Appears-Book-Isms

Here's how it probably starts.

There's a slip between the input and the output of the Gamemaster-In-The-Middle. The adventure writer communicating to the GM says "This appears to be a worn stone stairway leading down, but really is a sloping passage floored with the sticky illusion-casting tongue of a Deceptive Devourer, the rest of which lurks in wait in room 15 of the next level." The GM then communicates to players,  "You see what appears to be ... an old set of stone steps leading down into the darkness." Or consulting the "appears" synonym book, "seems," "looks like," "apparently is," et al.

Who knows why they do this, but two reasons come to mind. It could just be literal-mindedness, relying on the words in the description to craft a speech to the players. It could also be a reflex of honesty; the inner moral angel balking at saying there "is" a flight of stairs leading down when it just isn't true. Whatever the reason, it becomes immediately clear to the players that using "appears"-isms in this way is a giveaway that something funny is up.

Now, there's still time for you, the GM, to repent of your folly. Realize that your job is only to describe reality as it appears at any given time to the players. A successful deception will appear with the full force of reality;  "is," actually, is fully appropriate.

But in some games I've seen, the GM instead takes the left-hand path, doubling down on "appears"-ism by applying it as a decoy to things that aren't deceptive at all.

"What seem to be some mushrooms are growing from the dung heap." (They're just mushrooms.)
"There are some humanoids approaching. They appear to be orcs." (And they are.)
"A stream of what looks like clear water flows from the left wall to the right." (PSYCH! It's acid, save or take 4d6!!)

In any case, "appears"-ism usually gets left by the wayside when the players enter safe surroundings. Or at least imagine this:

You find what appears to be the same trail leading back to the village through superficially familiar birch and fir trees. After walking a distance that feels similar to the distance you took to get there, you see what may very well indeed be the buildings of the village. You go to a low house that looks very much like your inn. A hot meal for five is seemingly brought out within what feels like minutes by the self-styled innkeeper, who closely resembles the man you remember from this morning. Pewter-look plates apparently are sitting on what looks like a table, with a liquid having the appearance of ale in a ceramic-like pitcher. The "plates" are heaped with putative sausage and ostensible beans ...

This, I think you'll agree, is a Brechtian alienation effect gone too far; it turns the game into an exercise in Plato's Cave or radical philosophical solipsism. Whenever appears-speak is used, it will keep the players vaguely tipped-off and on guard, lending a hallucinatory aspect to the proceedings.

But I'm not sure it's necessary to use such a blunt instrument to get that effect -- shouldn't players naturally be wary in the dungeon? And more to the point, how do you really spring the classic "innkeeper-is-a-werewolf" surprise when you telegraph safe and dangerous areas so obviously?

In conclusion, there can only be one response to an environment described through "appears"-book-isms ...

"I DISBELIEVE!"

Is-Book-Isms

In fiction writing you may have heard of the said-book-ism -- the overly descriptive dialogue synonym that went out of style around the 1970's largely due to its naming and shaming in the Turkey City Lexicon.

Well, if you're writing adventure scenarios you shouldn't be writing dialogue. Really. But there's a parallel in scenario descriptions: let's call it the "is-book-ism."

An idol of a horned demon looms over the room.
An idol of a horned demon dominates the room.
An idol of a horned demon commands the room.
An idol of a horned demon squats in the room.
An idol of a horned demon stands in the room.
An idol of a horned demon occupies the room.
An idol of a horned demon exists in the room.
An idol of a horned demon can be found in the room.

All to avoid the humble verb "to be" with its drabness and its insinuations of the passive voice...

An idol of a horned demon is in the room.

Most of these locutions are called out as cliches in the Fantasy RPG Bingo Card page by Ryan Macklin (refresh several times to get the picture). But is this fair?

Writing RPG scenario text is a unique literary enterprise. It's best compared to writing stage directions in a play, or the art directions in a comic book script. At its best, the genre works this way: a scenario author creates vivid images and interesting contingencies in the mind of the reader, the gamemaster, which she or he then describes to the players, who in turn react, unlocking more images and contingencies from the GM. Let's call this the GM-In-The-Middle Theory.

Trying to cut out the GM-In-The-Middle and communicate directly author-to-player, through boxed read-aloud text, is a widely and justly denounced "cheat" in this procedure. Having ruled that out, how then to write the module text in a way that helps the GM communicate and interact with the players?

Useful principles emerge from the GM-In-The-Middle Theory, if you consider you are writing for the players through their characters. So, don't describe anything the players will never get to know. Write the most apparent things first, then the more subtle things, then things that can only be known by interacting. Don't force the characters' reactions.

A harder question is, how deeply should these descriptions be written? Some have advocated a minimal, list-like format, to try to break the habit of read-aloud; dispensing with the humble "is" in much the same way that the Russian language does. I've never been happy or comfortable with this.

The GM-In-The-Middle approach explains why: to work in this way, the writing must create a fully formed and vivid image in the mind of the GM, an image that he or she envisions and believes in. Reading someone else's list makes me feel like I'm taking inventory in a dollhouse. Reading prose, even prose with archaic or formulaic or dungeon-kitsch elements, can transport the GM so that the job of description becomes natural. Perhaps the prose can furnish a few bright and lapidary phrases that make it through to the players, but the heavy lifting should happen directly through imagery -- just as someone who is fluent in a second language forms their words directly from raw thought rather than passing them through a process of conscious translation.

All this supports the Is-Book against its naysayers. As long as the prose is descriptive and evocative, without compromising either mission with cliched or rote genre-copying (who the hell knows what a gambrel roof is anyway?) it's OK to have pillars march away into darkness, idols loom, portcullises menace, balconies survey, and wardrobes dominate.

In Search of the Universal Visual Language

Players of the "Eurogame" type of board game may have noticed that often the cards, board and everything else but the rulebook are produced with a language-free iconography. This reduces the production costs for the international market, because only the rulebook needs to be translated.

But can these glyphs be deciphered without reading the rulebook in your native tongue? Getting this across successfully depends on communicating either in icons (pictures with a one-to-one, analog correspondence to the thing being described) or in universally accepted symbols (pictures understood to stand for a concept without depicting it literally.)

Sometimes this is easy:

From these tiles in the game Caylus, you can see that they either produce a resource cube of that color, give you a choice of two resource cubes, let you trade the resource cube for 4 cash (white here meaning any color), or build you another game element (at top left).

Sometimes, as I've pointed out before, this is hard:

The clear sign that the Race for the Galaxy designers have lost the plot by this expansion - if not before - is their need to explain the iconography in tiny text below. So do you have icons with illegible text on a see-through background, or do you have text with clumsy big uninterpretable icons? Hey, why not both.

I've been mulling over these issues because of a French-language blog that recently linked to me with praise for my old one-page graphic on breakage. While I was glad of that, it made me think that part of the appeal was the language-free simplicity of that graphic. Most of my One Page graphics since then have had a lot of words on them, getting away from the original inspirations by Telecanter that he has produced more or less word-free.

While it's easy to express graphically "5 or more points of damage breaks this," it's hard to put into pictures: "He heals one disease and, unless he makes a Mind save, may not use another miracle that day." Things that are hard to express are those that need symbols rather than icons. A few symbols like the arrow of sequence or causality, or the red X of negation, can be used in limited senses. But how do you express choices or conditional statements? With a flowchart? Even negation is often ambiguous. if you have a red X over a sword does it mean you can't attack, can't attack with bladed weapons, with swords in particular - or you can't be attacked with all those possibilities? Or can't carry a sword?

I use the One Page format to keep rules to a basic level of simplicity. Would No Words be even simpler? Could you even code D&D that way, let alone my fancy house rule D&D with all the subsystems?

In any case, I'll be looking back as I review my One Page rules to see if any bits of text can go. And next time I'll show my attempt at a No Words version of the chase rule from the previous post.

Railroad in the Sandbox

Before I leave the ruins of Undermountain there's one more lesson to be had.

Ed Greenwood provides a great variety of hooks and plots that will take the adventurers into his mega-dungeon by one entrance or another. One of the hooks depends on the players seeing a ghostly knight. I mean, this is hardly a spoiler because it's so bleeding obvious what you're supposed to do. But after the apparition is described, we read:

If the players elect to do nothing about the Ghost Knight, they will soon be unable to sleep - whenever they close their eyes, they will see his angry-faced, shining image coming toward them with sword drawn.
This vision continues regardless of spells, magical barriers or cures, planar travels, and so on, until the sleepless, exhausted PCs lay the Ghost Knight to rest by revisiting the alleyway in which he disappeared. (Undermountain Adventures, Greenwood, p. 2)

That last sentence is particularly rich. It conjures up a scene of human defiance and petty authority worthy of Kafka. Or Looney Tunes.

Players: "Okay, well, we're pretty sick of these hauntings, so we're going to burn this plane shift scroll and travel to the Happy Hunting Grounds."
DM: "You spend the day marveling at the abundance of buffalo and opossum. But when you lay down your head to rest in a stand of pawpaw trees ... yes, this low-level knight ghost, this one-shot clue to a secret alley entrance, relentlessly reaches across the gulfs of space, time and probability to wail 'Whyyyy wonnnnt yoooou plaaay with meeee?' all night long!"

Well, OK, this was 20 years ago, in TSR's golden age of plot railroading. It's a sign of how pervasive the one-track adventure mentality was in those days that Greenwood feels compelled to screw over the players' free will even when there is absolutely no need. It's not like the players are following the hook to an adventure that took their DM two months to prepare, or even to a one-track purchased module. No, this is a boxed set that details at least a dozen entrances to the sprawling Undermountain complex. In modern terms, it's a sandbox ... with a railroad running right through it.

And did I mention the Ghost Knight is bleeding obvious? If your players turn down the hook of their own free will, it's like they're telling you, "Nah, we don't really want a dungeon adventure today, do you have something more in the line of a ship's chandlery economic simulation?"

There's a larger lesson here. It's inconceivable today that one of the top RPG designers could manhandle players with a design choice like this. The reason? Language. Over the course of the last two decades, writing about RPGs has reached a high critical level, spurred on by the emergence of White Wolf as a challenger to the hegemony and outlook of D&D, and by the spread of independent criticism over the Internet. Sure, the language sometimes collapses into jargon. But it also gives us powerful tools to articulate what wasn't obvious twenty years ago, let us spot the railroad in a sandbox, and figure out why it's not just an asshat move by the DM but actually unnecessary.

"Mono a mono" and other delights

Apropos of nothing at all, here's a long list of usage errors I came across while researching what is probably the most distinctive mistake from amateur fantasy games and writing. Here, the second most distinctive. Some of these solecisms have a certain wit: "old-timer's disease," "trite and true," "soup du jour of the day." Others are all too familiar from people trying to write Olde English or confusing Greek, English and Spanish. And one that is near and dear to my heart.

That's "Olde", not Old, Beowulf.

Speaking of Olde English, here is how to use terms like "thee" and "thou" correctly.

Any other recurrent mistakes in genre writing I missed?