GRAHAM
Okay. Very excited.
RYAN
You should be.
GRAHAM
Let’s explain a bit. In a moment of inspiration, or intrusive thoughts, I decided I wanted to see what every RPG ever made was– as part of a grand timeline of influences and design. We’ve all seen that purple internet octopus of literary movements. So what could be better than a strict timeline? A timeline of ideas.
RYAN
For a long time I’ve thought it would be really cool to see a family tree of RPGs. Track RPG genealogy, as it were. This feels motivated by similar feelings. I want to see how ideas grow over time – how games, movements, and art influence each other.
GRAHAM
Well, that’s the upcoming overly ambitious project. And to be honest, the early conclusions are so far what I already knew: the Sahelanthropus of RPGs is just Traveler lol. It influenced everything, from RuneQuest (1978) and the first edition of Call of Cthulhu (1981), to the first Palladium Games and the oddly beloved James Bond “007” RPG (1983) from Victory Games, and, of course, Paranoia (1984). I’ve heard the phrase “stuck in the 80’s” bandied about a lot when people get grumpy about popular RPG design.
RYAN
You’ve already sent a few titles my way from this era, and there are some truly wild entries.
GRAHAM
Well, that’s what I’m most interested in at the moment. The Wild Entries. (Wild Entriseas?)
The genealogical idea takes quite a bit of analysis and a whole lot of theory. “Was Game A actually a predecessor of a whole movement? What defines a movement? What games belong to this movement or that one?” It reminds me of an Art History class.
RYAN
Those are all ideas I would love to dig into, but as you said, that’s an ambitious project. One that would take genuine research to do it justice. Worthwhile, absolutely. But certainly ambitious.
GRAHAM
But you and I live in this weirdo indie space. We’re drawn to the novel and the innovative. It’s why we write what we do and play what we do. In my personal life, my leaps forward in terms of writing or just thinking about RPGs were the result of playing new and uniquely structured designs.
RYAN
I’d say that you and I are interested in the limits of games. What can they do, and how can they do it? Almost in the same way that contemporary art represents a very different attitude to the classics.
GRAHAM
Exactly. My first instinct was to look for the older oddities. The “indie RPG scene”, such that it is, I’d say roughly is about 20 years old. It has a few big standouts, from “My Life with Master” by Paul Czege in 2003, “Dogs in the Vineyard” by Vincent Baker in 2004, with the explosion of “Power’ed-By-Le-Apocalypse” post-2010 with Vincent and Meg Baker’s Apocalypse World.
RYAN
The modern indie scene really does feel like a movement that is a response to more traditional games, or the so-called canon of RPGs. I mean, it’s an essential part of any creative pursuit.
GRAHAM
Absolutely. And I’d argue that they’ve always been this way. We just hit the 50 year anniversary of the Hasbro™ Presents The Dragon Game™™. And Traveler (1977) and all its descendants were an immediate reaction to it, with its characteristics and skill systems.
RYAN
As the beginning of a form of media, we were still discovering what it could do. I think of old black and white “wholesome” TV compared to modern storytelling for streaming services.
GRAHAM
And in the black-and-white days of yore, you still had weirdos and outliers! We wouldn’t have every modern speculative fiction anthology without Twilight Zone.
RYAN
Or the strangeness that stems from The Addams Family.
GRAHAM
Well, that’s what I was looking for. The creepy and the crawly.
What were the innovators and weirdos in the RPG olden times? Who was messing with the format and doing the lyric games of the 80s and 90s? I made a big list and I sent it to you.
And that’s what brings us to now.
RYAN
I recognized a good number of titles from that list. But there were more that I’d never heard of. You certainly seem to know more of them than I do. I’m a big fan of something that you like to do: Name or Game. Where you give me (or some other lucky person!) a name of a character or the title of a game, and I pitch that character or game. But I want to take it in a different direction.
Looking at all those titles and having no clue what many of them are. I went ahead and chose a title, and wrote you a little game pitch. Your goal is to read my pitch, and try to guess which name I chose.
GRAHAM
Oh man. So excited. Okay, so I haven’t looked at this yet. Not at all. I’m going in completely fresh.
RYAN
And here I am, waiting for you to look. When I make stuff up, I love getting immediate feedback before running back to the drawing board. I have been waiting for this moment.
“Tomb of the Forgotten PC!”
You’re the remaining member of an adventuring party. Your companions are lost. Not necessarily dead, but definitely lost. Very lost. Just like you. But you’re an Adventurer. You’ve always been able to find a way out. And this dungeon isn’t about to change that.
GRAHAM
I already like it.
You find yourself in a 10x10 room.
GRAHAM
The best kind of room there is! The name of your first random chart is Decorate the Dungeon. Incredible. Very Bug Dish. Khanian, if you will.
RYAN
I’m so pleased you think so.
You have 3 skills: Contemplate, Dream, Languish.
GRAHAM
Damn right I do.
Assign the number 4 to the skill you do without meaning to.
Assign 3 to the skill you wish you didn’t have.
Assign 2 to the skill you know you should rely on.
GRAHAM
Hahaa. Lyricing it up today. I like this because it sounds like a riddle. “The man who made it didn't want it. The man who bought it didn't need it. The man who got it didn't know it.”
You have 3 topics that consume your mind: (The fiction of) Currency, (Justifications for) Violence, (The virtues of) Lying.
GRAHAM
I’m continuing to enjoy your writing here. Deconstructing the mentality and morality of “the dungeon crawl” continues to be of larger interest to me. Absolutely in a philosophical way, less in a “wow murder hobo sports ball” surface-level parody. In the last 5e game I played, my aged king character slowed down the action to address the other PCs and ask them if they were prepared to kill and what it meant if they did.
RYAN
I’m glad that theme came through immediately.
Whenever you…
Want to know how you got here
Wonder about your friends
Investigate something in the room
Consider using violence
Try to get out of the room
Choose the topic you’re thinking about, and the skill you’re using to think about it.
Roll dice equal to your skill rank and read the highest result
6: Come to a conclusion that sates your mind
5,4: Reach an answer the contradicts something else you believe
3,2,1: Glimpse the futility of the situation.
Five of a kind: you find a way out of the dungeon
GRAHAM
Wow, there’s a lot to see here. So the “critical” result is that I’m instructed to come up with an answer my character finds satisfying to my mini moral quandary. That, in and of itself, is pretty complex and hilarious mental gymnastics. On your “Blade in the Dark” mixed result, I am confronted with changing my mind, something that I think most people find nearly impossible, if all the cognitive biases are to be believed. And on a “Failure” result (again, really only because this is the format of how these d6 pools have been used, but I am asked to use my “highest result”), my denial gets a little crack. Hysterical.
And finally, if I get an impossible die result, I can escape?
RYAN
I think it’s pretty funny. I don’t want to say too much until you’ve read and digested the whole thing. But I had a good time writing this.
GRAHAM
Is this “The Price of Freedom?”
RYAN
Oh, that’s a solid guess. Incorrect. But I definitely see the connections.
GRAHAM
Damn, should’ve gone with my instincts. I curved that way because of all the goshdang philosophy you jammed into this one.
Is this “Dinky Dungeons?”
RYAN
What could be dinkier than a one-room, 10x10 dungeon with no features? What could be more absurd than a dungeon with no entrance or exit, that seems to exist for no particular reason. You’ve got it, my friend.
GRAHAM
There’s a Twilight Zone episode called “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”, which is a clown, a hobo, a ballerina, a bagpiper, and a soldier stuck in a room with no doors. Very “No Exit”. It’s a silly episode ultimately, but I love the odd purgatory of it. It’s also about problem solving, in a way, like a Star Trek episode (like “Allegiance” from TNG, where Picard is stuck in a room with three other aliens and they try to sort out what’s going on.)
RYAN
The dungeon crawl is a ubiquitous part of trad RPGs, and I wanted to turn the notion on its head. The name “Dinky Dungeon” sounds a bit silly, so I wanted to lean into that as well. So it’s a game about contemplating the dungeon. But, y’know. Silly.
GRAHAM
You also slipped in that absurdist End State. I recently joked with one of our friends that his game, too, was impossible to finish. The premise of his game was about “being surprised,” until you weren’t, which ended the game. Then you were surprised when the game ended, which only made another surprise and the game continued.
RYAN
I don’t know if I’m using the term “absurdism” appropriately with regards to art, but the End State feels important. It’s this essential part of game structure and design. In board games the first question is often “How do you win?” It’s the motivation for doing everything else. Even in RPGs where winning is a more nebulous concept, a dungeon can generally be completed successfully or not. So here’s an end state because that’s what a game needs.
GRAHAM
Here it’s a nod to an end state. You need five-of-a-kind when the maximum dice you can have in a pool is four. You’re teasing it. I suppose in your “trad RPGs” you don’t have any explicit end state. You tend to in your indie one-shot specific games: “the game is over when ~~ happens,” like drawing the last card in “For the Queen.” It frames the action of the game. But, like the Game Police idea, nothing actually stops you from just standing up from the table and walking away in any game, one with a described end state or otherwise.
RYAN
In terms of structure, End States can create tension and motivation. Or even act as a timer. I’d say it’s generally a good thing. Even in bigger, adventure-y games, groups I play with usually want to hit a natural breaking point. A sense of closure, even if things are still in flux.
GRAHAM
That’s the ol’ folk game thing again, which happens in your “trad games”. You, Ryan, learned about human needs and story structure, just by doing it. It’s trial-and-error and happens over time. No tee-tee-ar-pee-gee book told you to do that. I think that’s fascinating and interesting about this kind of play, but it took work and introspection on your part. That doesn’t always come naturally to folks.
RYAN
We do circle back to the idea of folk games often when talking about games. This also touches on what I think it means to “get better” at RPGs.
GRAHAM
The Systems Mastery of Storytelling. Or just being a good friend.
