In Defense of "Rules, Not Rulings": A Pathfinder Second Edition Review

To be honest, I wasn't planning on picking up Pathfinder 2e.  There are a lot of games out there, and I try (not particularly successfully) to limit my tabletop RPG purchases, both out of financial concerns but also out of trying to manage the currency of my time to read and digest them.  I was interested in what Paizo was doing with Pathfinder 2e, and I have mostly positive views about Paizo and the games they make, but you have to prioritize, and so Pathfinder 2e was placed outside of the circle of interest.  And then Paizo offered a sweetheart deal through Humble Bumble for the core materials (the Core Rulebook, the first Bestiary), a print copy of the Core Rulebook, and some of their useful flipmaps in PDF form, with the proceeds going to Black Lives Matter.  In that light, I felt like I had no choice to but to buy in.  [And, for the record, if you are inclined to respond to this with anything in the penumbra of "SJW!!!!", just save everyone the effort and move along.]  At which point, I put it aside, and mostly forgot about it.  But, last weekend, I picked up the Pathfinder 2e Core Rulebook and started reading.  And, since then, I've been pretty much sucked in, going through all of the materials and looking through some Youtube channels dedicated to the game (the best of which, IMHO, is Nonat1s' channel, which can be seen here).  

So, with all of that, is Pathfinder 2e a good game?  I think the answer is yes, especially if you reframe the question to be "is Pathfinder 2e good at doing the things it wants to do?"  But, perhaps more relevant than whether Pathfinder 2e is a good game or a bad game, Pathfinder 2e is without question the most game.  In a time when the tabletop RPG space is dominated by design that often tries to hone-in on a couple of  hyper-specific mechanics or game play use cases, Pathfinder 2e is an example of a maximalist design ethos.  Everything about Pathfinder 2e is big and heavily engineered.

More to the point, I think, Pathfinder 2e represents a perfect counter-point to D&D 5e, its primary competitor.  A while back, I mentioned an interview with 5e lead designer Mike Mearls in which he laid out the design philosophy behind 5e, expressed in a pithy way by "rulings not rules."  The framing here, per Mearls, is that 3rd and 4th edition tried to build a comprehensive rules system that would "control[ ] the experience of the game."  This approach is to be abandoned, again per Mearls, because those rules systems constrain DM flexibility rather than being "empowered" to make decisions on the fly.

That's one way to frame it, and obviously the way that paints the 5e project in the best possible light.  But the thing about "empowering" someone to do something is that it usually means that they are also obligated to do the thing.  Yes, the DM is empowered to make rulings, but 5e also requires the DM to make rulings on the fly, because the rules don't cover every situation, or even some rather common situations.  "Rulings, not rules" is a transfer of work from the game designers to the the DM, and a DM has a lot on his or her plate already.  "Rulings, not rules" adds to DM task-loading, and not every DM is going to want to spend their bandwidth on making rules-calls.

Pathfinder 2e doesn't promise that a DM/GM is never going to have to make rules calls--the designers are way too smart to make a promise that they will never be able to deliver on.  But there is far more codification and specificity in Pathfinder 2e about how the game is supposed to be run.  And that specificity makes it easier for a GM to just let the rules do their work while he or she focuses on other elements of the GMing job.  To take an example, consider the Stealth rules.  The Stealth rules in the 5e Player's Handbook were a word salad, so much so that rules guru Jeremy Crawford had to come out with a set of "clarifications" that were not at all obvious from the actual text in the book.  And, even after these clarifications, whether characters are either "hidden" or not hidden is mostly DM fiat.  By contrast, Pathfinder 2e gives you five different conditions that relate to not being seen, each with a very clear explanation for how you can get that condition and what you can do with that condition.  Add on to that the Hide and Sneak action under the Stealth skill, and you have all the rules you need to adjudicate this rather common and important element of game play.  And while the rules are spread out over a couple of pages, it is not actually that many words (there is a half-page piece of art that pads the page count in the conditions section).

In fact, the chapter of the Core Rulebook where I think I really "got" what Pathfinder 2e was doing was the Skills chapter.  For each Skill, there are a set of actions that are within the ambit of the Skill, each with a small text box describing how the outcomes are adjudicated and even in some cases how the DCs are set for the check.  In a way, the actions in Pathfinder 2e are like Moves in Powered by the Apocalypse games--discrete, somewhat self-contained rules mechanisms that are triggered by player action and spit out a narrative outcome.  There are far more actions in Pathfinder 2e than a typical PbtA game has Moves, and you are going to want reference material with all the actions at hand during play, but the basic idea is the same.  The vast majority of the meaningful things a PC is going to do during a game are going to have an action associated with it, providing a clear way of resolving it.  With the codification of actions in this way, a significant portion of the heavy-lifting on the rules is transferred from the GM to the players.

Speaking of players, the other obvious difference between Pathfinder 2e and 5e is found in character creation.  5e, very intentionally, limited the number of choices that a player makes during the life-span of the character--once you select your class, race, and background, for non-spellcaster classes the only remaining choices are subclass at level 3, and what you do with your Ability Score increases at 4th level and beyond.  Pathfinder 2e goes in the completely opposite direction.  Now, class and ancestry (the welcome replacement for "race") are skeletons, upon which you hang feats that provide the majority of your character abilities.  Each character gets a feat of some sort at every level, giving the player meaningful character building decisions at each level.  By "some sort," I mean that there are different sorts of feats--class feats, ancestry feats, skill feats, and general feats.  At first this seemed like unnecessary complexity, but it occurred to me that it allows the designers to silo different choices so as to make it easier to balance everything.  Pathfinder 1st edition was notorious for having players stitch together feats that created broken synergies with class abilities, and so keeping different types of options in their respective lanes might work to minimize that tendency.

Another choice that I suspect was made to avoid broken combos genuinely shocked me--there is no 3e (or, for that matter, 5e) style multiclassing in Pathfinder 2e.  Instead, you have an Archetype system which is similar to the system in Starfinder, but also somewhat similar to 4e multi-classing, in that you use some of your class feats to buy into the abilities of other classes, as well as smaller, more thematic character concepts, without having to abandon progression on your original class.  The Archetype system covers the conceptual ground of multi-classing, 3e prestige classes, and Pathfinder 1st edition archetypes, in one system and in a simpler way than any of the three of them.  It really is an inspired piece of design, and one of my favorite implementations of mixing up multiple classes in an d20 system.

The other two distinctive pieces of rules material in Pathfinder 2e are the unified results model and the combat action economy.  Almost every check has four possible outcomes of critical success, success, failure and critical failure, with a corresponding scale of 10+ the DC, equal to or above the DC, below the DC, and 10+ below the DC.  A "natural 20" bumps the result up one level and a "natural 1" bumps it down a level, allowing for the possibility of outcomes that would otherwise not be mathematically possible.  One interesting result of this that I really liked is the possibility of critically failing saving throws, resulting in double damage or some other really bad effect, making spells and traps more exciting and unpredictable.  As far as the action economy, everything is expressed in terms of requiring one or more actions, and each PC or opponent will get three actions in almost all cases on a given turn.  Multiple moves and multiple attacks (albeit with escalating penalties) are possible, and there is a lot of design space for special actions that provide action economy advantages (for example, the 1st level Fighter feat "Sudden Charge" lets the fighter Stride twice and attack once for a cost of two actions).  

With all it this, it would be wrong to pretend that Pathfinder 2e is not a crunchier game than 5e--it definitely is.  But in going through the Core Rulebook, I found it to be (1) not as crunchy as I expected, and (2) pushing most of the crunch onto the players.  Playing Pathfinder 2e is clearly more involved than playing 5e, but it is not clear to me that running Pathfinder 2e would be more involved.  As discussed above, there is far less rules adjudication that the Pathfinder 2e GM has to do than the 5e DM.  And I will also note that the monster stat blocks in the Pathfinder 2e Bestiary are very clean, much simpler than the 3e/Pathfinder 1st edition stat blocks and I think a little cleaner than the 5e stat blocks.  This is in large measure because (as in Starfinder) they abandoned the "monsters work exactly like characters" framework from those editions, a welcome decision in my book.  I never ran 3e or Pathfinder 1st edition, and to be honest I was a little intimidated/put-off by the monster stat blocks and complexity.  I would be willing to give Pathfinder 2e a shot.

At its heart, if 5e is the "DM empowerment" game, Pathfinder 2e is the "player empowerment" game.  Players have a robust suite of character creation choices, lots of round-by-round combat actions, lots of very clear ways to translate the rules into narrative and visa versa.  But, just as DM empowerment requires the DM to put in the work, Pathfinder 2e requires the players to do the heavy lifting.  Trying to run a Pathfinder 2e session with players that don't know their character abilities and look to the GM to tell them what they can and cannot do would be a nightmare--it's not great in any game system under any circumstances, but would cause Pathfinder 2e to collapse under its own weight.  And, let's face it, some RPG players are kinda lazy, and you have to know the group you are playing with.  This raises the related challenge of onboarding new players, getting everyone to the point where the players can carry their weight.  The folks at Paizo are about to drop a Beginner Box for Pathfinder 2e that is a possible solution to that problem, and it's worth noting that the 1st Edition Beginner Box was a great product.  

Those challenges aside, Pathfinder 2e is a skilled, confident, considered design.  If you find 5e to be constraining or too simplistic as a player, then Pathfinder 2e is absolutely something you should look it.  If you were turned off, or scared off, from 1st edition as a player or GM, you might have your mind changed by Pathfinder 2e.  It is both fits well within the broader umbrella of d20 fantasy while being clearly and defiantly its own thing.  It's an impressive piece of work. 

How Dark Is The World of Darkness?, Part 2.2--Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition

Part 1 of this review was about lore, and this will be about rules and my overall thoughts.  As far as the rules go, it is probably worthwhile from the outset to articulate what the general objection to the design of Vampire and the other World of Darkness games is.

Vampire, says this critique, spends a great deal of time talking about and promising to deliver a deep immersive role-playing experience, in which the players explore what it means to be human as their characters lose their humanity.  But Vampire delivers little in the way of mechanical systems that actually create that sort of play experience.  Moreover, it doesn't seem to be mechanically trying to create a particular play experience at all, instead engaging in a kind of self-negation at every turn by telling the reader that the rules are not really all that important, and that they (especially the Storyteller) should throw them out at the first sign that they are not working.  This is, by this school of thought, bad game design, as the goal of ttrpg game design is to build a mechanical system that generates the play experience you want.  If you as the designer is not putting in the work to make the system do the thing you promise in the lore and fluff, then why am I paying you for your game design?

Having now gone through V20, I think this criticism is completely fair, but only insofar as you accept the underlying premises.  If you believe that the job of a game designer is to engineer a play experience at the table, then you will find lots in V20 that will leave you scratching you head.  But, having gone through the book, it is clear to me that V20 are working off of a very different set of goals and a very considered understanding of what it is doing.  It doesn't engineer the play experience because it is not trying to engineer the play experience, as part of an intentional design ethos, not because of incompetence or laziness.

At the beginning of the very short "Rules" section (Chapter 5), the designers lay down a very interesting marker for what the rules are there to do: "Game rules exist to impart a sense of fairness  among story participants."  As the section goes on, it becomes clear that the mechanical components of the game are there to do two things (1) inject fun uncertainty into the story (after all, rolling dice is fun); but primarily (2) to make sure that the players don't feel like outcomes are being rammed down their throat by the Storyteller.  On the next page, there is a discussion of the difference between an investigation scene (where the advice is to forego rolls and just hand out the clue a la GUMSHOE) and a combat scene (where players would likely be very unhappy if the Storyteller just dictated the outcome to the players).

I can't help but see the strong influence here of the massive LARP community surrounding Vampire, in which game rules primarily exist to adjudicate intra-player disputes or potential disputes.  Here, the game systems are really there to avoid or negotiate player vs. Storyteller problems.  In this light, the complaint that the rules of Vampire have a disproportionate focus on combat relative to its role in the lore comes into focus--there are lots of combat rules because combat is going to be a pain point and place for disputes.  Whereas, if the interaction can be resolved without rules engagement, and everyone is going to be OK with that, then it should be done so without rules engagement.  Rather than "say yes or roll the dice," the ethos here might be "come to group consensus over what is happening, or roll the dice."

None of this is likely to sway the people who believe the goal of ttrpg game design is to engineer a play experience.  But, to be honest, I found the approach set out in V20 to be something of a breath of fresh air.  Games, and especially those games informed by the broad "indie"/Forge tradition, have become hyper-focused on a specific play experience, and as a result become very narrow, and even a little overbearing.  As exciting as I found the ideas in the Powered by the Apocalypse games when I first encountered them five or so years ago (hence the title of the blog), I am finding them (especially in their more recent incarnations) to be confining, a bit too much of a straight-jacket for the players and especially for the GM.

I'm also thinking about the time Critical Role played Monsterhearts.  Mercer and the gang (or, at least, some of the gang and some other folks in the broader Critical Role orbit) did a one-shot of Monsterhearts last Valentine's Day, and there was some loud backlash in the fan community that Mercer "didn't play the game right."  And, I think on a strict reading of the rules of Monsterhearts, those critics were right.  Monsterhearts, maybe moreso than any other PbtA game, is very aggressive in pushing a very specific play style, with very specific play experiences and outcomes.  To pick one example that I think best reflects the game's ethos, by rule an NPC or other PC can cause a particular PC to be turned on, regardless of how the player running that PC thinks his or her or their character would react.  This is usually talked about with the idea that "by rule, everyone is bi," and that's true but it is much broader than that.

So, I think the people saying that Mercer was "doing it wrong" are right.  But, would "doing it right" have made the overall play experience better?  Everyone was really into their characters, and I thought the session was very entertaining.  I don't think anyone at that table needed any of the mechanical elements of Monsterhearts that Mercer et al. admittedly glossed over.  Watching that game made Monsterhearts feel over-engineered and over-determined, full of systems that aren't ultimately all that necessary, or at least not necessary with that group.

Maybe they would have been better off just playing Vampire.

The Basic Mechanics

V20, like all of the World of Darkness games, is a dice-pool system.  The trend in dice-pool systems appears to be toward fixed target numbers--you need to roll a certain number or better on each die, every time, with difficulty set by how many successes you need.  This is the approach taken by Fria Ligan's Year Zero engine, and it is also what Vampire 5th Edition goes with.  V20, however, sticks to its roots by keeping the variable target number model--difficulty is modeled by sliding the number you need to get on each die up or down (with 6, i.e. 50% chance of success, as the default).

I don't think the variable target number system is inherently more complex or difficult to internalize than fixed target number system.  I think the problem comes when you do both--where there are two different difficulty sliders (TN and # of successes) and the relationship between them is complex and/or opaque.  We will come back to this issue in a big way when we get to Mage: the Ascension, but here I will point out that V20 doesn't do much with number of successes except as a narrative device--one success is a "marginal" success, two is "moderate," etc.  Some specific abilities (especially the Disciplines) have fixed success-level scales that are pretty easy to apply, though you are likely to be referencing the chart pretty often.

Most rolls are a pool equal to Attribute + Ability (i.e. Talents, Skills, and Knowledges--Skills in other systems).  One of the better elements is the concept of Feats--specific combinations of an Atrribute+Ability, a difficulty, and an outcome for a particular game play scenario. So, there is a climbing feat, a pursuit feat, an awakening (meaning vampires waking up from sleep) feat, and about two dozen others.  This is conceptually much like Moves in PbtA games, in that it is a discrete, self contained mechanical system that is triggered by the fiction.  I like it, especially since the rules go out of their way to say that these are basically a cheat-sheet for the Storyteller, one that the Storyteller can always modify or ignore at will.

PCs have two resource pools--Blood points and Willpower points.  Willpower points are probably the closest to Hero points or Benes in other systems, and do big things like give you a bonus guaranteed success, or overcome a compulsion or derangement (which, given that this is Vampire, comes up a lot).  It's also worth noting, given the discussion of tying setting and roleplaying to mechanics, that one of the core ways to refresh Willpower is to take actions consistent with the PC's nature.  Blood points power Disciplines, and heal damage, and as you might expect are recovered by feeding on blood from humans (or, other vampires, though that can be a risky move).  The pools are relatively small (5-10 for Willpower, up to the low teens for Blood pool), so they are not all that difficult for a player to manage.

One of the things that is noticeable from a brief look at the character sheet is that a Vampire character has a lot of stats and characteristics.  In addition to Attributes, Abilities, the Disciplines, and the Blood and Willpower pools, there are also Backgrounds (things like Status and [higher] Generation), Merits and Flaws, and Virtues.  The character sheet is very busy.  Here, though, I think the convention of expressing stats using dots as opposed to numbers actually works and pays off.   Yes, three dots is the same as a numerical 3, but if V20 and the World of Darkness games used numbers, the character sheet would like like an accounting ledger or lines of code.  I think the dots are more accessible and visually appealing.

Disciplines and Combat

Cool vampire powers are a big part of the appeal of playing a game like this, and the V20 book devotes almost 120 pages (a bit under 1/4th of its total length) to Disciplines.  The Disciplines are the definition of a mixed bag--some are very broad like Animalism (both controlling/manipulating animals and also the Beast), some very narrow like Serpentis (various snake-related powers).  Likewise, some of these Disciplines are associated with multiple Clans, and others are specific to the themes of a single Clan.  Each Discipline is rated on a scale of 1 to 10 dots (though, only 1 through 5 are accessible to PCs using the base rules), and each tier unlocks a new ability.

More importantly, given that there are 17 Disciplines and more than ten entries for each Discipline, the power levels and utility of the different powers are all over the map.  Many of the 6 to 10 dot powers are OP, but they are supposed to be kinda broken powers for antagonists, so that's OK.  The bigger problem is that you have to ascend the chain of each individual Discipline, so you have to spend points on some of the lamer powers to get to the good stuff.  It's also worth pointing out that a PC vampire is not likely to have the full range of Dracula's iconic abilities, as they are spread over multiple Disciplines that would take a a ton of experience points to gain.  Instead, PCs will have a couple of the Dracula tricks, or a group of PCs from multiple Clans will have all of the Dracula tricks collectively (and a few other weird ones thrown in).

As far as OP Disciplines go, let's talk about Celerity, which requires us first to talk about combat.  The combat system shows off the fact that this game is 30 years old.  I don't mean that in a dismissive way, and I don't even mean that the combat is bad; I mean that you can see that certain ideas have become ubiquitous in ttrpg design via their absence here.  For example, it's been a long time since I have seen a game that uses turn-based combat that doesn't use some variation of D&D 3rd edition (and its successors)'s "action economy," in which a character gets a hierarchical suite of actions on your turn that can be used for various purposes.  By contrast, in V20, the default notion is that on your turn you get to do one thing.  You can move, or your can defend, or you can attack.  If you want to do more than one thing, you have to "split your dice pool"--you must declare which actions you are taking, use the smallest pool of the selected actions, and then literally divide those dice between the various actions.  While this provides a lot of flexibility on a turn, splitting your dice pool is very punitive.

Celerity lets you add your dots in the Discipline to your Dexterity, which is good because Dexterity is going to be the base Attribute for most combat actions.  But, even better, you can spend a Blood point to convert one of those bonus dice into an extra action.  And, when you get that extra action, you don't have to split your dice pool between them, but you get full dice for each of them.  This is crazy good, and my brief internet research shows that this is toned down from the original presentation of Celerity.  To be fair, basically every ability in every game that allows you to break or bypass the action economy is OP, so it's not like this is some unique problem for V20.  And the number of extra actions is limited by the need to spend Blood points, so it's less broken than, say, wired reflexes in Shadowrun.  Still, it's hard to see how a vampire with Celerity isn't going to wipe the floor with non-Celerity opponents, unless the Celerity character is vastly outnumbered, as each Blood point spent with Celerity more or less doubles a character's dice pool.

Putting that issue aside, one thing about the combat rules is that they seem to play very fast.  Since each participant gets only one action, the round moves very quickly.  Plus, in something that surprised me when I saw it but I remembered was exactly the way it worked in then-contemporary AD&D 2nd Edition, you roll initiative each round and declare actions at the top of the turn.  All of this reinforces the speed at which combat is occurring, as well as pushing players to make choices for their PC as quickly as possible.  There is a frenetic quality to the combat, one that I think that fits well with the tone of the game--especially since combat is likely to be less frequent than in many ttrpgs.

Humanity and Paths

I should say up front that I am very uncomfortable with the idea of the GM/Storyteller grading the choices and roleplaying of the players and dealing out rewards and punishments based on his or her assessment of said roleplaying.  It feels to me like a power imbalance, as it's not like the players get to vote on how the GM/Storyteller is doing in playing the NPCs.  Plus, the GM has enough on his or her plate as it is, without having to take a discerning eye to the characterization of the players.  So, I don't like systems that require the GM to give out XP or Inspiration or what have you based on the players' choices and implementation of those choices.

So, I am not inclined to like the Humanity system.  The basic notion, set forth on page 309 of the V20 book, is "[w]henever a character takes an action that Storyteller decides is morally questionable, the character may suffer degeneration--a permanent loss of Humanity."  And then V20 doubles-down:

A Storyteller has carte blanche to monitor character morality in her chronicle.  This is a huge responsibility for the Storyteller, but one that ultimately makes for a great deal of tragedy and horror, as the characters gradually descend into a state of utter monstrosity though they desperately rail against it.  Storytellers, beware--players should never feel that you are screwing them out of Humanity, or consequently, their characters.  Use degeneration checks consistently but sparingly, lest the tragedy erode to an incessant series of failed rolls.

(Page 310).  Ehhh.  I get that moral degeneration is a key part of the themes of the game, but this is exactly the kind of power dynamics that make me uncomfortable.  On the flip side, it's presented as having such a central role in the game that there is a strong case for informed consent on the part of the players--if you agree to play V20, you are agreeing to let the Storyteller make those calls about your PC's moral choices, so you have no room to complain.

Mechanically, the degeneration rolls are tied to a Humanity scale of bad actions.  If the PC's action is below the PC's current Humanity rating on the scale, they have to make a Conscience check to avoid losing a point of Humanity.  This makes further degeneration less likely, but low Humanity has game mechanical effects--most importantly, it caps the rating of your PC's virtues, with means that Frenzys are going to be more likely.  This requires that the Storyteller keep track of all the PCs' Humanity ratings, in order to evaluate whether a particular action triggers a degeneration check.

Complicating things are the Paths.  Paths basically replace Humanity with an alternative moral scale, tied into a particular philosophical position held by the PC.  The Paths are conceptually interesting, in that they bring out some unique points-of-view that raise interesting roleplaying opportunities--the Path of Caine treats Caine as essentially the vampire Jesus, the Path of Cathari is actually a reversal of the views of the actual historical Cathars, etc.  The problems are two-fold.  First, the diversity of Paths means that the Storyteller has to keep track of multiple morality scales and the particular PC they are associated with if the PCs are part of different paths, which sounds like a nightmare (and something that I know myself well enough to know I would completely butcher).  Second, some of them are set up in a way that makes it hard for the PCs to violate, leading to what commentators have dubbed "Path of What I Was Going to Do Anyway."  Given how much the early part of the Morality chapter emphasizes the importance of these systems to gameplay, it's a little weird for players to be able to bypass the whole system with Path choices.

Does This Game Work for Me?

The short answer is yes, V20 works for me.  Themes that held no interest for me back in the 90s have much more resonance for me now.  In particular, I found the Caine framing myth to be very compelling, especially in the way it interfaces with theological considerations.  I won't get off on a tangent here, but the Cain and Abel story is a touchstone for Girardian-inspired approaches to Christianity (which is my primary approach to Christianity--you can read more on my other writing project).  So, the idea of Caine's curse as the foundation for corrupted civilization, violence, and exploitation is right up my alley now.  Sixteen year old me didn't really have any experience with obsession and distorted love, but now 42 year old me resonates much more with the ways you can explore the concept of the Blood Bond.  More generally, though, I think I'm less afraid of exploring dark themes and moods now than I was--and it feels genuinely dark, as opposed to performative and edgy-for-edgy's sake.  Maybe I just resonate better with what V20 is providing than I was before.

I also found the three page spread of testimonies about how Vampire affected their life to be compelling.  People clearly found community and safety and belonging from this game, and now reading the game, I get it.  In fact, it makes me a little bit wistful that I didn't try out this game and this community at the time when it was so big.  I absolutely looking for a place to belong and be accepted at that time, and I think if I were more open I might have found a positive experience.  Reading V20, I feel like I missed out on something.

As far as the rules go, I think they are perfectly serviceable.  I think the complaints about the game, while not unfounded, do not tell the full story.  The game makes some very intentional choices, and its systems are much more considered than the indie critique would suggest.  It's probably one standard deviation more complex than it needs to be, but it's not over-the-top or unplayable.  Moreover, it is designed in something of a modular fashion--you have a core, flexible dice system, some central mechanics, and then a series of take-it-or-leave-it systems that the Storyteller can add or ignore.  It doesn't do the things that a part of the ttrpg zeitgeist says games should do, but it works if you take it on its own terms and don't get bogged down in insisting that the game by "played according to the intention of the designers."  The designers intend you to use the rules as you need them; just do that.

V20 is an excellent compilation of a game that is a classic.  And, moreover, it deserves to be a classic.  I'm glad it's back.  If someone asked me to play V20, I would be in, no questions asked.  If someone asked me to run it, I would hesitate a little more, but I'm likely in if the group was all on the same wavelength.  Basically, I was wrong about this game.

How Dark Is the World of Darkness?, Part 1--Pre-Conceived Notions

Everyone, or at least everyone who is likely to be reading this post, is likely aware that Dungeons & Dragons is in the midst of a renaissance.  The renaissance has reached the consciousness of people who are not ttrpg fans, several of whom have mentioned it casually to me in various circumstances.  This D&D renaissance, one hopes, will lift ttrpgs as a whole, such that the benefits of it are not simply limited to those who are part of the Wizards of the Coast ecosystem.

Vampire: the Masquerade [5th Edition]

But, of late, I have also noticed that there is a discrete renaissance in another ttrpg--Vampire: the Masquerade.  In a way, this is perhaps not surprising, as Vampire is probably the second most popular, and second most important historically, tabletop RPG behind the collective versions of D&D.  If we are in the midst of a tabletop RPG renaissance (as opposed to simply a D&D revival), you would expect it to reach Vampire eventually.  But I think there are other factors in play.   One is the release of the 5th Edition of the game, which despite controversy has generated broadly positive reviews from what I can see.  Another is that its own "Critical Role"--a streaming game that showcases the ideas and style of the game in a stylish and accessible package--in the form of Geek & Sundry's LA By Night.

This rise has gotten me to re-examine my position on Vampire and the entire World of Darkness game line.  Despite getting into this hobby in the late 80s, I was never a big fan of Vampire, and was only somewhat more interested in the World of Darkness games.  The majority of that, I think, was where I was, and who I was, at the time.  With Vampire, I found the themes to be off-putting, but I think more importantly I found the aesthetic to be very off-putting.  Young me was desperate to fit in, to be seen as normal, and so the very intentionally outsider-ish and provocative posture of Vampire was the opposite of what I was looking for at the time.  I wasn't ready to be seen as any weirder than I already was, and so I avoided those spaces.  Now, with the benefit of being able to look back, I think I missed out on something that might have been very enjoyable, and even beneficial, to the person that I was at that time.  Be that as it may, I basically became convinced that I was not a "Vampire person," and maintained a healthy distance from the World of Darkness and especially Vampire.     

Vampire: the Masquerade
 [20th Anniversary Edition]

In the interim, there has been another layer of ttrpg discourse, one that asserts that the World of Darkness games are bad games.  The basic version of this argument is that World of Darkness games promise deep, character-driven play experiences, but don't provide sufficient mechanical support for that style of play.  Indeed, many of the folks in the "indie" ttrpg design space will point to Vampire and the other World of Darkness games as, while perhaps a step in the right direction, an example of what not to do.  And yet it certainly seems like the folks who have been playing these games have been having character-driven play experiences.  So, one of the things I would like to do is to dive into these games with the benefit of modern rpg design "tech" and concepts.  Maybe they will feel clunky and discordant, or maybe some of the negativity is overblown.

Finally, there is the thing that really hooked people on these games in the first place--the lore.  My perception is that the lore is perhaps second only to the aesthetic as the reason people get "hooked" on the World of Darkness games.  And these games had a lot of lore.  This lore was also, intentionally, something of a moving target, as the World of Darkness was firmly planted in the 90s ttrpg love affair with "metaplot."  For those who did not live and play games in those days of yore, the 90s was the apex of the idea that ttrpgs were about story, and designers understood stories move and progress.  As a result, ttrpg designers would release a game that would set out the lore of the game world, and then release supplements or adventures that would introduce events that would move things along and change the circumstances presented in the original book, often rather dramatically.  This ongoing story made up the "metaplot" of the game.  The concept of a metaplot has been essentially abandoned by the ttrpg world now, on the grounds that it makes it difficult to onboard new players and GMs ("yeah, I know it says in the core book that Mr. Jones is the Prince of this town, but as it turns out Mr. Jones is dead"), restricts GM freedom of action, and makes much of the books you buy retroactively out-of-date and useless.  But, in the 90s, everyone was doing it, not just White Wolf Publishing for the World of Darkness--TSR was particularly aggressive in adopting metaplot via its novel tie-ins for its D&D campaign worlds, making the Dark Sun boxed set out of date in less than a year.  So, I am interested to see what the lore and metaplot looks like now, after it has all been wrapped up.

Mage: the Ascension
[20th Anniversary Edition]

It will also be interesting to look at this lore on its own terms.  While many people passionately loved the World of Darkness lore, even at the time some people had complaints and problems about some of the material.  The World of Darkness was trying, I think, to be edgy, and being edgy is always a hit-or-miss proposition.  On the flip side, there were issues raised about the less-than-sensitive-and-aware treatment of religious and ethnic themes (I hear that the book on the Romani people, titled with a name that I believe is now considered a slur, is especially bad).  And then there might be stuff that just doesn't work anymore, or seems especially dated.  Because the World of Darkness and its corresponding lore was very unique at the time, I imagine that things that seemed creative and fresh in 1994 may not seem so in 2020.       

I want to figure all of this out.  As weird as it might be to "review" games that are as much as 30 years old, I am going to do a series on the World of Darkness games as they stand now.  At 16, in 1994, I decided that the World of Darkness was not for me, but how do I feel at 42, in 2020?  How do these games hold up, particularly in light of the changes to the approach to tabletop RPG design that have occurred in the intervening years (changes that, in many respects, were generated in reaction to the World of Darkness games)?  How does the lore land now?

To make this a little more coherent, I am going to limit my look to the three "core lines"--Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage.  Each of them have robust "20th Anniversary" editions that collate and streamline the original games, and my reviews are going to be working off of those texts.  I am also going to take a look at the Vampire 5th Edition book, since it is an attempt to repackage the material in a modern format.  In looking at these books, I'm going to focus on three things (1) do these games speak to me in a way that they didn't (or I wouldn't let them) when they first came out?; (2) how do the mechanics hold up in light of 25+ years of tabletop RPG design evolution (fun fact--when the 1st edition of Vampire came out, ttrpgs as a whole had barely existed for 15 years)?; and (3) how does the lore land in 2020--still edgy and fresh? cringeworthy?  blah?

Werewolf: the Apocalypse
[20th Anniversary Edition]

To that end, a brief note on terminology.  In 2004, White Wolf "rebooted" all of their game lines with a revised rule system and (more importantly, given the nature of these games) new lore.  This "new" World of Darkness has become officially known now as the "Chronicles of Darkness," as distinct from the original [old] World of Darkness.  I have even less familiarity with the Chronicles of Darkness games than I do with the World of Darkness--I played two sessions in a Changeling: the Lost game almost 10 years ago, and that's it (verdict--genuinely creepy and disturbing, would play again with a good GM/Storyteller).  I hope to take a look at the core games of the Chronicles of Darkness--Vampire: the Requiem, Werewolf: the Forsaken, and Mage: the Awakening--at some point, but definitely after taking a full look at the World of Darkness games.  And, to keep things from becoming impenetrable, when I refer to "the World of Darkness" in this series, I am only talking about the pre-2004 games and those games who are derived or share setting with the pre-2004 games (i.e. the new edition of Vampire)--not the Chronicles of Darkness.

Part of me wants to start with Mage, as (despite my anti-World of Darkness attitude back in the day) I always thought the lore of Mage was very engaging.  But it seems silly not to start with Vampire, which is really the jewel in the crown of the World of Darkness.  So, I think the order is going to be Vampire [20th Anniversary], Mage, Werewolf, and then the new Vampire.  So, let's get to it.  

Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition Review

[Update:  This review was written based on the PDF version.  I just received the hard cover version, and it is visually spectacular--the most beautiful ttrpg book I have seen, in a way that doesn't really come across in the PDF.  So, that's worth saying.]

Back in 2009, I was living in San Francisco, and from time to time I would pop into the Borders bookstore across from Union Square and just browse.  At the time, I had been out of the tabletop RPG scene since the mid-90s, but every once in a while I would wander over to the RPG section of book stores and see what was new.  In '09, the new thing that I saw at Borders was a glossy, black-spined book called Eclipse Phase.  For whatever reason it caught my eye, so I picked it up and read it for a while.  An hour later, I was at check out buying the book, and pretty soon I was back into the hobby.  There were other games that I picked up and played more--4th Edition D&D, then 13th Age, then Numenera and 5th Edition and basically everything.  But my return to tabletop RPGs really got kicked off by Eclipse Phase, and I have followed their line all the way through.

In 2017, the designers at Posthuman Studios Kickstarted a 2nd Edition, and they sent out the PDF version of the Corebook (the hardcover is due soon), and that is the version I am reviewing.  It is worth noting that Posthuman releases its products under a Creative Commons License for the PDFs, and so if you want to check out the 1st Edition materials, you can get them legally here. 

The selling point for Eclipse Phase, or EP, is the setting.  EP is a transhumanist sci-fi role-playing game, with strong elements of conspiracy and horror thrown into the mix.  The best short summary of what it going on in EP comes from the evocative tagline:

Your mind is software. Program it. 
Your body is a shell. Change it. 
Death is a disease. Cure it. 
Extinction is approaching. Fight it. 

Prior to EP, I had very little exposure to transhumanism and transhumanist ideas.  At least in its EP presentation, the technology exists to make copies of the consciousness of a human being, store it as data in a computer system, and then download it into a new body (known in the game as "re-sleeving").  This makes your body a possession that you have (and can change, if you have the means or access), as opposed to a reality you must accept.  These bodies are modified through genetic engineering into a wide variety of optimized forms, or replaced with mechanical forms, or dispensed with altogether in favor of existing in a purely digital form.  There are also uplifted animal forms, allowing you to play, among other things, a giant octopus.  Thus, while there are no playable aliens in EP, there is an enormous variety of character types, and the ability to move from embodiment to embodiment that creates additional options.

Anytime you engage with transhumanism, you are on some level engaging with questions of identity, and EP puts those questions very clearly on the table.  To take one example, in the last few years questions of gender identity, and associated questions relating to changing or conforming one's physical presentation to those identities, have entered the mainstream discourse.  In the world of EP, most people have easy access to tools that allow them to explore a vast array of physical presentations in a non-permanent context.  And this, in turn, raises questions--if I, someone with a male gender identity, could spend a week in the body of a woman "just to see what it is like," would I do that?  Probably.  After all, in the world of EP, that kind of experimentation would likely be considered vanilla, as your options literally include inhabiting a giant octopus.

The "extinction" bit has to do with the threat of the TITANs, a set of ascended AIs that attempted to wipe out the "transhumanity" ten years before the starting point of the game.  At the cusp of achieving its goal, the TITANs disappeared, for completely unknown reasons.  As a result, EP is a post-apocalyptic game, with the Earth mostly uninhabitable and policed by an orbital satellite defense system that no one is willing to take responsibility for setting up.  The inhuman threat of the TITANs also adds a strong horror component.  The default game concept in the 1st edition of the game had players serving as members of "Firewall," a conspiratorial organization dedicated to preventing another extinction-level-event.  Second Edition retains the Firewall campaign option, but broadens the focus--more on that in a bit.

The third major tent-pole of the EP setting is politics/economics.  Roughly speaking, the Inner Solar System (i.e. from Mars inward to the Sun) is controlled by a consortium (called...the Planetary Consortium) of business interests that push a capitalist line.  The Outer System, by contrast, is dominated by anarchist and other non-capitalist economic and political systems (most notably the Nordic Socialism 2.0 of Saturn's moon Titan).  These two sides, as you might expect, don't like each other very much, and are engaged in a system-wide "Cold War."  At the heart of this divide is the fact that nanotechnology allows for something approaching a Post-Scarcity economic situation, where a household nanofabricator can "3-D print" anything you might need with some power and a store of bulk matter.  The Outer System is all-in on these ideas, while the Inner System powers strongly regulate the use of nanotechnology, ostensibly for security reasons by also to protect their economic position.

Once again, I had very little familiarity with anarchist political ideas or Post-Scarcity economic theorizing prior to EP, and while the designers are pretty clearly on "Team Outer System" by and large, there is enough there to show off the pros and cons of each system in order to provide a balanced perspective and interesting story material.  For example, anarchist systems run entirely on the "reputation economy" to distribute skilled labor, unique materials, etc., mediated in part through online scoring systems.  In '09 when EP first came out, this seemed (and was presented as) mostly unproblematic; after ten years of social media ubiquity, it's not hard to see how that can be subject to manipulation and grief.

The final tent-pole of EP are the Pandora Gates--basically star gates that appeared mysteriously after the TITANs left at five places in the Solar System and which allow for instantaneous travel to other systems.  Different entities are exploring and settling these extra-solar worlds, discovering the ruins of other civilizations (though, no living aliens, apart from the slime-mold like Factors who showed up in the Solar System and are basically just "keeping an eye on things").  So, in addition to or as a substitute for Firewall-oriented play, you can play a group of explorers seeking out new worlds in a Very Weird version of Star Trek.  Second Edition also gives more resources for running a Han Solo-style "scum and villainy" criminal focused campaign, which is an interesting choice as it was not front-and-center in any of the 1st Edition materials.

As you might be gathering, the setting of EP is very dense and very rich.  It is a lot to absorb for the newbie, especially as it draws on material from less common ends of the sci-fi pool.  And, perhaps except for a pure Gatecrashing campaign, it would be difficult to run a campaign that doesn't engage with the political and economic ideas of the setting.  EP as written is clearly anti-capitalist, pro-anarchist, and pro-transhumanist, and while they are not going to come to your house and seize your gaming materials if you depart from that, the work needed to re-craft the setting away from those concepts is likely not worth the effort.

Having said that, I love the setting, despite not necessarily sharing all of those ideas personally.  And I think the setting material matured, in the sense of becoming richer and more nuanced, as the line developed.  For example, the original corebook presented the Jovian Republic in a pretty standard left-wing, unflattering characterization of US-style political and religious conservatives.  The Outer System sourcebook, Rimward, didn't so much depart from that as present things from their point of view, allowing you to see why folks would be on-board with a basically fascist state and presenting interesting (if not very nice) factions within that structure to work with for story purposes.

Second Edition keeps all of that good stuff, with the changes limited exclusively to the rules engine.  First Edition was a very crunchy game, especially by 2019 standards, showing off the influences of the designers' previous work on Shadowrun.  The new edition is still comfortably above the median on the crunch scale, but they made some targeted changes to bring it down a bit.

The biggest change has to do with how bodies work.  Remember, your character's body (known as a "morph") is basically a piece of gear in EP, and can be changed and swapped during play.  In 1st Edition, your morph provided bonuses or penalties to your attributes, which in turn affected your skills.  Thus, when you switched morphs, you had to in a sense rebuild your character and recalculate all of your skills.  Second edition morphs, instead of affecting attributes, instead provide points to physical, mental, and social pools that allow you to alter dice rolls or perform other effects.  So, instead of the Olympian morph giving a bonus to your Somatics attribute that effects every test, you get a pool of points to spend on certain tests.

While this does make morphs less relevant to the outcome of the game overall, it greatly simplifies the character management process.  The pools also push the game in a bit of a narrative-game direction, a departure from 1st Edition.  Spending a point from the Insight Pool allows you to automatically find a clue a la the GUMSHOE games, and there is a fourth, "Flex," pool that allows for things like causing a helpful NPC to appear or introduce an element into the environment.  I like these sorts of mechanics, but they are a little bit jarring for a game that is otherwise very simulationist.

The second change is to character creation.  The system in the corebook for 1st Edition was full-on point buy, with all of the time-consuming min-maxing that goes along with that.  It was divided up into packages corresponding to a character's background, but most of it was freeform spends.  Second Edition puts the emphasis on bigger character creation "blocks," with a few bonus point to sprinkle around at the end.  You can still basically build your character however you want, but it moves faster and it is less overwhelming for new players.  In service of this, the number of skills in the game was significantly reduced to 21 plus knowledge skills, which helps.  They also smartly segregate the points used to buy morphs from the rest of the character creation points.  In 1st Edition, buying a tricked-out morph at character creation was a trap option, since many adventures would require you to ditch your morph to move around, causing you to lose those points.  [In EP, the most common way to travel from place to place is to download your consciousness, broadcast it to your destination, and "sleeve" you into a new morph].  Now, you basically build your "ego" (consciousness), and then select a morph separately.

With all of the simplifications, though, it's still a crunchy game.  The basic mechanic is a percentile dice system using "the Price Is Right" rules--you want to get as high a roll as possible without going over your target number, which is your skill/attribute value modified for difficulty.  In addition to the binary success/failure, a roll of 33 or above that succeeds is a superior success, while a 66 or above that succeeds is a double superior success; likewise, a roll of 66 or below that fails is a superior failure, and a roll of 33 or below that fails is a double superior failure.  On top of that, doubles (i.e. "00," "11," "22," etc.) are criticals, either a critical success if the roll is a success or a critical failure if it is a failure.  This system creates a lot of conceptual space for narrating outcomes from a single roll, and the clean breaks make it pretty easy and quick to interpret a particular roll.  My one concern is that the distinction between superior successes/fails and critical successes/fails is not immediately obvious (though, the rulebook does a good job of providing concrete examples of implementing both), and I suspect it will take a while for GMs to get used to narratively describing all of the different permutations.

Combat wise, everything is an opposed test--attacker rolls to hit, defender rolls to dodge or otherwise defend.  Damage is then applied against a HP-like pool, and attacks that do a certain amount of damage cause more significant wounds.  In keeping with the horror dimension, there is also a parallel mental damage track, as you lose sanity through confronting inhuman horrors (though, in EP, you can go under the psychosurgery "knife" and get that fixed up).  One smart change from 1st Edition was to get rid of Shadowrun-style multiple actions per turn for high initiative results, which slows combat to crawl in my experience.  I haven't done a comprehensive comparison between editions, but it also looks like they paired back the combat modifiers and noodly bits.

Hacking rules are a notorious pain-point in cyberpunk and cyberpunk-adjacent games, and I will confess that I made a point of avoiding the Hacking systems in my previous encounters with EP.  Smartly, 2nd Edition EP follows the trend I've seen in hacking systems generally of moving away from making hacking a separate mini-game and toward a menu of actions that you can take to make the computer do what you want it to do.  This integrates hacking better into the rest of the game.  The rules for cyber-combat (called here "Mesh combat") take up only one page, which suggests that they are not going to be overly burdensome in play.

There are also rules for psychic powers, for transferring your character's brain from body to body, for dealing with different sorts of habitats and a variety of locales throughout the solar system and beyond, for reputation and social networks, and a bunch of other stuff.  There are a lot of systems and material, but there is a lot of stuff in the setting, so I'm not sure what else they could have done to streamline it more than they have already done.  And that really speaks to my overall take on the rules changes--it is markedly simpler than 1st Edition, but it's not really simple.  The streamlining is meaningful as compared to 1st Edition, but it may not be enough for many folks.

So, here's my ultimate conclusion on Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition.  First off, everything that made EP an amazing setting is unchanged, and if you have any interest in these themes and ideas, you owe it to yourself to check it out.  Even if you never play the game, it's worth reading and thinking about as a piece of fiction--it's that good.  As far as the game goes, unless you are a dedicated high-crunch fan or completely allergic to narrativist mechanics, 2nd Edition is clearly the way to go.  As neither of those things, from my perspective 2nd Edition is an improvement on 1st Edition in basically every way.  But it's still crunchy, and it's unavoidably "a lot," as new players and GMs will not only have to take in a multi-faceted setting with concepts that might be unfamiliar, but also a demanding (though, not as demanding as before) set of game mechanics that cover the sprawling setting.

Would I be willing to play or run Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition?  Absolutely, gladly--as long as I had players willing to "dig in" a bit to the lore and the mechanics.  There are stories that EP can tell that I don't think can be told in other settings.  It's worth the effort, and its less effort than before, but it is still going to be effort. 

A Modest Defense of Consent in Gaming

On Wednesday, Monte Cook Games ("MCG") released a free product in PDF entitled Consent in Gaming, written by Shanna Germain and Sean K. Reynolds  In many respects, it is a very on-brand product for the MCG crew--it is beautifully laid-out (I continue to believe that MCG products have the best looking and cleanest lay-out of any tabletop RPG company), has lots of pretty, Numenera-ish art, and is a breezy read.  It is also on-brand in the sense that MCG has tackled similar, or at least adjacent, topics before--Germain's Love and Sex in the Ninth World was the first ttrpg product about sex that I encountered that both mature and thoughtful (i.e. not completely cringe-inducing), as well as useful and relevant for play.  Likewise, MCG has recently come out with Your Best Game Ever, an incredibly useful (and, as far as I know, unique) book laying out best practices for all of the social and meta-contextual elements of playing a ttrpg that don't involve the game rules--how to create a character that other players and the GM will enjoy playing with, who should bring snacks, table etiquette, things like that.

Consent in Gaming can be seen as a supplement to Your Best Game Ever, honing in on the question of content in games and how to get everyone at the table on the same page about that content.  As the title might imply, Germain and Reynolds borrow the framework of consent in the sex context--no content is necessarily off-limits or problematic so long as everyone is prepared ahead of time and has affirmed their desire work in that space.  This framing is also not a surprise, as Germain, in her "other job," is an erotica/BDSM writer and advocate.  Consent in Gaming is in many ways a modest work, as it is only 13 pages, and it draws on (and very explicitly acknowledges) other works and other people who have developed tools and strategies in this area.  Still, Consent in Gaming is very useful, as it brings all of that somewhat disparate material together in one place and promotes it under the imprint of one of the most prominent ttrpg publishers, greatly enhancing the visibility and accessibility of these ideas.

It is a sign of the times, I think, that people were Big Mad Online about Consent in Gaming.  I should say, right up front, that (surprise, surprise) I think some of the online commentary is not being offered in good faith.  But, for purposes of this post, I am going to do everything I can to treat the criticisms that I saw at face value, and attempt to address them in what I hope is a constructive way.  Because I believe that Consent in Gaming is a good and necessary product, even if you don't use many, or even any, of the tools and approaches that it lays out.

So, what were the critiques?  One level of critique is to the notion of consent as a framework for approaching a tabletop RPG session, viewing it as fundamentally unnecessary.  This is expressed, in a troll-ish way, with questions like "what, am I as the GM going to have to ask my players' permission to kill their character?"  Well, yes and no.  Some of the content that makes up a tabletop RPG session is implicit in the nature of the game and its core elements.  If I sit down to play having spent twenty minutes min-maxing my combat stats, setting a stat that explicitly measures how much punishment my character can take before he or she dies, and choosing my weapons, I have to know that combat is going to be part of the game.  By sitting down at the table, one is at least tacitly consenting to some measure of violence in the game, including violence against your character.

However, there is a wide chasm between "your character might die," and "we are going to describe in detail your character being disemboweled."  Indeed, the way most ttrpgs abstract combat would likely lead one to the default assumption that there will not be an in-depth description of viscera and the other elements of "real combat."  Within the boundaries of the implicit consent provided by agreeing to sit down and play a particular ttrpg with particular content, there are a host of variations and unaddressed elements, and thus a host of places where different people might have different expectations around content.  In other words, there are lots of potential consent questions that are floating out there in a tabletop rpg session, and it is reasonable and prudent to bring some clarity to those questions.

This dovetails with the second strand of criticism, which has to do with implicit versus explicit standards.  There is a school of thought (in all things really, but here as well) that it is a bad thing to make these expectations concrete because it reduces creativity and flexibility.  I know there are a lot of people who feel this way in general, but I just fundamentally disagree.  In my experience, having clear, explicit boundaries enhances, rather than detracts from, creativity, because it provides a protected space in which to work.  If you don't know where the go and no-go areas are, I think most people will (and, I would argue, should) err on the side of caution when treading on potentially challenging ground.  But if you know exactly where the boundaries are, you know exactly how far you can go.

Let me give an example.  With my core gaming group, I'm getting ready to run a horror game for the first time (Eternal Lies for Trail of Cthulhu, for those curious).  Eternal Lies has some very explicit sexual content, and it has a strong dimension of body horror.  Neither of these are areas we have gone to before as a gaming group (our games thus far have been pretty PG-13, and this is at least a hard R), and so I wanted to make sure everyone was OK with those elements.  One of my players's response was basically "depends what you mean by sexual content--I'm not OK with demeaning or degrading depictions of women."  This is enormously helpful to me, first because I don't think the material in Eternal Lies fits that description, but also because I now know exactly where not to take the material that is there.  I feel much more confident and much more free to run the game in this space as a result of know where the landmines are located for my players.  If I didn't know what the problems were, I would be more inclined to just back all of the sexual content down (or, more likely, just not run Eternal Lies, as the material is pretty central to the plot).  All of that was made possible by being as direct as I possibly could be without spoiling the story.

Next, we have the "none of this is necessary because if there is a problem we can just talk about it" school.  One version of this centers around the checklist that is at the end of Consent in Gaming, which lists a series of potential trouble spots and encourages the user to check the green, yellow, or red box for that particular item.  This is presented as adding a bureaucratic element, one better addressed with less formal conversation.  But the virtue of the checklist, for me, is that it raises danger areas that many people might not be aware of as danger areas for others.  For example, I never considered "paralysis/physical restraint" as a danger category, but once you become aware of it, you can immediately see why it might be a problem for people and why it should be brought up.  If you find that having everyone fill out the checklist and submit it is overkill, then it is still useful as a reference sheet and to spur areas of discussion and consideration.

The other, and I think much more problematic, version of "just talk about it" is the notion that there is no need to address these issues on the front end because people can just object if and when an issue comes up.  There are several problems with this.  First, the cat is already out of the bag at that point.  I basically have a phobia around needles, and if a GM has described a bad guy driving syringes into my PC, me saying "hey, let's not go there" means I've already had a pretty bad time.  At the end of the day, playing a ttrpg is supposed to be fun, and so preventing an un-fun thing from happening again is not as good as preventing the un-fun thing from occurring in the first place.  Along those lines, putting the burden on the person who is in the midst of having a bad time to object in the moment can compound the bad time.  Is that an overwhelming burden?  Well, that depends of how bad a time the person is having.  My needle fear is not bad enough that I would be likely to have a big problem speaking up.  But other folks, especially if this relates to or stems from trauma, could be in a bad place, and not really able to "just speak up."  Finally, "just speak up" reflects a naive understanding of social and interpersonal dynamics.  It's hard to be the one person who dissents, even among a group of friends.  Many people, very often, will just choke back the objection and endure a bad time.  And, once again, the goal of this exercise is for everyone to have a good time, so this is a failure of the objectives of playing a ttrpg.     

Another line of critique is "we don't need to talk about this because we never use edgy or problematic content."  And, for many groups, that's true.  My regular group was more or less that type of group until this coming campaign.  If so, then this product is not for you, and that's fine.  But other groups do get into these sorts of spaces, and so it is relevant for them.  And, as discussed above, you may not be aware of what content is problematic unless or until you lay it all out on the table, so there is value in making sure you are not near any no-go zones.

It's also the case that, for some people and for some groups, they are not trying for a particularly emotional or personal experience.  This is part because of content (or, rather, a lack of certain more emotional or personal context), and in part because of the attitudes of the players and GM.  But it is also the case that ttrpgs can very quickly and very easily move into those spaces, and many players and groups seek out personal and emotions experiences through these games.  Being a player or being a GM is a kind of acting, and acting is a necessarily personal activity.  You bring a big part of yourself to the table when you participate in these games, even if everything is pitched at a very casual level.  I think many people in this hobby, especially people who don't have any sort of acting or performance background, don't really realize how quickly you can find yourself in a very personal and emotional space that you didn't necessarily see coming from the jump while playing these games, and you often don't realize until it is upon you.  My one experience playing Monsterhearts at Gencon was like that--everything was cool and casual and I am playing this edgy indie game with random folks at 11 in the morning, and then all of the sudden it's "oh, wow, I'm playing myself as a teenager, and feeling all of those old feelings, and this has gotten very real very fast."  So, even if a group doesn't intend to tread on any of these sensitive areas, I think it is wise to at least consider these questions.

Then we have the "why are you trying to impose your vision of ttrpgs on me?" group.  This again, has two versions.  The first is the idea that somehow Germain, Reynolds, and MCG are trying to impose a vision of how ttrpgs should be conducted, and are thus interfering with a gaming group's prerogatives.  I really don't get this objection.  Shanna and Sean and the folks at MCG are not the RPG police, breaking down your door in the middle of a session and demanding that you present them with your X-Card and consent checklist.  Nor is there anything in Consent in Gaming that presents itself, or them, as seeking that role.  If you don't like what they have written, then you can ignore it.  If you think all of this is unnecessary, then move along.

But the other, and I think more sinister, version of this is the idea that documents like this will encourage people to insist on these sorts of structures, making them normative in the ttrpg community, and thus negatively affecting other people's gaming experience.  You saw folks on Twitter saying things like "I would kick anyone out of my group who thinks this is a good idea," or "I will not allow this to be waived in my face."  On one level, I mean, OK.  Neither I nor MCG nor anyone else can stop you from purging folks who think consent structures are a good idea from your gaming universe.  Again, there is no RPG police.  But it's hard not to wonder what is going on in a gaming group where a discussion of boundaries by a player or potential player is greeted with this sort of reaction.  What is it that you want to do that is going to be limited as a result of these tools?  I thought we were all trying to have a good time here.

Underlying all of this is a certain sort of GM absolutism, in which the GM is allowed unfettered discretion to define the world as he or she chooses, and the players just have to sit there and passively accept it.  I found that kind of thing really odious when I first started back in the early 90s (when it was more common), and it feels positive archaic now.  Tabletop RPGs are, and should be, a collaborative exercise and power-tripping GMs are bad for everyone.  And when the power-tripping is taken on by people with a poor sense of boundaries and consent, you get horrible and totally unacceptable shit like the incident at the UK Games Expo a few months ago, where a GM running Things from the Flood (a game where the PCs play teenagers) had the PCs kidnapped and gang-raped for shock value.

Which leads to the last group, and I think least defensible on even the most generous reading, the "fuck your feelings" crowd.  I saw a post by Mark Finn in which he chronicles a thread in which a commenter insisted that it was necessary to have rape in tabletop RPGs because barbarians raped people, and thus we must be historically accurate in our Conan games.  Medieval people died of diphtheria, too, but I have yet to see anyone insist on the importance of that sort of historical accuracy in a medieval fantasy game.  Curious how rape is the element of the medieval period that is the marker of historical accuracy (again, in a Conan game, a world known for its fidelity to historical fact).  It is hard not to conclude that the commenter really likes the idea of depicting and talking about sexual assault in his ttrpg games.  Which, it should be said, I suspect Germain and Reynolds would endorse so long as everyone new what was going on and was on board.  Personally, I would not want to play in such a game, "historical accuracy" or no historical accuracy, but I am not offended that such games exist conceptually.  But if I show up for a session and you start describing in detail a violent sexual assault, I'm out.  And if the point of this exercise is to make me uncomfortable, then we have a fundamental breakdown in what it is we are trying to do in playing these games.

The other version, which I think might be worse, is the idea that tabletop RPGs should be spaces to explore and push on boundaries or difficult areas.  If that's what people want, and again consent ahead of time, then OK.  But you are a GM, not a therapist.  Getting into someone else's trauma and poking around, especially if you don't know what you are doing, is very dangerous.  And, more to the point, except for a small category of court-ordered interventions, therapy is a consensual process as well--once again, we are back to that word consent.  The idea that I show up for a fun ttrpg session and the GM unilaterally decides that he or she is going to "help me grow" by poking around in sensitive areas is profoundly irresponsible, and far, far above the GM's pay grade.  This is a very, very bad idea, for all involved, and if you think you are helping people with this, rethink things.

Again, perhaps none of this is helpful or worthwhile, as people who insist on being upset are likely going to be upset no matter what.  If your experience of playing ttrpgs is ruined by Germain and Reynolds and MCG publishing a 13 page PDF on consent, I don't know what to tell you.  But if you have a beef with this, at least take a moment to step back and think about the broader context, and why these resources are and can be useful to other people.   

Gumshoe Deep Dive, Part 3--The Fall of DELTA GREEN

I get it.  You're sick of Cthulhu.  Honestly, I am for the most part as well.

There are a lot of reasons to be burned-out with Cthulhu.  First, the source material is problematic.  And, I don't mean that in the edgy, "everything is problematic in 2019!" sense.  Lovecraft's work is actually problematic--he was deeply, virulently racist even by the standards of the 1920s, and many of his works reflect a deep xenophobia of the sort that bedevils our current era and its politics.  He's not exactly enlightened on women's issues as well.  Whatever you think of them, the Chapo Trap House games of Call of Cthulhu (examples of which can be found here, and here), while an intentional parody, are not that far off from the actual attitudes expressed in Lovecraft's works.

Second, I think over-exposure has dulled some of the edge of the Cthulhu Mythos.  I mean, I have a cute Cthulhu plushy sitting on the shelf of my bookcase at home that my brother got me for a birthday present a number of years ago.  It's hard to take Cthulhu seriously as an alien menace from beyond reality when he has been tasked with teaching little kids their letters.

Finally, there are structural problems with using the Cthulhu Mythos in tabletop roleplaying games.  In order to adequately represent many of these creatures in game terms, you have to make them insanely powerful.  But making them so powerful (especially in games that tend not to have quadratic power progression a la D&D) makes them difficult to actually use in the game.  Famously, in a combat with Cthulhu per the Call of Cthulhu rules, Cthulhu eats a random number of PCs every turn, and the PCs are unlikely to be able to do anything meaningful in response, as the PCs will be blasted with the enormous Sanity loss as a result of observing Cthulhu himself.  Actually encountering Cthulhu is a one round TPK, guaranteed.  And so, generally speaking, PCs don't actually encounter many of the more interesting elements of the Mythos.

As a result of this last element, tabletop RPGs that are "about" the Cthulhu Mythos are actually about something else (or some set of things), with the Mythos acting as a kind of background MacGuffin.  Those games are as interesting as the thing they are really about is interesting.  And, at a certain point, following a trail of clues up to the point where you get blasted in the face by an overwhelming foe, which is a simplistic but not inaccurate description of what many Mythos-based RPG scenarios are about, gets a little boring.  It is a testament to the skill of the adventure writing in both the Call of Cthulhu line and other lines like Trail of Cthulhu that they can make this basic formula work and be interesting and fresh, because the underlying premise is not inherently that exciting.

Nevertheless, even if you are officially on the "I'm done with Cthulhu" train, I would urge you to suspend that sentiment and give Ken Hite's The Fall of DELTA GREEN a chance.  Hite understands, or at least seems to understand, the idea that Cthulhu games have to have something in the foreground that is not Cthulhu in order to work.  So, while The Fall of DELTA GREEN on one level about fighting the infiltration of the Cthulhu Mythos into our world, it is really about the 1960s.  More specifically, it is about the 1960s in the United States, and how the 1960s eroded the essentially unbounded confidence that Americans had in their country that was inherited from World War II.

The key to The Fall of DELTA GREEN and why it works is that it uses the Cthulhu Mythos as a way to supplement and "turn up the temperature" on events and ideas that are already present in the 1960s.  Telling a story about Vietnam is in many ways already a horror story; adding the supernatural elements just highlights what is already there.  There are many very valid reasons to lose faith the U.S. government through the course of the 60s, so adding on top of all the other reasons the idea that there is a secret conspiratorial organization within the government that is researching alien technology and magic ("hypergeometry" in the language of the game) just puts a finer point on things.  There is a natural marriage between the sense of alienation that comes as a result of the actual historical events of the 1960s and the alienation embodied in the Mythos, and that marriage is why The Fall of DELTA GREEN is so compelling.

This dual sense of alienation is furthered by the fact that the PCs are agents of the U.S. government, members of unacknowledged agency DELTA GREEN dedicated to hunting down and destroying elements of the Mythos.  As such, PCs are placed in a front-row seat to watch things go down the toilet, both in the world generally and in terms of their own particular situation.  The default starting year is 1968, a year which in many ways represents the tipping-point beyond which no one could deny that the halycon days of the immediate post-War period were firmly in the rear-view mirror.  Even better, The Fall of DELTA GREEN fits within the broader DELTA GREEN universe, which states that the DELTA GREEN was shut down by the Pentagon in 1970.  In other words, the organization you are working for is literally at the end of its rope, but no one knows it at the time.  I'm not going to tell anyone how to run their games, but I would favor telling my players this fact ahead of time, as a way to emphasize the idea that this is the "fiddling while Rome burns" phase of things.

So, The Fall of DELTA GREEN is a dark game and setting.  But, unlike so many fictional settings that try to be dark, this game is very understated.  There are no cheap and contrived "edgy" set-pieces put in for shock value.  Instead, it lets the source material do the work.  The intro adventure that comes in the corebook is set in part in the tunnels used by the Vietcong, which is an inherently scary location even before you introduce elements of the Mythos.  War, racism, political violence, social unrest--all of these things are right there, in real life, waiting to be mined as the base for the supernatural to be layered on top.  The events of the late 1960s are so wild on their own that scenario design seems to me to consist of finding some crazy event that really occurred in history, brainstorming the most paranoid explanation for that event, and running with it.  Two hours after putting the book down for the first time, I had eight pages of notes on the how the Mythos ties into the Kennedy assassination, and had Oliver Stone's JFK queued up on Amazon Prime to mine for more material, all ready to be used in a campaign.

Another dimension to The Fall of DELTA GREEN, and a reason I think the game resonated with me, is that the 1960s are the perfect distance away to tell stories that have resonances with the present.  I don't think many are going to find this controversial, but I feel like we are living in another period in which people are experiencing alienation as a result of being let down by institutions and governments.  But it is hard to write about, or even really engage with, events as they are unfolding, because you are too close to them and it is hard/impossible to see the full picture to construct narratives.  The 1960s, however, are firmly in the past, and so they can be seen as a whole, with a sense of remove.  At the same time, it is familiar enough and similar enough to the situate we have now that GMs and players can make easy comparisons with things happening right now.  I suspect that running a few games of The Fall of DELTA GREEN, while perhaps not always "fun" in a conventional sense, might be cathartic for many people in 2019.

Mechanically, The Fall of DELTA GREEN hews pretty close to the GUMSHOE baseline.  Players pick a background specialty that lines up with their prior military or other government service before they were recruited into DELTA GREEN, and this background gives them a spread of Investigative and General Abilities (a system used, in one form or another, in many GUMSHOE games, including Ashen Stars and Trail of Cthulhu).  These are then tweaked with a few more points to spend, and then the character is good to go.  In terms of new elements, The Fall of DELTA GREEN has more extensive combat rules than the baseline GUMSHOE, but unlike Hite's own Night's Black Agents and the forthcoming Swords of the Serpentine which push the action in a more cinematic direction, these combat elements mostly revolve around making combat more violent and deadly, adding critical hits and the "insta-death" Lethality rules.  All of which is well within the tone and feel that the game is going for, without bogging things down too much.  It's still GUMSHOE, it still moves fast, but now with more options and approaches to take when fighting it out.

The other new mechanical piece, and probably my favorite thing in the game besides the setting, is the Bonds and Personal Life system.  At character creation, the player designates Bonds with people, places, and organizations (like a church or other body).  After missions, the player and the GM play out short scenes of what the PC is doing during downtime, and one thing that the player can do is spent time with those Bonds to repair or reinforce those connections.  The mechanics of the game, especially the Stability rules, create a kind of gravitational pull that wears away those Bonds, and so spending your PCs downtime with those Bonds keeps them strong.  But, spending time on our Bonds means you are not spending time doing additional research into the Mythos or other tasks that might help you on future missions, so there are real cost/benefit considerations to maintaining your Bonds.  As a result, many if not most PCs will see their connects with friends and family slowly erode during the course of play, which really reinforces the theme of alienation, while still ultimately leaving it in the hands of the player and avoiding heavy-handed intervention by the GM.  It's very elegant and fits perfectly with the rest of the game.

One last point--I have seen some reviews describe the physical presentation of the book as "amateurish," but I could not disagree more.  I think The Fall of DELTA GREEN is one of the most beautiful books Pelgrane has produced, and the layout and art design fit perfectly with the aesthetic.  The design is going for the random-pages-from-a-dossier look (a common choice for espionage games), but everything is washed through a sepia-toned lens that invokes films and television from that era.  The art is intentionally fuzzy and out of focus, heightening the weirdness and dislocation.

The Fall of DELTA GREEN won the Ennie Award for best setting a couple of weeks ago at Gencon, and it is well-deserved.  It is a deeply flavorful game that works even for those who are not otherwise massive Cthulhu fans, and the 1960s setting is a perfect fit for the tone and themes the game is going for.  The system shows off the flexibility of GUMSHOE, and is well paired with the setting.  The Fall of DELTA GREEN is not one of the most prominent GUMSHOE games, but it is a gem, and well worth a look.