Roleplaying Games Are Nomic Games

Roleplaying games, particularly in their most freeform state, are often a kind of Nomic game. Per Wikipedia:

Nomic is a game created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber, the rules of which include mechanisms for changing those rules, usually beginning by way of democratic voting.[1] The game demonstrates that in any system where rule changes are possible, a situation may arise in which the resulting laws are contradictory or insufficient to determine what is in fact legal.

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Initially, gameplay occurs in clockwise order, with each player taking a turn. In that turn, they propose a change in rules that all the other players vote on, and then roll a die to determine the number of points they add to their score. If this rule change is passed, it comes into effect at the end of their round. Any rule can be changed with varying degrees of difficulty, including the core rules of the game itself.

Peter Suber’s book, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, is available here. Appendix 3, beginning on page 199 by the PDF pagination, is about Nomic. But the Wikipedia summary is sufficient for understanding the basics.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

The logic behind Nomic subtly influences many kinds of games. Calvinball from Calvin and Hobbes is, of course, explicitly a Nomic game. It lacks the rigor of Nomic, as well as enough players to incentivize negotiation through voting, something Nomic’s rules specifically identify as an issue: 

Two can play, but three or more make for a better game. With only two players, there is no (initial) difference between unanimity and majority rule, which takes away a lot of the fun. 

But in spirit, it is so accurate to Nomic that I wonder if Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson read the original Scientific American article and got the idea there.

Other, more conventional games have Nomic qualities, insofar as there is almost always a socially navigated layer of agreement above the actual rules of the game. Common games played with standard decks of playing cards, for example, typically have many variations or house rules. The game cannot begin until the players agree on the rules they are using.

Even if the rules and procedure of the game are unambiguous, unforeseen events can arise that can only be resolved by group concurrence; which is to say, through a Nomic overlayer. What happens when a card is accidentally revealed? Do the players shuffle it back into the deck? Discard it? Is it replaced or not? Even a decision as simple as ending a board game before anyone has won involves a group discussion of whether to just conclude the game without a victor, or set the pieces aside to continue later. 

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

But TTRPGs are perhaps the most natural type of game to incorporate Nomic aspects. Even the loosest RPGs have some structure or rules; otherwise they would simply be freeform improv sessions (and there is nothing wrong with that; but it is no longer a "game"). And even the tightest TTRPGs, with the most intense procedure and the strictest rules, will inevitably require Nomic negotiation to amend and patch the rules, because as a game system, a TTRPG is an engine that produces corner cases, contradictions, and exceptions.

Nomic games cut directly to the idea of the social contract that is crucial to TTRPGs. Suber's anecdote  about removing the rule that says "follow the rules" in the Paradox of Self-Amendment is instructive:

After Nomic was first published in Scientific American, a German philosopher wrote to me insisting that Rule 101 (that players should obey the rules) should be omitted from the Initial Set and made part of a truly immutable shell. He missed an essential point of the game. Rule 101 is included precisely so that it can be amended; if players amend or repeal it, they deserve what they get.

 Surely everyone who has played TTRPGs – particularly at a young age – has encountered this problem, right? When my friends and I were kids, and D&D took the place previously held by purely freeform imaginary storytelling, we learned that while the rules were optional, we had something to gain by the constraints they imposed. The need to abide by rules to keep a game coherent is obvious and intuitive with a board game, and even more explicit with a video game, where (short of cheats and mods) one typically cannot alter the game’s rules much, if at all. 

But TTRPGs give the players more freedom than almost any other type of game. And with that freedom comes responsibility. There are no guard rails preventing you from changing, distorting, and ruining the game. And that’s what makes TTRPGs so fascinating.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Bonded Skills Through Flashbacks to Scenes of Bonding

I previously wrote about the disconnect that occurs in RPGs when the player doing most of the talking isn’t controlling the character with the best social interaction skill or ability modifier. I proposed several solutions to this source of dissonance. Here’s another. I have not (yet) tested this in a game.

When the PC doing the talking rolls to determine their success in a social scenario, they can use another PC’s superior modifier (or applicable skill, or die size, or whatever, depending on the system). In exchange, the two players must either collaboratively describe or act out a brief flashback between their characters.

The flashback should be short – five minutes is good. It should be something new; it can’t just rehash already-known events. It should have at least some indirect connection to the current social interaction. It doesn’t have to be direct and explicit; it could be indirect, or even metaphorical. But the two PCs need to establish some kind of connection between their characters, and explain how that past bond helps the character acting in the present exceed their solitary skillset.

An easy example is mentoring. Picture a scenario where the crude barbarian has to make a speech to the frog parliament. The charismatic bard would normally speak for the party, but the frogs want to hear the barbarian speak in their own words. The barbarian’s player would like to take advantage of that bard’s modifier on this roll. So the two players collaborate on a flashback to a month previous, when the barbarian reluctantly sought out the bard for speaking advice on some completely unrelated matter. That advice and mentoring now comes through in unexpected ways as the barbarian makes a still-crude – but surprisingly effective – argument to the assembled notables.

That’s a pretty direct example, but players could absolutely run with less literal ones. A flashback to an inconsequential chat during a quiet moment of downtime or the long boredom of travel could prove surprisingly relevant to an unanticipated scenario in the present. Players could put the focus on events that are certainly important to their characters, but rarely come up “on camera” in session; eating a meal together, for example. A flashback could also do double duty and resolve a loose thread, e.g., dealing with a minor antagonist from the characters’ early days.

Flashbacks like these are done best in small doses. Too many flashbacks can drain urgency and focus from the present scenario. Once per session, or less, is probably good for most games. Or, alternately, include a rule that each PC must do a flashback with each party member once before clearing their tally and having the option to “bond” with anyone once again. That would ensure that players don’t strictly conduct flashbacks just with the one character with the most desirable skills.

This idea could be applied to various kinds of skill and ability checks, with enough creative imagination. But social interaction is the space where I see players struggling with this player/character disconnect the most.

Turning the Wizard Question Around to Better Understand Our World

Last Week: Ignoring the Real World to Instead Learn to Cast Ninth Level Spells to Impress a Bunch of Wizards on an Internet Forum Whose Opinions’ Are Now Very Important to You for Some Reason

So if these wizards are not concerned with what the common people think, whose values and opinions would they care about? The Discord conversation concerned, in part, how humans naturally seek the attention and approval of their fellow people. Certainly this motivates real-world humans, and plays into many of the things they seek to accomplish in the real world. But I don’t think high-level characters necessarily see the broad population of other humans (or other sapient humanoids, more generally) as their peers. I believe wizards would care about status as measured by beings whose power equals or exceeds theirs; gods, extraplanar immortals, and, of course, other high-level wizards.

Following the logic of these ideas can take us back to the basic concept of domain play in classic and old-school D&D. Fighters rule land, clerics gather followers, wizards research knowledge. There is some overlap between those ideas, and exceptions, to be sure; a world should have an occasional witch-king or Merlin-style advisor. But in my conception, those are rare exceptions even among the already very small population of high-level adventurers.

So that’s my take – but I concede it is limited to certain assumptions about the metaphysical workings of a D&D world, how rare NPCs with class levels are, and the prevalence of magic. The approach of many high fantasy worlds – where NPC wizards and clerics in the double-digit level range seem happy to serve as government administrators, small business owners, and local troubleshooters – is not my approach. But it’s not a wrong approach, and it may suit certain styles of play. “It depends” wins another argument.

But it’s also interesting to turn this question around, and try to draw a more universal conclusion about the real world. Why do people seek status and power within nations and other organizations in the real world? Precisely because they cannot “level up” and access magic and supernatural power. Real-world historical rulers surely aspired to be like the 20th-level PC of their mythologies – Hercules or Gilgamesh or Merlin. But they were ultimately just mundane, mortal humans. They could not harness magical power or superhuman mastery of weapons. They had no choice but to build powerful societies because there was no other way to extend their influence and power far beyond themselves. 

In a fantasy world where magic and supernatural power exists, people would have that choice. That’s why I believe governments in medium- or high-magic worlds would be weaker, smaller, shorter-lived, and with less state capacity, simply because some percentage of the most talented potential rulers would instead be gaining power through magical means instead of building social and political power. 

We seek status because we lack the power to act so unilaterally as individuals in the way that the fantasy of fantasy RPGs allow us to do.

Ignoring the Real World to Instead Learn to Cast Ninth Level Spells to Impress a Bunch of Wizards on an Internet Forum Whose Opinions’ Are Now Very Important to You for Some Reason

Would high-level wizards in a fantasy TTRPG setting – say tier three and tier four, in modern D&D parlance – rule kingdoms and nations, whether directly or indirectly? Would they concern themselves with affairs of state?

These and related questions came up in a recent discussion on the Alexandrian Discord. They got stuck in my brain, and a blog post is the only reliable way to pry them out.

The discussion concerned the degree to which powerful D&D characters – particularly wizards – either would or would not seek real-world status and power in a manner that would be familiar to us from historical examples in the pre-modern real world. Would developing infrastructure, taxing the populace, raising armies, and otherwise participating in statecraft matter to them? Or would such worldly concerns be irrelevant to their goals and interests? 

I am firmly in the latter camp; in my own games, a character wielding such powerful magic simply has better ways to achieve their goals. Some other high-level characters – fighters or paladins, for example – might (might…) choose this route. But not a wizard.

It was clear from the Discord discussion that worldbuilding assumptions underpinning this question varied greatly. For example, the more the material plane is the metaphysical “center of the universe,” the more plausible it is that a wizard would invest resources in controlling mundane elements of it. In a cosmology where only mortal souls on the material plane can worship gods, perhaps the conventional control exerted by temporal nations would matter to a wizard.

But in my own conception of how wizards work, they would have better ways to achieve their goals. They would isolate themselves in their wizard towers (or better yet, off-plane domiciles) and focus their work on research and exploration. They would have little time for the values and priorities of the humans of their world. And doing so would make them a target of rivals and enemies more than it would help them. 

I believe that governments in medium- and high-magic fantasy worlds would be even more susceptible to decapitation strikes than their real-world equivalents, so high-level characters would have a strong incentive to decrease their visibility, exposure, and entanglement with organizations and governing structures. Some of my earliest posts on this blog were an attempt to reason out how societies in this kind of world would differ from equivalent historical societies in the real world.

Next Week: Turning the Wizard Question Around to Better Understand Our World

You Separate in a Tavern...

“You meet in a tavern” is the “It was a dark and stormy night” of TTRPGs. Cliches have their place, and people who work hard to subvert cliches are often missing the point by prioritizing novelty over usability. So naturally I will now subvert this famous cliche.

A group of strangers, by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are cursed. The source of the curse is incidental to this campaign premise. The important thing is that they don’t know each other before they are cursed, and perhaps don’t even get along. But the curse prevents them from leaving each others’ general vicinity for long. They are stuck together.

Shortly after coming to terms with their circumstances, the players learn (through villain monologue, friendly NPC expert, downtime spent on research, whatever) that the only way to break the curse is to find the mystical Tavern of Fond Farewells. This location is famously difficult to find, but is sought by those who need to truly let go; the grief-stricken, the lovelorn. 

How far apart can the characters get? What happens if they are forcibly separated? It could vary depending on the system and style of play. If I were to run such a game, I would investigate this question with the players at session zero.

Speaking of cliches, this is a tried and true gimmick in fiction. “People from different backgrounds are thrown together by fate; they dislike each other or come into conflict at first; but eventually come to like/respect each other despite their differences.” Genre-savvy players can steer into these vibes. Bonus points if two or more characters, at the end of the story, decide they actually want to remain friends (or perhaps more?) Audiences love that kind of twist. 

Your Days Are Numbered, and So Is Your HP

This character creation idea arrived in a dream. I wrote down the broad strokes as soon as I woke up. You know you are getting good at roleplaying games when even your subconscious gives up on normal escapist dreamfare, buckles down, and starts creating mechanics and hacks. If you’re not going to go to sleep, brain, then you might as well get some work done.

Roll stats as normal for a D&D-style game, 3d6 down the line, no dropped dice or modifiers. Keep these ability scores; they work as is typical.

Also sum up the results of all stats. This will give each character a number between 18 and 108. Each player subtracts that number from 108. The resulting number is their HP.

For example, I just rolled a character and got 4, 11, 14, 12, 14, 10, for 65. 108 minus 65 is 43 HP.

That’s a lot of HP, right? Well, there is no maximum/current distinction in this model. HP is a non-replenishing resource. So it may sound like a lot, but it has to last you your entire adventuring career.

In the grand spectrum of HP, from “literal combat wounds” on one end to “luck” or “fate” on the other, this is closer to the latter. The more heroic a character is – the higher their stats are – the more Fate expects them to burn brightly, but briefly. These adventurers are like Achilles; they are the best at what they do, but they’re not going to last that long. Fate has decreed it to be so, and Fate will have its way.

Yes, this means that a first-level character with 18 ability scores across the board would have 0 HP. They would literally die in one hit. A wretch with all 3s would have a comparatively massive 90 HP to work with. But because the math is averaging six stats together, most characters will end up a lot like my example above (the mode character in this system should be at 45, so I was just two points off).

For a more forgiving version, treat this HP more like Bastionland-style hit protection, and have damage spill into ability scores. Or allow for (very modest) increases to HP, either through leveling up, or through some intrinsic mechanic within the game (perhaps bargaining with Fate).

Broken Wheel Cosmology: If You Were Summoned Into an Alien Reality Against Your Will, You Would Probably Act Pretty Rudely Too

If you have paid any attention to the sermons in the temple, the gossip in the town square, or the warnings on the oldest books in the library at the academy, you surely know that demons are innately cruel, sadistic, soulless monsters. They have no redeeming features. They are pure evil… right?

Well... maybe. Let’s step back and interrogate what we really know about these “demons.” 

The vast majority of human interactions with demons occur on the material plane. Living humans go to the home planes of the demons only very rarely, and only a tiny percentage of those who do ever return to tell the tale. Most humans on the material plane meet demons for one of the following reasons.

• They summoned them. Thanks a lot, jerk.
• They were in the wrong place at the wrong time when someone else summoned them. Sorry bystanders.
• They are the people called in to clean up after a summoning. Hello adventurers!

So most of what we know about demons comes from these incidents. Summonings come in many forms. The evil ritual deep in the woods is a classic. But it could also be a wizardly accident. Or an ordinary, run-of-the-mill massacre, which accidentally triggering a long-forgotten prophecy. Even a muttered curse from one neighbor to another, expressed with sufficient malice, can create a crack in reality that pulls a demon through.

For a demon, being summoned is not like voluntarily traveling the planes through something nice and civilized like the Plane Shift spell. It is more like a very strong force pulling them through a too-small hole. It is painful. It is frightening. They do not come through the process whole. It fragments them.

A summoned demon is an incomplete being. Most of its essence remains in its home plane; this is why demons summoned elsewhere return home when “killed,” rather than truly dying. It’s presence on the material plane is an aspect of its persona, with full senses and awareness, but merely an ego without a superego. A demon’s demeanor reflects this partial, fragmented manifestation. The malice and penchant for cruelty are reflections of the trauma of summoning, combined with the incomplete nature of their manifestation. 

How do we telegraph this idea to players? Some ideas:

• There’s an excellent demon-summoning scene in the first book in the Laundry Files series, the Atrocity Archives. Playing with fundamental elements of sense and time helps make them alien.
• Arnold at Goblin Punch wrote an excellent treatment of demons earlier this year. Centering possession and focusing on the demon’s flaws, not just its powers, really paints a much more interesting picture.
• Previously I wrote about using the idea of someone who believes they are trapped in a simulation as a shorthand for roleplaying a demon. These two ideas can be used separately or together.