The Post Human RPG, Session 1
Well, this turned out to be a classical essay, an attempt to understand my beliefs and thoughts by writing them out. It’s barely edited too. The shame! (I mean, uh, it’s discursive).
For those of you new to this, GM means “Gamemaster,” the person running the game that the players are playing in, and PC means player-character, the character that a player runs in the game.
“Fairy and Fish,” Painting by Journeyman
Thinking about the Post Human RPG
Excerpt from Session 0:
So what is the Post Human world? It’s simple. The apocalypse that characters in the Cthulhu Mythos are always trying to prevent, happened. The stars were alright, the gods of Chaos awoke, reality warped, and humans mutated, but our core did not change.
You might have a third eye and an intelligent fungus as a roommate, but you still have to call your momma once a week, and you fight with the fungus over space in the fridge, and maybe once or twice in your life, something terrible happens, and you’re called upon to be a hero, as only an ordinary mutant can be, and that’s the Post Human condition.
This has to start with a story about my wife, Cat, whom I thought would never play a tabletop RPG with me. I had given up trying. And then one day, a little over a year ago, when I was looking for playtesters for the revamped version of Godkillers, Cat volunteered. I hadn’t even asked her.
And when I played with her, Liz, Travis, I stripped the rules down to almost nothing, and, in the playtest, I stopped looking at and using what few rules existed. I just wasn’t happy with them.
Of course, by “rules,” I mean the rules inspired by wargames. Random chances to succeed and fail. How and whether you live or die. I didn’t replace those rules with their analogues from storygames either.
We played with other unwritten rules, such as taking turns, having fun, progressing the story (toward an unknown end), and using logic, character, and story to decide success or failure and life or death.
I didn’t invent this style of play. Liz told me that I was doing something similar to roleplaying (RP) although RP typically doesn’t have a gamemaster. And one of my favorite RPGs is Amber Diceless Roleplay by the late Erick Wujcik, and he deliberately did not use the word “game,” and though Amber has some rules, it is spare in rules and generous in advice, and it was that advice that helped me to run that playtest the way I did.
I had a blast in that playtest, and Cat loved it so much that she continued to play RPGs with me and my friends, but we went back to rules-based RPGs, to D&D, Shadowrun, Zweihander, Legend of the Five Rings.
I understand the fun of the rules, the joy of system mastery, the world-building of the system, but after forty years(!) of systems, I was tired of them, even the best of them are like self-driving cars: They still need a driver.
And if I was tired of them, Cat was scathing: “Am I supposed to read 500 pages to play this game?” (My sister, by the way, echoes that sentiment). I told Cat that she didn’t have to, and I basically did her homework for her, and she still had fun.
I know that you don’t need to read all 500 pages of Shadowrun, for example, to play the game. But you kinda do, if you want to play it right, if you want to make the most fun choices, you have to understand the choices that are fun for you. A kind GM will bend the rules for you, or let you “re-spec” your character, recreate it, if you fell into a system trap (yeah, systems have traps — unfun lures for the unwary player), but this becomes an unpleasant moment in a game. You have to petition the GM to make an exception for you, and that’s a not-so-fun moment for all involved, even if everything goes your way.
What about games that don’t have 500 pages of rules? Is even one rule too much? In this, I go back to the distinction between “Wargaming” rules and what I called "unwritten” rules, but let’s call those “Party” rules.
Wargaming rules are what we think of when we think of traditional roleplaying game rules. Your character can have thirty feet in a round, which is 6 seconds long, and they can attack once per turn, and they have 7 health levels, and so on.
In a standard rulebook, Party rules are not so enumerated. Party rules tend to show up as advice for playing the game right, for having fun, for emulating the genre the game is based on, for getting along with other players, for controlling the pace of the game, and so on.
Party “rules”1 combine the conventions of a genre with standards of behavior that help us have fun with others. These rules are unlike wargame rules in that you don’t roll dice for them or spend in-game resources when you use them, but they are important, and ignoring them can have unpleasant consequences.
The Wargaming rules and Party rules are often in conflict. For example, GMs are admonished not to hide information crucial to a scenario behind a die roll since a failed roll could lead to a fail state in the game. Some games advise GMs not to focus their fire on the most dangerous or obvious PC, although players are given the opposite advice. “Play fair,” GMs are told — the logic of that being that as a GM, you have all the power, and you could use it to crush the PCs mercilessly, so don’t do that
This kind advice wouldn’t be necessary except that Wargaming rules applied ruthlessly are not fun for most groups, and yet perhaps due to the historical accident of RPGs being derived from wargames, or just due to the amount of space they occupy in most rulebooks, or perhaps because Wargaming rules are formal and Party rules are informal, Wargaming rules often take precedence over Party rules. That is, in a standard gaming group, you typically have to justify why you are ignoring/contradicting the “rules-as-written” in favor of Party rules2 3.
So here’s an open secret — good GMs learn the Party rules for their group and apply them constantly.
Here’s the corollary: If the Party rules contradict the Wargaming rules, a good GM decides in favor of the Party rules.
And here’s the dark secret at the heart of my game design: I am always contradicting Wargaming rules in favor of Party rules, in favor of fun at the table and genre emulation, so if I’m doing that, and I want to design a game, I want to design a game that focuses on Party rules and has as few Wargaming rules as possible. The model for that exists: Erick Wujcik’s Amber.
So that’s my plan: Very few Wargaming rules, lots of Party rules.
My goal is that the Post Human rule book will be an enjoyable and useful read, and that people like my wife and my sister (and maybe you and me) who are turned off by lots of Wargaming rules, by character sheets that look like a Ren Fair version of an insurance worksheet, find something to like about Post Human. If you like your Wargaming rules4, I hope that Post Human inspires you to create something in your favorite rules set.
Next Post: Much More about the Post Human setting.
There are narrative/story games that turn Party concerns into rules with numbers and such but those are outside the scope of this already overlong rambling piece. In short, I’ve seen very few of those that work for me.
Though one key argument for the primacy of formal Wargaming rules is that they provide a common understanding and framework through which different groups can understand and play a game.
There is one Party rule that makes it into many games, and this is Luck / Fate / Willpower points that allow players to undo or mitigate the effects of Wargaming rules. This type of Party rule is formalized.
Man, do I hate the attitude of bad-wrong-fun. Do you know it? It’s confusing your own likes or dislikes for what is true or correct. If you like the Wargaming aspect of most traditional RPGs, more power to you! I will never tell you that you are having “bad-wrong-fun.” Please don’t mistake my strong belief in my preferences and my criticism of Wargaming rules for a disdain of those rules or style of play. Okay, I made fun of standard character sheets. In good fun! Really.