Staring into the abyss while trying to discern what goes in this outline. Anyone want a little mini-thread about ttrpg game design (and also most other game design) that’s basically what came from talking with the anime hermit @LiteralSoup? Since they won’t write it themselves.

I took a nap instead and let me tell you that DID NOT help matters at all.

So, like, thread incoming maybe.

So let’s talk about TTRPG systems and their goals-through-mechanics a bit.

There has been some Discourse about Powered by the Apocalypse games, which often use a 2d6+(1 to 4 Stat) rolling mechanic and moves (which will call for you to make specific rolls or bypass a roll).

There’s been a lot of threads and some good (and not-so-good) points made all around. But I think we need to delve deeper than just rolling mechanics to understand what a system is truly aiming for...

... and we’re gonna use pop-punk and wrestling to illustrate the point!

So, since it was the system up for debate, let’s look at PbtA.

In Apocalypse World, you are generally not playing heroes. You’re playing someone who, in the ecosystem of the world, is neither good nor evil. If they didn’t exist, the world goes on. You’re the Miz/Cobra Starship.

People who know wrestling and also game design (so like 10 of us?) maybe just had something click. But for everyone else, lemme tell you about the Miz.

If you’re An Old, you may recognize him from MTV’s The Real World: Back to New York and Tough Enough. As a cast member.

You see, once upon a time, he was just the weird kid who liked wrestling enough to try to be a wrestler, a goal he mentioned constantly. He eventually achieved that goal and joined WWE. And for a while, his gimmick was STILL being that weird kid.

What set him apart, made him a PC so to speak, was the ability to act really REALLY well he still had to hone that but it def helped him out. He’s been good. He’s been bad. He’s been in-between. His personality has changed little but his approach to the narrative has.

He’s been the underdog, the cocky guy at the top, the dark horse... All by changing his reaction and approach to the situation. He’s not a hero though, he’s in this for his own ends at all times.

Similarly, there’s Cobra Starship and in particular frontman Gabe Saporta. Oh, Cobra Starship... Oh, Gabe Saporta... Where does one start with this band?

Probably the thing Gabe repeated a lot himself: “I’m not your role model and I’m not your hero.”

You see, Cobra was the fun party band. Their “origin story” is that Gabe found himself out in the desert, high on peyote, and spoke with a cobra (from space?) who told him to go to the emo and scene kids and tell them to stop taking themselves so seriously.

This mans been a PC.

And that was the band’s aim: to make the music they liked and you might like too. They made money doing it, sure. And they gave me the mantra “fake it ‘til you make it”, which I’m gonna say has served me well. But there was no noble goal here. Just some fun.

This is the sort of thing an Apocalypse World PC does: affect massive change largely by accident and failure. Which is, conversely, why failure is so often a state you end up in.

This is also where I think a lot of hacks end up falling apart.

Something you may have noticed with both the Miz and Cobra Starship is that they’re trying to fill a void of some kind. It might be a small void, it might be partly fictitious, but it’s still there. Apocalypse World also does this but not always implicitly. Not every hack does.

For the Miz, that void is basically confidence of self and outside validation as a character. Something he brings up a lot in his most memorable promos is how often he’s there, how he bootstraps himself, how he juggles other responsibilities.

For Gabe Saporta, I mentioned the void: the fun that had eked away from scene and emo music. That often got CS labeled as more pop than punk (which, if you know the band’s backgrounds and especially his...). Here’s their first song.

Apocalypse World asks you to consider the same things with its rules as written while also explicitly telling you, via its mechanics, that you will likely fail at getting them.

The hack I think best illustrates this is Monsterhearts.

In Monsterhearts, you play as teenagers who are also (usually) monsters. You have a need particular to your playbook (werewolf crave dominance, vampire craves blood and dominance, ghoul craves flesh and... you get it). But you’re still a teenager. You still want validation too.

World Wide Wrestling asks you to consider your void via relationships, but in 1e didn’t have good ways to try to fulfill it, largely because of the era of wrestling it emulates.

Other hacks I’ve played didn’t have even ask at all.

A lot of PbtA hacks fall apart at this stage because they simply copy the formula of Apocalypse World without understanding what holds it together. It took me a minute to get there.

Is PbtA dead/too old/in need of replacement? Nah. It’s just a tool to be pulled out as needed.

When you want to illustrate PCs as doing anything (maybe everything?) to fill a lack within themselves, failing and fucking up along the way, consider reaching for PbtA. You don’t need the dice mechanics (I mean, Blades changed them) but dice mechanics aren’t the whole point.

Let’s do d20 systems! We’re talking Dungeons & Dragons. We’re talking Pathfinder. We’re talking the d20 System and its games, as spawned from the 3.5 OGL/OGC/SRD. Because you know what d20 systems are a lot like?

...

My Chemical Romance and John Cena.

We gotta start from the top here so let’s go. In d20 systems, you are a hero. There’s no way around that one. There are no significant mechanics that complicate this. There is little rules-as-written that will prevent this. The one that could is alignment and...

Beyond that, you’re considered to be competent in your chosen field (class or equivalent). While you don’t always feel this (rolling a 1 feels bad always), it doesn’t make it untrue. You do become more competent through progression, so it generally becomes less of an issue.

But you’re always the epitome of Big Damned Heroes to someone. You’re special. You stand apart. You’re going to save the world (or destroy it, I guess).

When you try to do anything that departs too much from that core, you often end up breaking the game.

You know who else wants to save the world? Gerard Way. They’ve said a lot and in multiple avenues that they wanted to save/heal the world through music. That’s an enby who has played a lot of bards in their life.

A lot of MCR’s music is about saving the world. That world might be as small as just one other person or yourself or as large as the post-apocalyptic wastelands. MCR wants to be the hero or, at the very least, help inspire you to be one. There’s a lot of hope there.

Similarly, we have the man, the meme, the paladin, John Cena. Even in feuds where he’s ostensibly the villain, he’s the hero. With how he’s been billed over the years, that’s unlikely to change.

As the veil between kayfabe and reality thins, his irl charity adds to it.

This man can’t not be a hero. In much the same way a PC in a d20 system can’t. Not unless something outside of d20 is grafted onto the base mechanics.

And d20 tends to be little more than mechanical engagements to try to pull narrative levers. Emphasis on the try.

While d20 systems would like and often purport themselves to be capable of everything, they are limited in how one can truly engage with the narrative via mechanics. In the end, the one with the most pull over the narrative is always the GM/DM or the author of the adventure.

Unless the GM makes a point of complicating the lives of the PCs and handing narrative control to them at least occasionally, the only one with narrative control is the GM or the adventure author. Every choice of the is boiled down to a binary yes/no with no nuance.

So, if you want Big Damned Heroes and a level of assumes competence in PCs, then you definitely should be started with d20 and similar systems. Be the John Cena and Gerard Way you want to see in the (probably fantasy) world.