World-First Games
By prioritizing the stories we can tell over the signals we can sense, modernity reduces the vast web of relational intelligence to a narrow, human-centered narrative....[that] suppresses other forms of intelligence and communication. (Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Outgrowing Modernity, 168)
I know that I can sound so serious about everything—spirits, remembrance, and futurity in the face of great oppression. Which is maybe why I am so in love with play, especially with tabletop role playing game play. The misty mirror of fantasy is such a delightful way to meet each other and role playing games provide so many vessels to contain those encounters. From the silly to the profound, gaming has been an anchor line for me.
The first game I played was with my older brother, who turned to Dungeons & Dragons to entertain me. As a five-year-old, I looked forward to those times when he would let me sit at the basement table and indulge me with bits of solo adventure (the fairly new U1: Secrets of Saltmarsh was the first of those). For the next ten years, I managed a few games here and there with curious friends. Dungeons & Dragons most often, but occasionally other fare like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Marvel Superheroes, or Middle Earth Role Playing (the old ICE game based off of Rolemaster; hey, I already said I was old).
And then in high school a proper grown-up gaming group adopted me into their game of Megatraveller and then TORG, and I have been in one gaming group or another ever since (barring the three years of graduate school coursework). When I left North Carolina for Chicago, I left behind a wonderful story games–centric group I had been playing with for more than fifteen years.
I have played more than my fair share of story games whose narrative, story-first mechanics center on providing players with the tools to tell certain sorts of stories. These games drew a lot from dramatic conventions from cinema—genre, scenes, cuts, framing, and fading to black. Most of us have some sense of how cinema works even when we don't have a lot of the language to describe it, so this approach gives players a lot of tools to work with. It is a lot of fun to see how the mechanics of the game then encourage us to improvise narrative directions within those constraints.
Games like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder have never been story first. I came to Pathfinder 2e because reading the fantastical account of the planes in the original Gamemastery Guide left me yearning for the worlding and world building that it implied. When I use "world" in a verb way, I am talking about the creative transformation that goes on in a game when the environment exceeds story into a (cosmic) horizon. There were so many places to situate player characters that allowed them to find their own way through this immense world. It invited disruptions of straightforward genre stories with breakthroughs from other parts of the cosmos.
Running Pathfinder 2e was also a pleasure. It was so easy to provide meaningful combat challenges and many of the creatures had just enough lore and pathos to launch the world making in which I would embed them for discovery. The subsystems for other activities seemed good enough. The debts of Pathfinder 2e's encounter, exploration, and downtime modes to OD&D appealed to me and seemed like an invitation to play a little more in that explorer's vein.
It took me a while to notice how all those out of encounter mode mechanics were slowly eroding what I enjoyed about world making and exploration. Since the Pathfinder challenges are very proficiency driven and proficiency was broken down into an array of fine-grained skill checks, most any exploration challenge could be abstracted into a roll.
There wasn't much difference whether I rewarded players with Gleanings from the Final Incantation by the pseudonymous Maestre Minuet (an illegal but oft-published grimoire), or a "couple of books" from a library about demonology; both ended up tumbled down into a note on the character sheet about a +1 to Recall Knowledge checks about demons and maybe a chance to learn a ritual.
Pathfinder 2e's system made much of the substance of exploration into color. It didn't support multifaceted objects that pointed toward other aspects of the setting. The treasures of the game highlighted that. There are many items available for me to put into my game, but few of them are drawn to pull players (or GMs) more deeply into the world around them.
Eventually, I experimented with supplementing and partially replacing the out-of-encounter mode rules with the core moves of Kult: Divinity Lost in the Pathfinder duet I run with my partner. That isn't quite as strange as it might first seem! Kult was one of several systems I had been curious about for its effort to fuse traditional role playing mechanics with those of story games. Dungeon Bitches caught my eye for what it had done in that regard, and so more recently did Daggerheart.
Kult stood out from others for a few reasons. Its use of 2d10 meant that its bonuses were fairly compatible with the heavily balanced d20 system of Pathfinder 2e. The moves were each linked to ability scores, many of which were fairly compatible with the ability scores of Pathfinder. The active abilities settled well against the core attributes and the passive abilities were nearly identical to Pathfinder's three saves. The sheer number of abilities in Kult (10!) guaranteed there were moves were most of the situations that came up in game.
It dramatically improved my experience of running the game, for sure, and helped both me and my partner find a bolder and bigger world to explore. The "fiction-first" approach embedded in its Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) mechanics prioritized events in the game, leaving more in my hands to make a decision when the events in the game called for a dice roll. The question and answer nature of many of those rolls gave my partner a lot of decision making power about how to follow out the results of many of those rolls.
It wasn't a perfect fit; I wasn't exactly expecting it to be. The question and answer structure of many of the moves pointed back at the world better, but the questions were often both constraining and leading. Improvised questions didn't always end up fitting as tidily against the moves. But more importantly: I started to wonder if the narrative fiction-first PbtA mechanics were an unnecessary kludge for what the OSR was already doing with its rereading of B/X-style exploration.
And that invites unraveling a lot of the play style I have built up around Pathfinder 2e and asking what I really need in a game system to run the sort of world-first rather than story-first games that I love the most. Which means I am at the point where I want to write a game that helps me interrogate some of what it is I am personally after when I world and when I navigate a world as a player.
There is a mechanical and social dimension to this work that will be familiar enough to anyone who reads and writes games. The OSR community has built up ways to talk about all of this that I find very useful and will be making use of.
I don't know if the resulting game will be properly "OSR" because there is also a more historical, autobiographical, and spiritual aspect to this that I can't shake. My approach owes more than a bit to Walter Benjamin's work, especially the sort he engages in The Arcades Project and "Theses on the Philosophy of History," and David Bowie's practice of crafting personas through which he could channel musical worlds.
It owes quite a lot more to the idea of historical rescue that Jenny Hval places at the center of her novel Girls Against God. I am going backward toward my own youth in order to find a different and more queer feminine trajectory that I could have grown up within, one that might have a presence and future now that it couldn't have had then.
So I am working with the OSR not just because of its game design discourse but for its simultaneous distance from, and entanglement with, my 1980s childhood by way of Dungeons & Dragons. That means keeping hold of the heavy history that foreclosed many queer creative possibilities in the 1980s, AIDS. I strive to write a game whose worlding resonates with all of that.
This is concrete work, rooted in mythos making for the weird little girl I was and the weird middle-aged woman I am. I balk a little at calling it artistic, but I don't know a better word to describe this process. Situationist art, maybe, committed to creating an occasion for a group of people to have their own experience within it.