Ivory Goat

yeah, okay. Miniatures reviews never happened. Whatever. I still like the blog name.

I love fantasy settings. But what I love about them is the thing least supported both by the games themselves and gaming culture in general. I love investigating the... well, the science of them. Biology, Anthropology, History, Physics. The whole shebang; heck, in most fantasy settings, Theology becomes a falsifiable field of inquiry. I want to know if evolution exists, or if it's all a static intelligent design, and if it was intelligently designed, by whom? Is that designer still around? If not, what happened to it, and its creations? What happens when a manifest and immanent deity is no longer worshiped? If an elven god became worshiped by humans, is it possible that the elves adopted that god from an older race? Can an alchemist's concoctions be mass-produced? If not, WHY not? How are there still precious metals and gems in the earth if dwarves, humans, and countless monstrous and bizarre species have been mining nearly non-stop for thousands of years?

Questions like that are what I want to delve deeply into. And the answers to those are either not addressed, and sometimes even mentioning that they're not addressed can cause one to catch hell within the fan community, or are left entirely up to the GM, which, given that I end up the GM more often than not, is unsatisfying. If I wanted to CREATE a world, I wouldn't have paid money for your setting, game-designers. When GMing, thinking about these questions is often dismissed as building castles in the sky, and GMs are admonished to focus on the gameable stuff, and if they want to world build, write a book. In a lot of ways, I agree - because if it's not going to hit the table, it really is wasting the other players' time. When playing, you're told not to worry about it, and focus on the four-armed ape that's trying to kill you.

An older game called Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth is about the only RPG I know of that focuses on world building as the game itself, and although I've never seen the book, I'm told it's nearly unreadable for its pretensions and unplayable in its mechanics. That's a damned shame. And from what I've heard about Aria, it's very much about top-down world building. The players make their decisions and apply them directly to the world. That's fun, but again, I can world-build in that fashion alone, and without scouring e-bay or game stores with a used book section. As player, I want to formulate hypotheses, run experiments, and collect data. As a GM, I want a working mechanism for players to uncover this information, apply it to change the world, and sometimes come to incorrect conclusions.

In a lot of ways, adventure gaming can handle part of that. In an adventure role-playing game, you're always going to be more Indiana Jones and Lara Croft than George Bass and Augustus Rivers. So I can rappel down caves into ancient pre-human ruins and dodge the murder traps ("Why did they have so many murderous traps in their own city," the part of me that prompted this post asks). That's fine. Other people at the table want to swing swords and/or bed harlots, and y'know, that's fun too. I don't necessarily want to role-play out sitting around for 72 hours while the computing elemental crunches my data on the air-speed velocity of an unladen white dragon. But wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mechanic for obtaining and understanding that data?

Whenever I complain about non-combat mechanics in a fantasy adventure game, my request is always "I want the mechanics for doing activity X to be at least as complex and robust as the mechanics for murdering things!" The usual response is that combat can be broken down into discrete steps with easily identifiable actions that have obvious cause-and-effect relationships to mechanical elements. Social interaction, to me, does seem to lack that sort of modularity - and yet, pick-up artists, social psychologists, and behavioral anthropologists all seem to be able to break down these interactions into steps that seem a lot like combat examples in your usual RPG. Research and investigation certainly lend themselves to a logical breakdown even more than chatting up a hot young thing in a nightclub.

I should make these rules myself, then, since no one else seems to be jumping at the opportunity. But if I make the rules, I'll almost certainly have to run them, and again, nobody else seems interested in this mode of play. Which is almost certainly why they're not included in rules sets - if you can sell one copy of the book to me by including rules for collecting data and interpreting experimental results (and for the GM, embedding those facts into the world to be uncovered), or you can sell 100 copies by including more rules for murdering people more spectacularly, the economics are clear. I'm facing a similar roadblock in my ideas for Spell-Component Tycoon, which would focus on mercantile and economic endeavors rather than the research-based ones I'm rambling about here. Both could be attempts to graft rules onto systems that already have an embarrassment of rules, or they could be game unto themselves, requiring me to build a system from the ground up, which lacks a great deal of appeal to me.

So, that's almost 1,000 words of complaining. Let's see if I can write another few thousand words on solving the problem, and see if we can write the next thousand in less than a year?