Clean Slate

The Crossroads of Ideals

I just had one of those days where all of a sudden a raging torrent of ideas came flying in, and in the middle of my damn day I had to whip open my word processor and desperately try to keep up.

I would imagine it started with Goblin Henchman's "Can we de-quantize D&D?, and preceeding posts, discussing how dungeons, and overland travel are just a point crawl. There are defined rooms, hexes, people, whatever, and they're connected by portals (or entrances/exits), paths, relationships, and once again whatever else. We've discovered the power of graphs, and I can finally go bananas about my TTRPG brain thoughts.

I've been wrestling around with this idea for honestly years now, after beating my head against a wall with 5E and AD&D for so long. I was so objectivity-pilled that I would scour the internet for more specific, more chunky hexcrawling procedures, with 17 factors all layered across each other proportionally to tell me exactly how long it would take to get from some location to another. And of course exactly how many encounters of exactly what, to challenge my exact players the exact amount that they would have the mathematically optimized amount of fun, for that optimized amount of risk and reward. I would search for huge compendiums of monsters, items, costs, weights, spells, all of that jazz. I just wanted EVERYTHING to be defined, so that I could go reference the right answer. That's what happens when your first TTRPG experiences are Gygax shoving charts down your throat. And listen, there is absolutely a world where that type of gaming is fascinating. For me specifically, I would imagine lots of people would rightfully hate it. My players, who loved me very dearly, and who would play anything to hang out with me and each other, also hated it. They never told me, and in fact a lot of them were also obsessed with this pursuit of absolute rule truth, but we all hated it. It wasn't until I essentially stopped playing altogether that I realized that it wasn't Gygax that I was searching for in my TTRPG pursuits, or at least not his AD&D crap to sell splatbooks.

When my dad first ran games for me as a kid, playing AD&D, sure I would read Aurora's Whole Realms Catalogue front to back, and all of the Complete class books, and Spells and Magic, and on and on. I would try to come up with perfect builds that fit my perfect fantasy. But I only did that because unless things were perfectly defined, with absolute truth, in AD&D and then 5E, there was no truth. Let me try that one more time in a different way. I'm essentially re-hashing the age old "Thieves and their damn skills killed D&D" argument. Because things started getting defined, and having mechanics and rules attached to them, it also encoded that nothing else could do the same thing, or else those mechanics would be invalidated. If Thieves have the encoded ability to pick locks, that must mean that everyone else doesn't, or else why would it be encoded? And so that means that if picking the lock is your approach to solve a problem, you better be a thief, hire a thief, or pick something else.

But then my friend decided to pick up GMing for the first time, and I was so very proud of her. She wanted to make little Capsule Games, but she only knew 5E, so we were pidgeon-holed into making fantasy superhero characters that were trying to round up all of the zoo animals. And so she either told us what to expect, and we made characters that invalidated the obstacles, or she didn't tell us, and our characters were useless. I faced this all the time in my games as well. And it all boils down to this idea of Abstraction, but particularly how it intersects with Diagetic mechanics. Oh and also those Nodes and Paths I was talking about earlier, trust me.

Diagetic mechanics are super easy to do when everything functions under a literal context. I literally do this thing in the fiction, and something literally happens. Crazy.

Diagetic mechanics take some intentional effort when you operate in an abstract context, which is really the beauty of game design. When your world space is not literal, but a model, able to be communicated via our measly brain tongue monsters, to other peoples ear brain monsters via some misshapen thing called language, you either end up with non-diagetic mechanics that operate in the voids of the literal, and then emerge as literal, or you end up with diagetic mechanics that output abstractions, which are then pounded and mashed into literal outputs later. Kind of like when Tim Hortons, or some other more universally available restaurant/cafe chain says that they make their baked goods "in-house" but they actually get handed a pre-formed, pre-mixed, pre-literally-everything-but-baked blob, and throw it in their oven for 10 minutes. Maybe that sounds good to you, maybe that sounds bad, but that's only because I used a literal example.

Out there exist a few frameworks for how to handle the literal and the abstract in the OSR(-ish?) sphere. Two of them are rattling around right now, and those are Blorb and Cottonmouth which both handle, in my mind, how important the literal is in a given game. Blorb, as I interpret it, says if something is literal, it's literal, and that's that. No ifs ands or buts. It keeps the verisimilitude and all that. But, if something isn't literal, look to the default, or the mildly abstract, and if there isn't a default, then you're free to decide there on the spot. Cottonmouth, again, as I interpret it, for my needs right now, is that if something is literal, it better damn well be literal. There's no backing out and saying "oh no HP is just an abstract measure of how hard it is to kill me", girl why is it 6, or 23, or 1 million? If I can slide HP and damage, and actions, and rounds, and whatever to whatever else I want it to be, what's the point?

The reason why me and my players felt so much resentment towards the games we played, even if we had fun playing together, and enough so to keep suffering through them, was that there was too much definition (and by proxy to much inverse definition), and yet absolutely nothing was literal. I could click on this literal button, interact with some abstract meta-system, and exact a literal outcome, but only in some abstract representation of a literal world. We did Tomb of Annihilation for a while, and someone built a ranger and it wasn't fun anymore. So I decided to make the system more complex, to escape the all-encompassing nature of the ranger's ability to defeat the scenario. And then there was too much outside of the context of the system, and too much cognitive overload, and then we also hated it. Combat, Skill Checks, it's all the same problem. Hit points rise with level? Guess I have to deal more damage and increase my monsters' hit points to balance it out. Then literally what was the point. My class makes me think I'm some plane hopping assassin ranger, but all I can do is teleport 15 feet. I'm some legendary dragon knight thing, but all I can do is, I don't even remember?

And so naturally, I see where PbtA came from. I've never gotten to play one, as I'm really the only TTRPG pioneer in my group. I love the idea of storygames. I love that they know what they are, and that they lean into their thing so well. They know the themes they're trying to touch on, and the settings they use to do it, the scenarios that one should experience, and they don't literally define their mechanics. Sure, meta-currencies are stupid. But at least fate points never got in the way of my character being able to pick a lock. They don't define anything, and that's the point. If all of the tools a player has to interact with the world are abstract, then they have the tools to define its literal implementation. I have a lot of respect for that, and it works guys.

I do wish I had a better memory so I could cite more people, but I'm still developing my blog-reading and recording system, and a lot of these were read before I even had an RSS reader.

So here is the thing, I desperately want to be a player in all sorts of story games, I love being a part of the story, I love collaborative storytelling, and I like the control and the passing of it in storygames. But when I'm running a game, I really am dying for emergent gameplay. And by that I largely mean generative, or procedural play. And so I do tend to cast out things of literal nature, and at every opportunity I am looking for ways to cast aside numbers.

It started with currency. It was always a problem for me trying to find ways to make currency interesting when you have to snowball it for people to feel like they're making progress, but also make the players not be able to buy the world and also actually not run out of things for them to buy. Sure, I could take the AD&D route and tax them, have it stolen, turn it into a meta-currency, make them go mad and build a dungeon to stash it in... this is all a reference to the actually incredible work of Blog of Forlorn Encystment, read all of it right now, but that actually sounds like a ton of work, and all in service of a loop that I don't really care about. It all boils down to the idea of characters needing money to pursue their fantasies, and money is time to do it, and resources and all of that. It's the Conan waking up with no money thing, and I get it, and it works for them. But for me, I just care about what you can generally afford. Lets make like 5 or 10 buckets, or honestly one at a time until you've run out of things, and just say I have a 1 in money. Your money is what kinds of items you can buy without going flat broke. It's the lifestyle you can lead. It's your perceived wealth by others. Me, in my life, I can't really afford rent, but I could buy a bunch of donuts, or maybe a book if I wanted to. That's what matters. That value is abstract, so it doesn't get in the way of any literal circumstances, but it is easily translatable to literal circumstances when needed. It's one step separated from reality. I know I can bribe someone with a $10 bill if I absolutely need a value, or I can try to bribe them at a value that just shows that I can only fork over the kind of money a Money 1 kinda fella has on hand. It doesn't take me out of the immersion.

Inventory is another easy one. And it ties in with money. I don't need coin-weights, or pounds, or strength values. I've got some slots in my pack, a slot in each hand, and maybe some quick slots at my waist. I can wear armor. I'm a big fan of the Usage Die, which I first picked up from Forbidden Lands, but surely existed well before. I don't care if I have 6 arrows or 7, I care if I'm out of arrows. When I test against my Ammunition, or my Rations, or my Torches or something, I'm just testing to see whether my stash goes down. And most importantly, if the last of my stash runs out. And to be honest, I don't even take my items too literally either. I'm probably not literally only carrying these 8 things or whatever, they're just the things that are accessible enough to use in a Dungeon Turn, or a Combat Round, or whatever abstract unit of time. I don't care if my sword is at 48% durability, but I do care if my magic wand is out of charges, my shield is unable to protect me anymore, or whether I've finally charged up my cool new ability. I spent a lot of 2025 obsessed with the board game Vantage and it has really changed a lot for me when it comes to, honestly a lot of TTRPGs. But I think it's strongest feature is finding the perfect balance of literal and abstract when it comes to its items. Characters ARE their items, and their items have a perfect level of abstraction and yet easily interfaceable function to have smooth gameplay.

Onwards to time, and in conjunction, distance. Time, velocity, displacement. Different variables of the same function. Strict time records must be kept, but literal ones don't. Strict is a word that in this case, to me, means discipline, not precision. Minutes don't matter in overworld travel. Neither should hours really. Watches at the most fine-grained. Minutes might be way too coarse-grained in a random dungeon encounter, but could be way too fine-grained in a large-scale battle. But in all of those cases I can lean on something abstract, like a turn, or a round, and have it be an alias of something literal. The scales of your hexes or whatever should be literal. But I actually don't think there's a meaningful difference between measuring them based on time or distance. In fact, realism chads pick their distance scales based on measured times. How far can I walk in a day? A days distance dweeb. Map projections are a lie to put down the global south, so suck it up. If you're dealing with sub-hex exploration, you're playing at the wrong time scale. I don't measure my car ride in kilometers, I measure it in hours. So if I'm making a car ride hexmap, I'd pick like a 15 minute scale, or maybe even hours scale. If I can walk to it in less than a week, I don't need a hexmap. And spoiler alert, you don't need one anyways. If it takes a week, I can make day hexes. If it takes a month I can make day hexes, and then super hexes that are a week. I don't need to come up with some complex procedure for how long it takes to walk through a forest hex. It takes a god damn DAY. I don't care if it's only a mile long. Hexes aren't real anyways. Dungeons are measured in how much I can cover in a Dungeon Turn, and combats are measured in how far I can reach with my sword. Then I can measure by how far I can roughly move. I've got my center of influence, and I'm got my zone of influence. A gun lets me extend my zone of influence, but it gets worse the farther I go out. Holy cow that's exactly how factions work, and roads work, and oh my god it's a graph again. My little hex on an overland walking map is how far I can walk. The super hex is how far a stronghold's zone of control is. And yes, because I defined it like that, there is most certainly a stronghold there. Systems settle into equilibrium, and there was a power vacuum there, so in went the stronghold. The even bigger hex is like a kingdom or something. The next largest abstraction of your factions. The next longer range of your weapons, or your speed. Roads also have a scale. A bigger pipe can move a larger amount of water, but it can also move a lower, slower amount of water. It can't move too much water. Vehicles can have a class that matches any kind of path. A person can take a footpath at walking speed, a horse can't fit so it can't move at all. A person can still walk at walking speed on a horsepath, and a horse can move horse speed, but a carriage can't move there. A carriage can move carriage speed on a road, a horse at horse speed, a walking at walk. Thing to big? Can't fit. Thing smaller? Doesn't get any faster! I don't care about dwarf speed or human speed almost all of the time. I don't even care in fine-grained combat. Maybe in chase, but not on the foot by foot scale. I care that the predator will catch you, what do you do? I care that the prey will get away, what will you do? Same thing applies to dragons, cats, nuclear missiles, the Sun. Distance and Time are the same thing, and the ability to exude power over distance is a flowrate problem. Bigger pipes let you pump water further, should you have the water to make it that far. More powerful factions have more water, and build bigger pipes, and pump further. But all I care about is the nodes they affect (and how much!), the paths they use to do it, and where they center from.

The next is relationships. Or languages even. Everybody is a faction. The closer you align with a faction, the easier it is to make nice with them. The more nicer y'all are to each other, the larger the favours you can ask of each other, or the more frequently you can ask smaller favours. Sounds a lot like roads to me. The wider you make your friendship pipe, the more friendship you can pump through it. The closer aligned your known languages are to another language, the more you can communicate. If they're right next to each other, you might not know some domain-specific terminology, but can otherwise converse in complex sentences. The further and further away, the less terminology you know, and the simpler your sentences have to be. Too far, and you're just pointing and waving. Shoutout to my homie Rocky, this is just a reverse Project Hail Mary. Charisma modifiers are boring, but abstract relations to other people, factions, cosmic forces, now that's how alignment was meant to be. How, wait for it, ALIGNED are you with them? Perfectly? Great. Most of the way? Great. Kinda? Great. See I can translate that into play no problem. And looking in the opposite way, seeing how you aren't aligned, that makes tension, that makes drama, that might even make infighting, falls from grace, and enemies! Some issues might be overlooked by money, some by gifts, missions completed, trials, tribulations, or just straight up going against your ideals. That goes so damn hard.

I'm sick of mechanics writing the story for me and my friends. I want it to give us some walls to work with, but make our own story. I want things that are rooted in the literal, but sit in a quantum state one fraction of a step away from a powderkeg explosion of story. I don't struggle with the quantum ogre, because I either wrote it in, or I didn't. If I wrote it in, it's there, and there's no taking it back. If I didn't write it in, it could certainly be there. But only if it makes sense in the literal fiction. That's why Spark Tables are the best, and why my mechanics sit one step away from the fiction. I am running with all of the information that has led up to the present, and I just need a little nudge in the right direction. Encounter Tables shouldn't be literal. The more literal they are, the less likely they'll fit the fiction. 2d6 Rats doesn't help anyone. Infestation, Rot, Disease, now that helps. I can take my Kitchen, and I can roll that up, and I can come up with moldy corn spirits, and a rat conjurer dressed like a plague doctor. I can walk through the woods and roll up Primal, Aggressive, Tempest, and come up with something where tree branches are whipping around, coming off, and the ents are pissed and end up taking it out on the players.

Now, I'm figuring out how to be done with things that I haven't been able to shake. Hit Points are a notable one. It made it easier when I realized that their mere invention was a lie. Wargames just have Hits or Wounds or something, it wasn't until after that that we decided we wanted some variation or something and made Hit Dice, which were then rolled. That's way too literal for me. Hit Points also don't make sense from a physical wounds perspective, since hits don't matter until you die. Okay so we swing it to the other side and say that it's just the amount of damage it takes to knock you out of a fight, and that you can just vibe until then. Great, so what the f*ck is a 17 hit points? Am I just better at not getting stabbed? Isn't that what Armor Class was for? Can I just get stabbed more often? Am I stronger than metal? Am I getting stabbed in less deadly places? Like what is the literal implementation of the only god damn abstract thing in existence? I can't figure out how to translate it so it's got to go. Hit Points were the friends we made along the way. And in that same vein, what is an Attribute? What is a 12, or a 16? What is it really? How do those 6 things really manifest? Ah yes, obviously my ability to bend bars you dimwit, says everyone. Boring, sucks, hate it. My take is inherent human classification never ends well, attributes are the amount of stuff you can hold. I got a body one, a mind one, a soul one. More body, more physical objects. Take a hit? Can't carry as many object. Brain? Spells, Aspects, I don't know man. Get brain fried? Lose access to a Spell today. Sorry, no more room for that thought. Spirit? Soul? What'd I literally just call it? Lets say that's Relationships and Affiliations, Hirelings, Followers, Henchmen, Pets, Porters, whatever you want to call them. You just don't have room for their bullshit today, they'll have to sit it out. If I run out of space physically, mentally, or spiritually, I'm out of the fight. Physically maybe I whip out a Dismemberment Table. Mental, maybe I've got some sort of exhaustion type of table. And Spiritual, I'm sure those horror games have something I can cook with for just having your will sucked out of you. Hey, this abstract thing has a tangible effect on play, and scares you a bit as you drop!

So how do we adjudicate obstacles? Well, of course, in the good old-fashioned way, through conversation! We decide on an objective, an approach, and we might even have to put something at stake. Usually, and I mean almost all of the time, the thing should either obviously happen, or not, and that should be obvious before the player "attempts it". And this might be non-orthodox, but I'm leaning towards a core resolution mechanic where the answer isn't whether something is done or not, if you're rolling, it's happening, but instead, we roll to find out the cost. This is 100% ripped for me at least, from Vantage. The difference between you succeeding and the risk it takes is measured in a number of dice. It's a dice pool. Generally if you're not at least 3 dice off, you may as well just let the thing happen without consequence, or with a simple, declared cost. 3 dice or more, you roll them. 1 is a physical damage, 2 is a mental damage, 3 is a spiritual damage. 4 is a telegraph of the danger, 5 and 6 are nothing. Use your stuff and things to soak damage, and everything that you choose to let through, goes to your bars. Might mean you have to drop some things. Early on in the adventure you can probably take the hit without losing stuff, but later on, when you're loaded up with loot, you might damage your equipment to hold onto the booty. I don't know I'm not in your game.

What about my precious pillars of play? What about combat, social, and exploration? Shouldn't I have different systems and mechanics for each of them? Meh. If on any individual combat turn there are interesting and meaningful decisions based on updated information to make, then sure, slow down the time, shrink the distance, and decide on actions at that level. But if the question is how are we going to dispatch these goons? Well, we know it's going to happen, and rolling to hit isn't a meaningful choice. I want strategy, I want tactics, I want player skill. If you go in with the plan of, I'm going to swing my sword until they're dead, you're probably rolling more challenge dice. Honestly, maybe even enough to kill you. If you actually approach the combats as a puzzle, like everyone says they want to, then gimme some 1HP minions and maybe a Cave Troll. I've been watching Batman: The Animated Series lately, and superhero combat, especially at a more human scale, isn't about who has the coolest ability, and who min/maxed the hardest. It's about who solved the puzzle the other party put up first. It's basically this, mixed with this. Honestly, social encounters too. Combat is what is keeping this entity from being defeated (by whatever appropriate means), so why not use that for convincing people of something? Battle of wits, battle of intimidation? What would make them crack before you? How about traps? Chances are if you find the thing that stops the trap, you can beat it in that one singular blow. The hardest part is keeping the stakes high, but if you know that rolling dice makes you take damage, the fiction can leap in to explain that damage. It's a spark table!

I'm ending it here, I might go into more detail on some of these specific topics later, with better citations and such, and maybe some research and editing, but I want to wrap it up with a TLDR.