act upon you in return, and therefore becomes truly inter-active. Consistency in the rules of the TTRPG helps make this possible.

No "Flavor Text"

You know how in a game like Magic: the Gathering, cards often have "flavor text" at the bottom? This text tells you something about an imaginary world but, crucially, is fully isolated from gameplay. Your Lightning Bolt card would function exactly the same no matter what the flavor text said. This is antithetical to the Literalist Roleplay-Gaming philosophy of TTRPG play. Remember, we want "roleplay" and "game" to be integrated. If it happened in-universe then it happened in-universe. And since that universe is where we play, those happenings matter. 

That doesn't mean there's a promise that every detail will come up or become relevant, but we play with the implied acknowledgement that if it comes up, we'll treat it as true. Your alien pilot having purple skin might be a cosmetic detail with no explicit mechanics attached, but we play with the assumption that if you somehow find yourself needing to hide naked in a field of purple flowers, your alien pigmentation will remain factual and be handled accordingly (whatever that might mean in context).

This is sort of the flip-side of the "meta" mechanics we touched on earlier. Due to the integrated relationship between roleplay and gaming, we're disinterested in meta-mechanics that don't plug into the imagined realities of the game world—but equally so, we also accept that anything we establish as true in-universe has at least the possibility of becoming mechanically relevant in the right circumstances. Everything is real and nothing is flavor text.

Investment of Self

Something that tends to happen in Literalist Roleplay-Gaming is an investment of "Self" into the character being roleplayed. Players will retell the events of their adventures by saying "I did this" and "We did that," in sharp contrast to the third-person descriptions given by the viewer of a TV show. Now, this doesn't mean that LRG fans are failing to roleplay a character who's different from themselves. Rather, it means that we roleplay by stepping into that other person's shoes. In a sense, we alter our sense of self into that of the character, and then engage a scenario as that other self.

This makes LRG uniquely positioned to create experiences that feel first-hand rather than observational. It's hard to describe how different it feels to live through situations as your character, rather than, for example, using TTRPGs to create a story about your character. But it is different, and I highly recommend giving it a go sometime. It's the closest you'll ever get to actually visiting another world. 

Common Misconceptions

Often, when I try to talk about this philosophy of play, people draw wrong conclusions or make weird assumptions, so it's probably worth the time to address some of them.

"So you mean wargames?"

No, I don't mean wargames. I get this misconception a lot, and I think it stems from a stunted understanding of how TTRPGs originated. When I explain to someone that I'm not doing what they're doing, they assume that I must not have made the transition from wargames yet. But that's not true (and I've personally never played a wargame in my life). The Literalist Roleplay-Gaming model can be applied to any genre or tone, with or without combat.

"So you mean crunchy, rules-dense games?"

If you start looking at lots of TTRPGs that exist, you'll find that the ones whose mechanics most consistently align with Literalist Roleplay-Gaming ideals tend to be bigger, crunchier, more mechanically-detailed games. Those with more meta mechanics, or which aren't very game-like, or prioritize something else over roleplay (such as story-crafting) often tend to be smaller, lightweight titles. However, this is nothing more than historical coincidence. You could easily create an LRG-friendly game that fits on the back of a postcard, it just hasn't happened much so far. LRG is about how rules and roleplay intersect, not about how granular and detailed those rules get.

"So you never use houserules?"

On the contrary, houserules are 100% acceptable in Literalist Roleplay-Gaming! I think people tend to enmesh the concepts of on-the-fly fudging and agreed-upon houserules, and thus assume that declining the former equates to declining the latter, but that's not remotely true. Remember, consistency is the key: if we've all agreed on a houserule, it can be consistently applied, in keeping with the LRG philosophy. But fudging and Rule of Cool are a different beast, disrupting the imaginary world's tangibility due to lack of consistency. It's kind of like Uno: nobody's playing by the book, but any given group is playing by a consistent set of rules.

So That's That

Literalist Roleplay-Gaming. It's awesome. It rules. Give it a try sometime. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

A Case for Classification

This is for my TTRPG folks.

We need to start looking more seriously at functional classification of our different hobbies. Yes, "different hobbies." Look, TTRPGs are young. Once ground was broken, there's been an explosion of both innovation and iteration, creating all kinds of wonderful things. And because the field is so young, we're all running around calling everything by the root term "TTRPG," happily assuming we're just doing variations on a single thing.

But we're not. This boundless creativity made us spread out fast. It's my belief that we creativity'd so hard that we've actually got multiple fundamentally unalike hobbies, activities that are different enough that it's no longer reasonable to call them different "approaches" or "playstyles" of the same thing.

When two things are so different that the advice, tips, and best practices of one would actively undermine the other, they're different enough that they need their own spaces.

All of the things we're currently doing under the TTRPG umbrella are beautiful and important enough that they deserve room to grow and flourish. But an artform can't grow and flourish if half the people in the room are giving you advice for a completely different artform. None of us are at our best when we're constantly kneecapping each other. Descriptive clarity is a good thing.

Now, you might be skeptical that there's anything under the TTRPG umbrella that has reached such a threshold of differentiation, so I'll demonstrate by contrasting some key points between the two types of TTRPGs that I'm most familiar with. Fans of each just call them TTRPGs, but that would make this comparison incomprehensible, so I'll temporarily give them different names: Flat-Process Oracular Storytelling and Literalist Roleplay-Gaming.

Flat-Process Oracular Storytelling (FPOS)

First, let me explain the name. This activity is fundamentally a form of storytelling (and story-making). In traditional narrative media, there's a bit of a process in between the starting point of the author(s) creating the story and the audience consuming the story. FPOS "flattens" that process into a single step: people who are both author and audience are both creating and consuming the story all at once. The "oracular" part refers to how the mechanics of the TTRPG are treated not so much as game rules but more like an "oracle" that can be consulted when desired but also disregarded when unnecessary or unhelpful. (Note that this is independent of whether the TTRPG was designed to be used in this way.)

The fundamental activity is the creation and telling of a story. The activity is fundamentally generative, in that it carries an inherent intent to create. A statement like "Don't let the rules get in the way of the story" is highly relevant advice, as the story is your main goal and the "rules" (oracles) exist only to serve that end. Concepts from other narrative mediums, such as "Yes, and" from improvisational theater, are often adapted for use in FPOS as means of curating the story. Concepts from gaming mediums, such as pausing to validate rules or diligently maintaining an accurate game state, are ignored or even shunned as "bad behavior." Player agency beyond their own character, such as the ability to introduce something into a scene, is usually positively regarded.

Literalist Roleplay-Gaming (LRG)

Again, let's start with the name. I'm calling it "literalist" because it uses "TTRPG" not just as a name, but as a literal description. The TTRPG is literally a game, and the type of game is one whose most-central mechanic is roleplay. LRG takes the concept of a "game" (which, importantly, is more specific than "recreational activity") and the concept of "roleplay" (which is more specific than "imagination") and integrates them into a whole. As an analogy, a "drinking game" does not mean simply drinking recreationally, nor does it mean drinking while also separately playing a game, it means adding rules to drinking in order to "make a game of it." In the same way, LRG treats a roleplaying game as a full integration of roleplay and gaming.

The fundamental activity is the playing of a game, and that gameplay is built on inhabiting a persona within a shared imaginary world (roleplay). The activity is fundamentally experiential, in that the point is to do it, not to generate anything from it. A statement like "Don't let the rules get in the way of the story" is both nonsensical (what story?) and counterproductive (rules define a game). Concepts of gaming carry over, such as how rules can be altered by group consensus (houserules) but not by one person (cheating). Preservation of fidelity, not only of the "game state" but also the in-universe truths of the roleplay, is a high priority. Player agency is typically channeled almost exclusively through the character's in-universe capabilities; meta-influence like a player introducing an outside element to a scene (rather than simply interacting with what's already there) is often viewed as disruptive and undesirable. The LRG fan would rather spend a point of Stamina to have their character swing from a chandelier that already exists, than to spend a Plot Point to declare that a chandelier exists to swing from.

~~~~~

I know that's a lot to properly digest, but once you do, it becomes clear that these two hobbies are largely incompatible. That's not to say one is better than the other, but their best practices are at odds with each other's goals. If someone who's into FPOS seeks advice, but half the incoming advice is from LRG enthusiasts (or vice-versa), then half the advice is actively disruptive to the requester's needs. It should be self-evident that both activities would be more enjoyable if their fans could count on the people around them actually liking the same things. Otherwise, we just keep giving each other bad advice and invalid feedback, over and over, every day, forever. Does that sound ideal to you?

I don't have a roadmap to the endpoint. Hell, I don't even know how many different artforms we're dealing with. But the more our different fields grow, the more disruptive the lack of classification will become, gradually smothering our potential more and more. If we want to flourish, we're going to have to stop being afraid of functional description, and start acknowledging that there's lots of different roommates in this house, rather than each of us pretending to live alone.

____________________

(P.S. — Yes, I've seen the XKCD Standards thing. If you think that applies here, you may have misunderstood something.)

Understanding SNES-Era RPG Mechanics

Let's talk about old-school RPG video games—specifically, what made them tick, what made their gameplay so compelling back in the day. I'm writing this partly because game-related trivia can be fun for its own sake, but also because I think a lot of people looking back at SNES-era RPGs wildly misunderstand how they worked. This is because some of the SNES-era mechanics have since been pulled out of their SNES-era contexts and repurposed for other roles in modern games, leading people to (mis)interpret old games through the lens of modern design. For example, the random encounters and XP-based leveling that is often maligned as just artificially padding the play time actually used to have an important role in the overall design. Curious? Let's dive in.

The Gaming Landscape

As long as we're talking about understanding things in context, let's look at the bigger context of video gaming as a whole. This was before everything was 3D open worlds and first-person shooters. Heading into this era, the non-RPG games were mostly stuff like Mario and Street Fighter, in various forms and IPs. There were a few outliers (notably Zelda, which is probably part of how it took off), but for the most part everything was jumping and punching. Even the crappy movie tie-in games that came out every year were mostly platformers.

I couldn't tell you whether it was intentional or not, but RPGs served as a foil to all the real-time dexterity-based gameplay dominating the field at the time. It was long-form gaming. Instead of giving you two minutes of testing your input skills and reaction time where one or two screwups would spell doom, they gave you a long series of interconnected decisions across multiple axes, whose consequences were cumulative rather than immediately catastrophic. Other games were threatening Game Over if you screwed up a couple times in 90 seconds. RPGs threatened Game Over if you had accumulated too many inefficient decisions over the past couple of hours. That's the paradigm you need to keep in mind to understand these games.

The Core Gameplay Structure

The RPGs of yesteryear had a pretty consistent play structure. You would be In Town, where you can refresh all your various resources, and then you would Venture Out (whether across the map to a different town, or to an important dead end and then back to the original town). In other words, gameplay is about getting from one "refresh point" to the next before the resources that you had refreshed became fully depleted. Where this gets interesting, and indeed the "meat" of gameplay, is the variety of resources and how they all intersect with each other.

The Resources

• HP — You can think of HP as the most foundational resource, because it's the one that determines if when you've lost. When a character is out of HP, they're unusable. When the whole party is out of HP, it's game over. Every time you engage in combat, even if it's easy, you're going to lose at least a little bit of HP, putting you at least a little bit closer to losing.
• Actions/Turns — As I'm sure you already know, these RPGs were using turn-based combat. Do you use this character's turn to attack? Heal? Set up a buff? Use an item? If it's a long fight, a buff could yield great dividends, but in a shorter fight it's a wasted turn. Healing might be what one character is best at, but if you're paying enough attention to know that the fighter almost killed that monster, maybe it's better to have the healer smack 'em and remove that source of HP drain from the fight.
• Mana/PP — The ability to do things. This presents the possibility of "running out of gas." In most RPGs you had a "normal attack" with no cost, but it's a single-target attack that's often your least powerful option for most characters. Usually somebody has an attack that hits every enemy, or is more powerful, or gets a bonus against this enemy because it's the right element; but it costs Mana and you only have so much. If you use it now, this fight ends faster, making you lose less HP, but that's also true for the future fight that it becomes unavailable for if you use it now. Which fight do you use it in to minimize your overall attrition?
• Status — You might not think of status conditions (or the absence thereof) as a resource, but they sort of are. If someone is debuffed to only deal half damage, then you can't defeat the monsters as fast, so they get more rounds to attack you, so you lose more resources. If someone is poisoned, then your HP loss per round has increased, so each round counts for more attrition. If someone is muted, they can't use their special abilities, which (depending on the character) might lengthen the battle and thus cost you more HP. How much loss does each of these cause you? Is it more or less than the loss incurred by spending someone's turn (and an item or MP) to clear the condition? Is it likely the condition just comes back right after you clear it, meaning you wasted a turn? Do you play those odds?
• Items/Money — "Refresh Points" are usually towns that include an item shop, where you can buy consumable items. The most basic is the health potion, which directly restores HP, making you last longer. Likewise, Mana-restoring items are potent because they extend the usage of your entire suite of abilities (as a result, they're often expensive or hard to acquire). You can also get items that clear status conditions, which presents an important set of decisions for the player: if you buy a status-clearing item whose associated condition doesn't come up, you wasted money that could have been used on a more relevant item. But if you encounter a status that you can't clear, you're going to accelerate your attrition for the rest of the dungeon. What do you buy, and how many of each?
• XP/Money — You gain XP from battling enemies, and that XP makes you more powerful. Effectively, you suffer attrition in exchange for eventually reducing your rate of attrition. Similarly, you gain money from battles, which you can then convert into the aforementioned items (or upgraded equipment), creating a second way that you trade attrition for future resilience against it. An interesting difference, though, is that a level up will immediately improve your performance, while money will be completely worthless until you reach the next Refresh Point, making it more like an investment for the future.

Example: Viridian Forest

Let's put all that together in a familiar example so you can see how all these threads tug on each other. We'll use Pokémon, partly because everybody's familiar with it, and partly because it lets us set aside things like party dynamics and area attacks so we can focus more on the foundational resource exchanges. So let's examine a classic trek through Viridian Forest. (We're going to assume original Red/Blue games for this, since they were released closest to when this type of RPG's popularity and formula was at its peak.)

You're starting in Viridian City, which is a Refresh Point: there's an "inn" (the PokeCenter) to heal your party and an "item shop" (the PokeMart) to buy supplies. Your objective is to travel through Viridian Forest and reach Pewter City on the other end. Just like Viridian City, Pewter City is a Refresh Point, so if you reach it then you're safe; you have "cleared the dungeon." You fail if your whole party is out of HP before you get there.

What are you up against along the way? Along the path from end to end, you have to fight several trainers. Some are avoidable, but they're also your only source of money and your best source of XP. Additionally, most of the path is through long grass, meaning random encounters (wild pokemon) will occur many times, but the number of encounters and what exactly you'll face is unknown.

The roster of enemies is significant. The Caterpies are pretty basic, presenting minor HP attrition. The Weedles have the chance to poison you, which vastly accelerates the attrition (and in early games, keep depleting HP outside of battle). The Metapods and Kakunas don't present any direct threat to your HP, but they have high physical defense that rises every turn, costing a lot of PP to defeat. That said, they also offer lots of XP compared to other enemies.

So let's imagine you're halfway into the forest by now. You have a random encounter with a Weedle. What do you do? You could use your Normal attack that you have (or, "had") 30-35 of, but it will take two hits to finish it. That will add up over the course of the dungeon. Not to mention, Weedle gets to strike back in between the two hits, and it might poison you. Do you play the low odds? Do you decide it's fine because you brought an antidote (or because you picked Bulbasaur, who can't be poisoned)? Or do you decide not to risk it and use your limited supply of Embers/Bubbles to one-shot it? (Do you know yet whether Bubble will one-shot it?)

Of course, maybe a wild Weedle's little bit of XP (and zero cash) isn't worth spending an Ember or two Tackles or an Antidote, so you want to run away. But your attempt to run away might fail, and if it does, the Weedle gets a free attack, which will deplete some HP and possibly poison you—exactly what you were trying to avoid. Do you try anyway? If it takes you 2-3 tries to run, then you've suffered the same attrition as fighting, but without gaining XP. If you fail to run once or twice and then switch to fighting, you've achieved the same result as fighting in the first place but with additional losses. Are you sure you want to try to run?

Oh! Now you've encountered a wild Pikachu! Do you want to catch it? It's a very rare encounter, so it seems a waste to pass up this opportunity. But what does the catching process cost you? You would have to hold back and carefully lower its HP without knocking it out, letting it hit you in the meantime. Then you start throwing PokeBalls (each of which represents a Potion or Antidote you didn't buy), and each time it breaks free it gets to hit you again. And throughout this process, every time it hits you, there's a chance it paralyzes you. That means your enemies always get to hit first (faster attrition!) and sometimes you lose your turn (longer battles, more attrition!). Can you afford that, based on how close to the end you are and the current state of your party?

Hm, you're pretty deep into the forest, but your party is looking rough and you're low on items. Do you double back, return to the original Refresh Point, and try again? On the one hand, any trainers you fought don't refresh and you might be a higher level now, so maybe a second go is easier. But getting out means walking through more random encounters; can you make it, or are you close enough to the end that it's actually better to keep going? Also, what's the state of your item inventory? You haven't made enough money to resupply, so your second attempt will have fewer resources. What happens if you get poisoned as soon as you return to the forest but you've already used all your Antidotes? Do you just keep restarting over and over until you get lucky enough to not get poisoned for an entire run? 

Long-Form Give-and-Take

As you can see, there are lots of decisions to make. What's important to note is that none of the decisions are about whether you can win the current battle. A game like Street Fighter asks "Can you defeat this opponent?" That's not what a SNES-era RPG asks. It's not asking "Can you beat a Weedle?" over and over again. It's asking "Can you defeat this dungeon?" and the Weedle is just one component. The challenges exist on the dungeon scale, not the individual fight scale. If you wanted to continue the analogy with Street Fighter: an RPG fight doesn't correlate to a Street Fighter match, it correlates to a single move in a Street Fighter match. An entire RPG fight, start to finish, is the equivalent of a Street Fighter player reading the current situation and then selecting and executing the correct move. Failure worsens your position, and it's not until you accumulate enough failures that you finally lose.

Unfortunately, sometimes games inherit as "legacy mechanics" the things that were refined for use in SNES-era RPGs, but without the full, systemic context they were developed for. In some cases this is new games repurposing old mechanics, sometimes it's an existing franchise making "quality of life changes" that remove a mechanic without accounting for the ripple effects of that change.

It doesn't take much of a change to deflate the whole thing; that's the nature of a multi-faceted system. For example, scroll back up to our Viridian Forest example and reread it with a change in mind. What if your party fully healed after every fight? What if you didn't have PP and could always use whatever move you wanted? What if things like running away or catching had a 100% success rate? Take any one of those changes and plug it into the example, and you start to see the consequences cascading down through the whole play experience. Games are about making decisions, and changing even one thing in this system starts to make a whole lot of decisions cease to be decisions.

That's why you're so tired of this or that RPG mechanic. Not because the mechanic is bad, but because it's been disconnected from its purpose. It matters how a mechanic is used. It matters how it fits into the larger play structures of a game.

So That's That

I don't really have a fancy conclusion, I just wanted there to be someplace on the internet where someone could read about how some of these weirdly ubiquitous RPG mechanics got their start and how much sense they made in their original context. Hope you enjoyed!

Game Comparison: Super Mario RPG vs The Thousand Year Door

Today I'm going to compare an old video game and a less-old video game. Not because anything really needs to be said about them, but because I played them both and couldn't help analyzing them in my head. And since I have a blog, I'm making that your problem.

The very-old game is Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES, 1996). I played the hell out of it when I was a kid, and I have replayed it multiple times during my adult life. The less-old game is Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (GameCube, 2004). I had never played any of the Paper Mario games, but this one got a remake on the Switch so I played that. (Incidentally, SMRPG also got a recent Switch remake, but I haven't tried it because I still have an old cartridge and my childhood SNES.)

The reason I couldn't help comparing these two games while recently playing the latter is because it was pitched to me as a spiritual successor to the former, and thus it was suggested that liking SMRPG made it probable that I would also like TTYD. They're both RPGs (well, maybe), they're both full of colorful characters and wacky antics, and so forth. SMRPG was Mario's first foray into RPGs and TTYD inherits some of that DNA.

There's a general comparison to be made that applies across pretty much all subjects, so we'll start there and then apply it to various facets of the games. Here's the two games in a nutshell: Super Mario RPG has a strong core with some flourishes on the side; The Thousand Year Door is more like a large collection of small bits.

The Story

SMRPG has a strong narrative theme: the status quo has been disrupted and must be set right. Not just in terms of the world-saving stakes, but as a core theme throughout. Lots of lives have been disrupted by the inciting incident, and you help them each on your way to your larger goal of fixing the world. The core characters—Mario, Peach, and Bowser—had a status quo of kidnappings and rescues that was disrupted mid-cycle and we get to watch them cope with it by joining forces to return to that status quo. (It even shows at the meta level: the events that form the premise of all Mario's platformers gets disrupted so now he has to do his first RPG about it.) Yes, unrelated things happen along the way, but there's a certain consistency at the core.

TTYD is more like a collection of vignettes with some stakes in the background. You go to a series of self-contained locales with distinct themes and no connective tissue. Your magic map says "go to spooky zone next" and you hop in the pipe to spooky zone and clear the spooky dungeon and then your magic map tells you the next zone. Each of these is sectioned off as a "chapter" that feels very compartmentalized, siloed off from everything else. The reason for even doing all this stuff in the first place keeps changing (from "treasure hunt" to "find the princess" to "save the world") without really affecting what you were going to be doing anyway.

The Characters

SMRPG has a core cast of five characters: the classic trio plus two new friends, Mallow and Geno. You've got all five in your party by the time you reach the halfway point of the game, so you have plenty of time to get to know each of them. They all have their own personalities that you get to see as they interact with Mario, NPCs, and even each other. They all have their own ties and investments in the core story. I'm not saying they have incredible depth (it's still a Mario game) but they're fully individualized and they have time to develop.

TTYD has something like 8-ish companions for Mario: one for each chapter, plus a bonus one I got in my playthrough. Each one has a defining quirk and initial conflict when you meet them, then they get absorbed into your party and kind of stop existing. They don't really interact, and dialogue with NPCs is just the same lines performed by whoever you happen to have out at the time. This makes them functionally interchangeable as characters, defined primarily by their gameplay mechanics (see below). Goombella is a bit of an exception since her Tattle ability gives her lots of extra dialogue to get to know her, and Vivian stands out for having an actual multi-chapter story. But they're the exceptions.

The Gameplay

SMRPG has consistent core gameplay—or more like two cores, since the game is a direct hybrid of RPGs and platformers. In combat, you have a pretty traditional setup (attack, magic, item, defend), with the twist that instead of crits you can press the button again to boost your damage/effect. A handful of spells use different action commands, but most spells and all basic attacks and defense use the same core mechanic. Outside of combat, you have light platforming elements. Mario is known for his jumping, and uses that to get around a lot. There are several minigames, and some of them have unique mechanics (like the Yoshi race), but others build on the core platforming element (the second half of Midas River, or the hill on the way to Marrymore). So like I said earlier, a core with some flourishes.

TTYD has an incredible number of mechanics. In combat, every attack has its own unique control inputs. Multiply that by the number of characters, plus also your Star Specials, and it's a truly staggering number of mechanics to learn. And that's to say nothing of customizing your build using Badges! Outside of combat, I wouldn't call TTYD a platformer, as jumping serves only to climb stairs. Instead it's a little like old-school Pokemon, where basically you just walk around but then you unlock certain abilities to let you access new areas. So like if Pokemon had 15+ HM moves—one per partner and a few for Mario. Having so many means each is used only a few times; basically they each get used in the first dungeon where you get them, then unlock one item in Rogueport, then get used so infrequently thereafter that I often forgot I had them. Also TTYD has the equivalent of two different types of Korok Seeds to collect, because everything needs collectibles now I guess.

The TLDR

So yeah, it really is "core with flourishes" versus "pile of small bits" all the way down. So I guess if you know which of those styles you like better, you know which game you're likely to enjoy more. Personally, I like Super Mario RPG more than The Thousand Year Door because I like that core-with-flourishes model better than having a million things that are mostly forgettable or interchangeable. Maybe you're the opposite, which is fine. And to be clear, I did still have fun with TTYD. (Shout out to my girls, Goombella and Vivian.) But I probably won't replay it, and I'm glad I played a library copy instead of buying it.

P. S. — Odds & Ends

Both games keep Mario basically mute, never putting his dialogue on screen. SMRPG has him explain things via shapeshifting pantomime, while TTYD uses a simple "I'm explaining now" hand gesture. The former was charming and fun, the latter was admittedly more efficient.

Holy hell, TTYD spent a lot of time on tutorials. I almost walked away before Hooktail's castle because I was spending so much time on tutorials for mechanics that hadn't really created any interesting gameplay yet. I stuck it out and it got better, but oof.

Both games let you take a shower, which is probably one of the most bizarrely specific similarities in the games. In SMRPG, you walk into a separate room that you don't see the inside of, and the shower happens behind closed doors with no details. In TTYD, Peach takes a shower behind a small curtain, and the game makes sure to show you that she's naked and lets you know when she's toweling off, which seemed weirdly horny (at least by Mario Game standards). It's also not the only time the game makes sure you know Peach is naked.

Relatedly, in TTYD, things get a bit harem-y. Nearly every woman except Peach kisses Mario at least once, and two different women (again, not Peach) are on the verge of love confessions toward him by the end. 

TTYD door did EarthBound's friends-along-the-way final boss powerup thing. EB's was better.

When I finally looked up whether there was a way to increase my inventory limit in TTYD, I discovered I needed to hit Floor 50 in the pit. I had already been in the pit and stopped at 40 for no particular reason. I always do this. I missed Hestu in BOTH Zelda Switch games. Why am I like this?

SMRPG has you traveling around to collect seven important stars, so it gave me a chuckle when I realized I'd be doing the same thing in TTYD.

Am I the only one who thought that one X-Naut lieutenant guy looked like Dr. Robotnik?