Zabaton to Tabletop, I

A Regular 3 Ring Circus.

The table and chairs are gone, the shelves are bare. The man sits on the floor.

“My first games were poor. I was a child, but I’m not here to talk about the narrative complexity, the production value of art and sets, or advanced game theory. This is back to basics. I mean poor. As in dirt fucking poor. Rule books from the library, d6s taken from board games, all other dice replaced with diy cardboard spinners, played on the floor.

It’s amazing how much people unlearn as they are socialized. I’ve talked about rule -1. That games run on trust, yes even solo games. I’ve talked about the problem of the blank page or the blank stage of play. I’ve rambled about the designing of better problems and why you need them and how to make them hum like an engine. We’ve even touched on how to analyze problems.”

The door opens and Ravel and Varies enter, each taking a seat on the floor in a circle with you. Varies pulls out his pipe and thinks.

Ravel speaks, “I really wanted to go over the three stroke- engine, I see we have a bigger problem though first.”

Varies sighs. “Punk nuked the board again. I challenged that he’s rather untrustworthy.”

The man passes around unlined paper and pencils. “How does one build trust?”

Didn’t we already do this you might think.

“The first problem, it’s not just zero, this is a full on clean slate.”

Varies rubs the scar over his eye, “There is an old myth, that the knife is the greatest tool of creation, the act of destruction is immediate, its visible, active, it feels decisive.” He taps out some ashes from his pipe onto his piece of paper and the embers eat it away until there are only hints of the burned up paper on the cement floor.

“Really? You’re just mad I beat you again, I’m just glad I took the carpet out as well.”

Ravel snorted at that. “If you two boys are done reacting instead of planning.” Ravel draws a circle in the center of her piece of paper. “As Varies pointed out about that Go board, a big capture might just be spectacle not substance, reaction at its worst, lacking coherence or value. The absence is assumed to be a fertile field but as was demonstrated with the little flame example sometimes you just have ashes.”

The voices of children come from nowhere and creepily sing, “Ashes ashes we all fall down.”

Varies takes another long drag from his pipe before thinking, “Building, especially building to last, takes planning. Only a fool thinks destruction is the same as plowing a field, sure you have to remove the stumps, weeds, and rocks, but making a bunch of rubble first is just making more work for yourself. You want to build something that some punk won’t just blow a hole in? You have to examine and evaluate everything.”

The man yawns, “Creation, by contrast, is quiet, iterative, and often invisible while it’s happening. You can destroy endlessly and never actually produce anything of lasting value. I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend, Tolkien. Those who confuse elimination with construction have forgotten their objective. The knife is seductive, Ravel, what do you have for us from that seed you planted?”

She taps the circle on the paper, “Nothing. You’ve walked us from nothing to zero and what we have observed is the mess of absence. The stunt of removing the furniture is the point, you can’t cut zero. You can’t divide it. You’re talking about the act of intentional construction under limitations or scarcity. This is about fewer lies, Varies’ precious Go board was a pretty pattern of lies, every unnecessary complication, assumption, or glossed-over detail is a lie that compounds.”

“Oh sure, rub it in.” Varies pouted.

“Phrasing,” she murmured. Ravel taps the circle on her paper again. “Squaring the circle is a lie we tell ourselves to make the impossible feel approachable. The ancient Greeks didn’t know it was impossible. That’s almost forgivable. What isn’t forgivable is that we know and we still do it.”

Varies raises an eyebrow. “You’re saying designers know they’re lying.”

“I’m saying they know the furniture is gone and they put it back anyway and call it design. Every shortcut that papers over a real problem is a lie. Every assumption you don’t examine is a lie. Every mechanic you borrowed because it worked somewhere else without asking if it works here is a lie. They compound.” She draws a second circle overlapping the first. “You can’t square the circle with a compass and straightedge. The tools don’t exist. But if you convince yourself the lie is close enough, you build your entire system on an approximation.”

“And then some punk blows a hole in it,” Varies said, not entirely without satisfaction.

“The hole was always there. It’s your fault for lying to yourself about it.” She sets down her pencil. “Fewer lies isn’t a design philosophy. It’s the precondition for having one. You cannot build something that lasts on a foundation of close enough.”

The man on the floor looks at his unlined paper. “So where does that leave us?”

Ravel picks up her pencil again. “Exactly here. On the floor. With nothing. Which is the only honest place to start.”

The door opens. Brute is a large man who moves carefully, the way large men do when they’ve learned what they break by accident. He surveys the room before he sits. His eyes go to the marks on the wall where the shelves were. He touches one with a finger. Just briefly.

“Sorry I’m late.” He sits down heavily in the circle, accepts a piece of unlined paper, looks at it for a moment. “Someone moved the shelves.”

“Furniture’s gone,” Varies said. “Keep up.”

“I know. I can see where they were.” He sets the paper down in front of him carefully. “That’s the thing about removing things. They leave evidence.”

Ravel watches him. “History lesson.”

It isn’t a question. Brute nods like he expected it. “Johan Huizinga. 1938. Homo Ludens. Man the player. He described something he called the magic circle.” Brute draws nothing on his paper. Just rests his hands on it. “A temporary space, voluntary, separate from ordinary life, with its own rules. Inside the circle the game is real. Outside it nothing that happened counts.”

Varies taps more out ash onto the floor. “Counts how?”

“Counts as anything. Counts as meaningful. The circle is what makes the difference between a sword swung in anger and a sword swung in play.” He looks at the marks on the wall again. “The shelves were there for a long time.”

“Long enough to matter?” The Man asks.

“Long enough to leave marks.” He smooths his unlined paper once with his palm. “That’s Karma. Everything leaves marks.”

Ravel scribbles DFK in the center of her circle. “Drama, Fortune, Karma,” she gestures to each person seated on the floor, “the magic circle. We’ve returned some of the furniture.” She looks at The Man.

He snaps his fingers and the table and chairs are back. “The argument wasn’t against the furniture, it was about examining what you are leaning on. By removing all the noise we reveal the true thinking.”

Varies sighs in comfort, “Next time you want to do Zazen can we use the pillows, I’m not as young as I used to be and don’t have the cushion of the other two.”

Ravel wrote again, this time outside the circle she wrote, ‘floor’, she then wrote ‘players’ with the word half in the circle and half out. “Hmmm I don’t see ass pillow in the design doc.”

Brute spoke, pen in hand, pointing to the paper, “Most design fails aren’t failures of beauty, the furniture, they are failures of alignment.”

“If you don’t know why I’m sitting on the floor, you’ll just think I’m poor or disorganized, if you understand that it is to let go of thoughts and stories to experience immediate reality then you see the mess is the monastery.” The Man looked at Brute like he was trying to stare a hole clean through him.

Brute wrote down, ‘fewer lies = the minimal necessary interface’ “The paint where the tv used to be on the wall is brighter by the way. The designer who claims to make something new and all they can give you is heartbreak as they put everything right back where it was with new upholstery. Can you even prove the blank slate of zero, seems to me you have a problem, creation from zero requires that some furniture can’t come back. Not because of arrangement but because if you put a treadmill in here the table wouldn’t fit. You acknowledge the marks so you know what you’re actually starting from, because creation from zero isn’t possible if you won’t admit you’re starting from the outline of where the table was.” He writes down ‘honesty’.

Varies pulls out his deck of Tarot cards from the pouch on his belt. “Drama isn’t just narrative, it’s really the oracle of meaning. The cards? They don’t mean anything, sure we might bring our pasts with us, assumptions. Meaning can occur before, during, or after, we naturally seek it, but they are just cards, their meaning is zero, blind luck, or fortune produces the variance of the draw. The seeker brings with them the history, the wants, the karma. The reader? Their job is to seek alignment, this is the art of the cold read. The cards mean zero, the magic circle says that they mean whatever the brought assumptions of the seeker and the teller create.”

He throws four cards down randomly. The fool comes up first. The 7 of pentacles. The wheel of fortune. The empress.

“The fool speaks of you Punk, unexpected influences could have a powerful effect on your decision-making. 7 Pentacles says much work has been done and still more work is to come. The wheel tells us to go with the flow, the empress speaks of assurance and abundance, the foundation of future progress. This is a truly creative and fertile time.”

Ravel shot The Man a mischievous grin, “Weird how that read seems to fit this endeavor perfectly, do you feel fertile?”

“I will banish you to a hellplane.”

“Kinky. I’m going to take that as a no.”

“A bunch of Barnum, vague, generic, and could apply to anything.”

Brute grunts, “Unexpected influences, that’s just noise, the random draw, the roll of the dice, the input of others.”

Ravel nods, “Work done and work to come, meaning, or drama.”

Punk yawns, “Meaning happens when it happens, before, during, after, all meaning is found in the here and now, the question is when do we make sense of it. When we front load we run the risk of choking out life, when we focus on the after we run the risk of a barren field, too much focus on the now and you will pick the fruit before its ripe.”

Brute looks at Varies, “Do you have any clue what he’s talking about?”

Varies blows a perfect smoke ring. “No meaning to start is the blank page, the empty stage.”

Ravel ponders the unsaid for a moment, “Too much backstory not leaving any room for the current, but the focus on the now?”

Punk grins, “Not all plots need to go anywhere, a game focused on the story beats now will quickly run through their beats. If you sampled a thousand game masters you would no doubt find many have killed a npc from a player’s background and of those I would gather they did it far too early.”

Brute is staring at the spot where the TV used to hang on the war. “Saturday morning cartoons and other procedurals. Like Monster of the Week. How many times can you play the same formula before it’s a well that’s run dry? The status quo becomes tyrannical.”

Varies places a single white stone on the table. “You asked the question about trust, before Brute got here I might add, you wanted to see if any of us would realize the need of Karma. The record of what players do but also what they do not do. That’s how you build trust. Ravel wasn’t wrong when she drew the player half in and half out of the circle, Brute keeps mentioning the evidence of absence. We basically proved what a tar pit true zero is. You build trust by extending an olive branch to the Homo part of the Homo Ludens based on what in theory is nothing more than a cold read and then adjust based on what the player does in Ludens not what they say. That’s how you build trust. The player must see that it’s both safe to not be themselves and also that their choices and not choices carry weight.”

Brute rummages through his backpack, he finds a tin soldier, saber held out as if ordering a charge, and places it a bit away from the white stone, facing it. “Conflict begins at the space where Homo and Ludens meet because the player wants something and chance, drama, and the record all get in the way, but even before that there is always the chance for conflict within the self. I want to play in such a way that the other players think I’m cool or funny. I want my soldier to be brave, the dice and his stats may agree or disagree. That conflict drives drama without any narrative drama needing to be added in theory. He just needs space to find out.”

Punk slides a mat under the figure and stone, the soldier wobbles but he doesn’t fall as the world of a dungeon plotted on a grid surrounds him. “I played my first games as theater of the mind, it’s rather hard to track 40+ creatures moving at different rates in just your head. I would start doing what I later learned to be trig to track everyone. Slow and ponderous and it still didn’t solve the arguments that would occur. Can I reach? Who gets there first, how many can I hit. I still play theater of mind often, when it’s just myself going solo, when it doesn’t matter for a group due to the mechanics of combat, or when trust is high, but I grabbed a chess board after Combat and Tactics came out and never looked back.

The only argument I ever hear against it is that it encourages players to become grid locked. I’ve never found this to be true. The one inch square is just a helpful measure. Look there in the corner of the tunnel, Brute’s Soldier would have to stand on the intersection of four spaces to move through the gap. Perhaps the problem starts with the GM?

Well what about narrative freedom? There’s nothing stopping you from flipping over this table in that room and using it for cover, the only thing that’s changed is that I don’t have to tell you the table is there. Is prompting really narrative freedom? I’ll take the shared reality of helping everyone agree on the shared imaginative space anyday, anyone who says otherwise has never had to argue about how many kobolds fit in a blast radius.”

Brute eyes the distance, counting inches, he had thought he was closer when he set his figure down. “Can he make it if he runs?”

Punk nodes.

“My name is Leroy Jenkins!”, Brute says as he moves the metal man up to the stone.

Punk narrates” the cave is dark, the sound of hooves on stone you heard had told you that there was something outside of your torch’s bloom. Varies what did you place into the world?”

“When I first threw dice they were knuckle bones, sheep knuckles to be exact. Let’s say that it’s a sheep.”

Brute shrugged, “Captain Jenkins almost trips over himself as he comes to a screeching halt, the sheep looks up at him and bleats confusedly. He sheepishly puts his sword back in its sheath.”

Punk points to Ravel and she gets the cue. “Meaning after, very modern, love some media res. Okay, Our would be hero, the humble captain of Hamish’s theoretical militia has braved the caverns just outside of town in the Matia Mountains, livestock have been going missing in a tale as old as time, the trail lead to the accursed land. A thousand stories of monsters filled the brave captain’s head. Just superstition, surely, once long ago this had been a mine, the tales of monsters? Bad air and bad luck, cave ins and a dry vein was what all sensible people excused the taboo with.”

Punk nodded thoughtfully, “Swords and sandals, I dig it, et tu Brute?”

“Capt’n Jenkins has always believed that the monsters were real, hence his makeshift militia, currently only himself admittedly, but he couldn’t say no to Mary Bo Peep. Besides, if he brought back the head of a monster surely then others would answer his call. ‘Come along lambchop, let’s get you home.’ He ties a lead about its head. ‘This seems to easy,’ he says to himself.”

Dice clatter openly on the table, 2d6 and they come up 6 and 1. Punk smiles at Brute, “Your wish has been granted.” He rolls them again and keeps a neutral face followed by yet a third roll of the dice. “You hear it first, claws on stone.”

“Does it sound big?”

“Big enough that you don’t need to roll.”

“Could I pick up the sheep?”

“Your hands are empty, it’s a lamb of about age, maybe a buck 20, you’re a trained fighting man yeah, but it would be awkward and you couldn’t run.”

“I pick it up and set it down in this book in the cave behind me and draw my sword and shield, turning the problem into an obstacle. A still potentially dangerous obstacle.”

Ravel is almost bouncing in her seat. “It took ya bloody wankers long enough to get here. The three stroke engine is three problems working together to generate a continuous series of events for the purpose of play.

In the set up we have established that Sir Jenkins wants to both save the lamb and impress the girl but also slay a monster, these are two non-conflicting problems in theory. The problem is that the monster wants to eat the lamb and Sor Jenkins doesn’t know if he can beat the monster, he has chosen a space to make a stand but it’s possible that his choice to limit his mobility will hurt him. This isn’t a full “engine” as it’s only the interpolation of two competing but aligned problems.”

She pauses to take a breath before continuing. “To diagnose how we might add an additional problem to the scene we must first understand the structure. An enemy on its own is not a Problem, though it may be problematic. An Obstacle is something that lacks meaning choice and often functions on an element of resource gating.”

Ravel points to the exit drawn on the cave system, “that two minutes away if we assume normal human movement and Punks usual scale without actually picking up a system and making this example more confusing. If we look back we see that there is a gap that must be jumped, this wouldn’t be meta gaming as we have established that Sir Jenkins had come in from that very direction, we can assume he jumped to get in here and thus knows that.”

Varies points at the map of where Brute’s man had started his run from, “Never-mind that the simple fact is this is a shorter distance than out and thus the character must know this unless we are saying he was just magically placed here, fourth wall aside.”

Brute picks up the tinman, “In modern play we can debate about the threat rating of an encounter, but it’s perhaps not the most useful mindset for roleplay. My soldier here is a slightly mad lad who not only believes that the monsters are real but has also been preparing to fight them. He might not be confident in the outcome but he is confident in his actions. The fact is I as the player have no clue if this is the right call or if it will flatten me in a single hit, we return to the need for values but not necessarily the need for me to know all of them or not know them. Punk can I assume that I’m two deviations above average, you know without assigning a system to this and ruining your whole lesson plan?”

“Yes and you guys disappoint me. I think we were on explaining Obstacles before getting side tracked.”

Brute puts the figure back on the map, “Right, so my point was that even if the threat is a big risk and out of scope, that’s still just an obstacle that you pay a resource drain in time and risk to damage and gear expenditure, it doesn’t change your strategic goal. By placing the sheep behind me I have made a choice that neutralizes the constraint, I regret to inform you Ravel this isn’t even a problem. A problem can best be stated as costing you options.”

Ravel bit her lip as she thought for a long moment, “No, because you made a choice, you could have tried to run with the sheep, you could have poisoned the sheep and used it for a trap, you could have just run. Your risky gamble or smart play is a meaningful choice that proves that the first two obstacles were in fact a problem, you have cost yourself the option of movement and having to fight with a sheep behind you in a cave. I think that we lack a clear, obvious third problem that allows you to trivialize the other two.”

“Fair point. We could almost go as far to say that if there is a correct answer it’s not a problem but a puzzle. If we want to pull from Punk’s recent ranting on military theory, obstacles are for skirmishes, problems are for campaigns. We thus see that this encounter is a point where those two realities overlap.”

Punk just grins. “Y’all talking a lot for people who don’t know if there’s some unseen problem or not. Wandering monsters are how the expenditure of time and other risks, such as noise, manifests.”

Ravel groans, “Way to kill the suspense, okay so there’s more than one of these monsters, choosing to stand might have been a costly move. Obviously not every problem needs to propel new and exciting tangents to follow but perhaps there is some other problem back at town that could intersect with these to produce meaning after the fact?”

Brute stares at his stand-in for a long moment. “Her father is the village elder, there will be hell to pay if I tell the truth about where the monster and the lamb were found, I violated taboo, people have been banished for such before. Something like that?”

Punk picked up the dice again, “Sometimes the best way to find out is just playing and seeing what happens next. Now before we go and define stats as we’ve taken this about as far as we go in this example of explaining the importance of karma or more simply statistics. Let alone roll for them, I think we’ve set on the core furniture, certainly no room for a treadmill, but is there anything else we might be overlooking?”

“Structure,” Varies says, “procedure, adjudication. The GM player divide is furniture and not needed, the asymmetrical game is artifice, we’ve even inverted it in our example, three GMs to one Player Character. Player Roles, well perhaps some people still have a caller and a mapper, the rise of the GMless game, well we could all use a break from Punk, but I think much of the desire is born of GM burnout, that if it always feels like work in one player role then the table risks strain.”

“Right but whatever those roles are you still need clearly defined player roles, don’t back seat another players character unless its like better angels or everyone is john, only the GM dictates what actually happens, or the rules for shared lore creation is structured such that its clear which player has that ability.”

“Did you just yes and me?”

“No.”