Playing to Win

About two years ago I tweeted a thread about how people who don’t know much about indie ttrpg culture can often go into games expecting a win state. To summarise it, I used to play Masks: A New Generation with some friends who had only ever played D&D. We were rubbish at it. You’d think that’s basically impossible, right? But no, it turns out, if you play with the intention to win every fight, and don’t really engage with the social aspects of the game, it’s not as fun! We made it work with alcohol, determination, and plenty of running gags, but ultimately we went back to D&D at the end of the campaign because it made more sense to our group.

It didn’t make sense to us at the time that failing and making mistakes was the driving force of the game. We tried to weight every roll in our advantage, and there were sessions where the GM only made one or two hard moves.

In response to this experience, once I had more experience with PbtA and actual play podcasts (shoutout to The Unexplored Places and Protean City Comics specifically), I wrote a section into the introduction of Space Legs specifically laying out what it means to win in that game.

And then I forgot about the problem, mostly.

Until last year, when I was setting up to run a game for my mum and her sister, and my aunt asked “what’s the win condition of this game?” about Heart: the City Beneath (one of the games I was itching to play), and I had to explain what a Zenith Move was.

And then I forgot again.

Until a couple of months ago, when I started volunteering at a primary school, running Quest for a couple of ten year olds (between 1-4 of them will come along depending on their moods).

One of the crucial thing about these kids, that I learned within the first couple of sessions about them, is that they refused to accept a failure. If they rolled low on the dice, they’d snatch it back up and roll again (and again and again) until they succeeded.

Unwilling to argue with a ten year old about the “proper” way to play, I let them do it for a week or two. In the third week, after running around killing everything in sight in the previous session, my most devoted player told me it was too easy. I laughed, and told him that it would be harder if he let himself fail. He looked thoughtful, and I figured that was the end of that for now. We kept playing, and I reminded him about how failing could be interesting whenever he hesitated before rerolling the dice. He never committed to a failure, though I managed to tempt him into a partial success once or twice.

And then I had a brainwave. This kid was extremely into learning and using the new moves from the book. So I took Quest’s “you get a new ability at the end of a session”, mentally crossed it out, and drew a five box XP tracker on the bottom of his character sheet.

(I’m a sucker for PbtA, you got me.)

“When you accept a failure, you get an XP.” I told him. “It’s like learning from your mistakes, and it’ll make the game more difficult.” I still let him reroll if he wants to, still unwilling to argue with him in a way that will make the game less fun for him, but he only gets new abilities when he’s failed, and accepted the failure, five times.

The first time we played with this system, he didn’t use it, but was tempted once or twice.

This week, he took his first failure, and one of his spells washed right off the animated clay butler he was trying to attack.

I think that means I win? We’ll see how next week goes.

Now some housekeeping

• Despite a kind of spotty streaming record the past couple of weeks, I should be back to normal going forward. That means I’m back tomorrow for Mass Effect Monday, etc etc.

• We’re about a month out from my birthday Junebilee! I’ll be doing extra streams, more ttrpg stuff on my channel, and more in June. If you want to get involved, I have an organisational thread in my discord that I’ll be rebooting soon.

• No newsletter in April doesn’t mean I didn’t write in April, just that I was unprofessional about it! I released two things: Dad Bod- a long poem about masculinity and what fatherhood means to me, and Trinity - an intimacy game for three players about intertwining your self with those you love. Both of these games were written for the excellent Trans Fucking Jam, which is ongoing.

That’s it from me tonight, I’ll be back when I have more to say!