Image by Susan Cipriano from Pixabay

RPGs have a lot of genre elements that do not exist in the real world.

Magic, Divine visitations, strange creatures, non-human races with exotic capabilities, exotic potions and arcane enchantments of all kinds, and that’s just the fantasy genre!

On top of that, there’s the look-and-feel of the environment, and that means that certain actions sometimes have disproportionate or unrealistic consequences.

Style & Narrative

Some of these are a matter of style; others can be communicated through a richer palette of narrative.

Stylistic elements often require tweaks of the rules – critical hits and fumbles, for example. Some can be achieved by amending the GM’s palette of options to include things that would not be present under a more ‘normal’ reality, or by excluding more normal things from that palette.

Narrative elements simply require the use of appropriate descriptive text by the GM to get players into the “mood” and into the mindset that their characters should possess by virtue of deriving from the genre environment in question. That’s true for all genres – whether exploring caves on the frozen moons of Jupiter, unraveling the latest scheme of Diabolico, Having Firewire-7 ports installed into your cyberware, or playing escort to a traveling caravan through Troll Country.

That leaves a few genre elements which need to be explicitly catered for within the rules. Game and campaign designers often approach these elements from a game mechanics perspective. And that’s a problem, because the hierarchy of dominance in an RPG puts these game mechanics at the very bottom of the pile, at least so far as I’m concerned.

I originally presented a hierarchy of genre elements as part of the discussion of the Pulp Genre in Blat! Zot! Pow! The Rules Of Genre In RPGs (Jan 2011) and revisited the subject in The Blind Enforcer: The Reflex Application Of Rules (April 2014). I expanded it slightly and clarified it in The Language Of Magic: A Sense of Wonder for the Feb 2019 Blog Carnival (Feb 2019, obviously); the hierarchy arose again, most recently, a month later, in Into Each Chaos, A Little Order Must Fall: Coping With Randomness, which is where the diagram to the right comes from.

This is a tool that has multiple significances, and can be used in many different ways, but they all come down to (1) the playing of a game; (2) the uniqueness of the setting; (3) the needs of the adventure; (4) the influence of the genre; and (5) the game (meta-) physics and game mechanics provided by the rules system, and the relationship between them.

For example, in the article from which the diagram is drawn, I employ it to generate a series of questions to be used as prompts for GM decision-making when a PC does something completely unexpected:

This is frequently the result of a player announcing an unanticipated course of action … and the GM insisting on a die check to see whether or not the action is successful (regardless of whether or not it will have the desired effect). Sometimes it’s the result of the GM forgetting a character capability, and sometimes it’s a consequence of the player applying an ability in a way that the GM hasn’t thought of – “I cast Blade Barrier down the purple worm’s throat – what happens?” (an actual example from the latter days of the Fumanor: The Last Deity II campaign).

It’s at times like this that I fall back on the hierarchy pyramid…

• What do the official rules say (if anything) about any similar situation?
• What do the house rules say (if anything) about any similar situation?
• What seems the most “realistic” given the base assumptions of the campaign world?
• What seems the most appropriate interpretation given the genre of the game?
• What is the interpretation that works best in terms of the adventure plot?
• What is the interpretation that works best in terms of the health of the campaign?
• Are there any practicality considerations that should be taken into account?
• What is the interpretation that will produce the maximum fun?

Remember that any subsequent answer overrules one that’s already in place – the house rules trump the official rules, “realism” trumps the house rules when they are inadequate, genre trumps “realism”, plot needs trump Genre, campaign needs trump the needs of any one plot, practicality of implementation trumps everything else, and fun trumps all.

It’s worth briefly revisiting the different layers of the hierarchy to look at what they contain and how they relate to the practice of playing an RPG.

1. Official Rules: – The official rules that come in the game system are the foundations at the bottom of the pyramid.
2. House Rules: – Because house rules explicitly supersede official game rules, they have to sit above that foundation in the pyramid.
3. Simulation: – This is the level of Game Physics within the game world, and the subject of today’s discussion. Because the rules (house and official) are an imperfect codification of the game physics, if there is ever a conflict between what the rules say should happen and what the principles that have been established say should happen, it’s the official rules that get overruled – so the Simulation layer has to sit above the rules layers. This is what makes it possible to translate a campaign from one game system into another. The game physics is a metagame level of in-game ‘reality’ – the characters might understand them in a completely different way to the comprehension of the GM and players, especially in a ‘hyper-realistic’ genre.
4. Genre: – There are several different places in the hierarchy where Genre can fit, and that’s at the heart of today’s subject, too. But because the one set of rules can be a broad church providing for multiple genres, the specifics of one particular genre override generic rules and even game physics.
5. Plot: – plot refers to the decisions made in-game by PCs and NPCs within the current adventure; it’s the story of that adventure. Since an adventure can contain out-of-genre elements and influences, this level dominates the genre if a ruling can be justified in terms of the needs of the current adventure.
6. Campaign: – This level contains anything that persists beyond this one adventure. That includes characters and characterizations (as exemplified by the PCs, quite specifically) and any narrative that defines or displays the way the game world works – the style and look-and-feel of the game environment. There are some who would argue that the Plot layer should supersede the Campaign layer.
7. Gameplay & Practicality: – The uppermost level of the pyramid recognizes that a rule can be technically correct but unplayable – see, for example, My Biggest Mistakes: The Woes Of Piety & Magic for concrete proof of this fact. No matter what anything else says, the needs of practical gameplay are the ultimate censor and trump card. At least, according to the official pyramid.
8. Fun: – GMs are in the business of entertaining through creativity, narrative, plot, and stimulated interaction between characters and the players who “voice” them. Fun isn’t given a level of the pyramid because it functions like the walls and capstone. If you have two equally-balanced choices, the most ‘fun’ choice should always win. If you have a technically-correct and/or practical answer to any question that is boring as heck, it should lose to a less correct, less-practical answer that happens to be more fun. For example, I’ve seen any number of proposals over the years for reducing the number of dice rolled for damage in RPGs, because that would make the math easier. Consider if all HP were divided by 4 in a D&D campaign, and weapon damage was divided by 5 – so a weapon that did 1d6 would do one point 4 times in 6 and two points the other 2 times. A weapon that does 1d4 would simply do 1 point every time, no roll needed. But there is a vicarious thrill in rolling dice, and an inherent drama in the GM rolling lots of dice (especially without explanation). More dice therefore equates to more fun, at least in some respects. Ease of math has no hope, in the face of that reality.

Is Genre The Birthplace Of Game Physics?

To some extent, the obvious answer is ‘yes’; part of the genre definition is that characters are able to do “X”, something that violates the basics of real-world physics as simulated by the core game mechanics. “X” could be anything from wielding a “particle pistol” to generic superhuman feats to spellcasting – and that means that “X” is part of the “observed universe” of the characters and analytic types will have invested effort in trying to understand how it works.

This, in turn, is usually expressed as a pseudo-scientific narrative that vaguely outlines the “principles” upon which “X” is founded – a campaign level synopsis of what is therefore presumed to be in the game physics layer (I don’t know anyone who actually goes to the trouble of writing up their game physics in terms of actual equations).

That means that there are multiple layers of translation and interpretation that lie in between the actual “in-game” physics and the genre-related functions that the physics is intended to perform for the game – a looseness that can both benefit and harm.

Genre to Game Mechanics

Most game designers take a different approach to writing the game rules. Having identified “X” as something that the genre demands, they will adopt a “practical” approach by trying to use some existing mechanics as a means of interpreting “X” within the game system. Sometimes that is all that’s needed, sometimes it only provides part of the answers, and additional specific rules are needed. For example, Fireballs in D&D use many of the same damage-handling game mechanics as an attack with a sword, but the rules concerning the number of fireballs the mage can cast, it’s range, and several other mechanics, are entirely separate. There is absolutely no reason why characters couldn’t have an additional stat to describe their resilience to magic, which is used instead of hit points – but from the first, the additional rules required have either never been considered or have been rejected as unnecessary or inefficient.

And yet – one of the major ongoing problems with D&D has always been the relative power levels of magic and more physical mayhem; separating the damage handling subsystems would seem an obvious way of tweaking them in isolation from each other. So it certainly can’t be argued that such proposals would be without merit on their face!

Basing the handling of a genre element on existing game mechanics is always dangerous, potentially compromising the implementation of an important genre element with the simulation provided by the game mechanics. For that reason, such game mechanics are popular targets for house rules, representing attempts by a particular GM to more accurately simulate the genre element as they see it within the campaign.

Never The Twain Shall Meet

So, now, we have two different paths to the implementation of Genre Element “X”:

• Genre → Campaign → Simulation
• Genre → Practicality → Game Mechanics ( → House Rules)

Both paths are completely independent of each other. That means that the in-game interpretation of “reality” can be completely different to the “reality” simulated by the game mechanics.

The conflict becomes acute when two additional interpretive steps are inscribed into the second sequence:

• Genre → Campaign → Simulation
• Genre → Practicality → Game Mechanics ( → House Rules) → Simulation → Campaign

Where now does the Campaign draw it’s narrative from? Taking it from the explicit “underlying in-game theory” of the first progression means that the actions taken, and their outcomes, may make no sense in terms of action-and-reaction encompassed by the narrative. “Of course, the area was magic-rich, so of course I drew my dagger.” The character is attempting to use the game physics to explain a decision made according to the game mechanics when the two are in contradiction.

Taking it from the game mechanics – equation two – means that actions and consequences may make no sense in terms of the character being able to justify their choices with their understanding of the world. “I suspected the creature was susceptible to fire, so I hit it with a fireball even though we were standing in puddles of flammable incendiary oil. Magic Fire goes out the instant it burns the target, so it was perfectly safe.” Here, the character is trying to offer game-physics reasons (and quite possibly making them up out of whole cloth) to explain his character’s game-mechanics decision. At the very least, he is almost certainly adding to that game physics; at worst, he is flatly contradicting something in the official explanation. The odds that the game rules would explicitly state or even imply that you can cast a fireball in perfect safety while standing in a pool of flammable matter are remote!

The examples are deliberately extreme, and employ fictional game mechanics to illustrate the point, which is that neither of these approaches is all that satisfactory, always entailing a risk of contradiction.

A third path to complicate the mess

Quite often, people will try to base the game physics for Genre Element “X” on real-world physics, using the real thing as analogy. This gives the following pathway:

• Real World Physics → Simulated Unreality → Campaign → Game Mechanics

For example, do Laser Pistols suffer from the inverse-square law, i.e. do 1/16th the damage to a target 4 times farther away? On the face of it, this sounds entirely plausible and immediately makes “Laser Pistols” sound more realistic.

Problems come when the game mechanics don’t actually employ the inverse square law anywhere, instead giving a flat range and damage level for Laser Pistols. But if the in-game physics described in the flavor text do suggest this, the likely result is a House Rule.

Perhaps the GM decides that the quoted damage values are for an “optimum range” that is 1/10th of the stated range; he then provides a set of tables that convert the stated damage according to the multiple of this “optimum” range. Now, weapons range in most game systems is a function of accuracy, so the next step would be to set your own “optimum range” value, permitting simplicity and practicality of interpretation.

With a third pathway, the chances of confusion and frustration obviously increase markedly. By putting a differential between the actions that a character can reasonably take according to his understanding of the world, and the optimum choice of actions based on the game mechanics, the verisimilitude of the whole campaign suffers.

In terms of the Hierarchy

If you look at these processes in terms of progression through the different layers of the pyramid, you can easily see that they are a mess, skipping layers in both directions higgeldy-piggeldy It’s no wonder, then, that the results are a dogs’ breakfast; the disrespect of the logical hierarchy is not the cause of the problems, but it is indicative.

Game Physics ↔ Game Mechanics

I always feel that the compromises inherent in making game mechanics playable mean that the simulation layer, in which the pseudo-scientific principles are formulated and contained, should be dominant over the game mechanics as an initial principle, but recently had a bit of a revelation in this respect.

If you are forced to compromise your simulation as expressed by the game mechanics, and you are quite certain that the fundamental aspects of those mechanics will remain constant into the future bar a little tweaking, then those simulation content should then be amended to incorporate the compromises.

That means that you can quite happily draw inspiration from your imagination, from real-world physics, and from your game mechanics design, in equal measure. What’s more, you can bounce back and forth between the two (almost) adjacent layers repeatedly, so that the game mechanics are a closer reflection of the conceptual creations and vice-versa.

What’s more, this permits the embedding of narrative language into the campaign layer that matches both – the incongruities vanish.

If this were the only problem, we could mark it solved and bring the article to a successful conclusion. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Roleplay or Rule-play

Ideally, your game mechanics, as used in play, should not only reflect the genre conventions and elements, but should reinforce them during play. I’m constantly reminded that my co-GM is an expert (in relative terms) on the Pulp Genre; I’m more of an expert in RPG story construction and gameplay. Some of the players in our co-GM’d Pulp Campaign are even less au fay with the genre conventions than I am.

In a perfect world, you could simply hand the rules to a complete novice and come back in an hour or two to discover them playing a perfectly acceptable representation of the genre. But that’s a big ask, and few game systems can pull it off.

And that presents an immediate problem:

Genre → Rules → Pseudoscience → Roleplay – or Rule-play?

If the rules are an imperfect reflection of the Genre, then players can follow the rules when the GM is interpreting the game situation from the perspective of the simulated reality, or vice-versa.

The inevitable result is frustration and dispute, with one side saying “but the rules say…”

This is exactly the sort of problem that the hierarchy pyramid was created to solve. According to the pyramid, if there is a conflict between what the Rules say happens, and what the metagame physics says happens, the metagame physics wins.

In other words, we start with the “science” of the Genre, i.e. with an abstract or meta-level interpretation of both the Genre conventions and how they are to manifest within the campaign; this is then used to generate modifications to the rules, which can then be used to add to the richness of the pseudoscience. This in turn then gets reflected in the Genre description as a section on “Genre Interpretation,” which is used as the narrative engine and interpretation framework for play.

• Genre → Pseudoscience → Rules → Pseudoscience → Genre Interpretation → play

If you track these through the layers of the pyramid, you get:

• 4 → 3 → (2 →) 1 → 3 → 4 → 5, 6, 7

This is a clear progression, nowhere near as messy as the previously-described approaches. Because both GM’s interpretations and players’ interpretations are framed by the metagame rules of the Simulation of in-game “Reality”, with the GM creating house rules or interpretations of the standard rules accordingly, there is no conflict or contradiction; everything is stemming from common ground. A player may disagree with the actual changes the GM is making, but not the purpose or motivation behind them. And if they actually have a better rules solution to the specific problem, most GMs will be happy to listen – after the day’s play, of course.

Side-Benefits

I think we can all agree that this is a worthwhile end, in and of itself, but on its own, it may not be enough to justify overturning an established rule. There is an argument that the more you customize the rules, the more you lose common ground with other campaigns, the more work you have to go to when integrating new source material, and the more you create uncertainty in the players and a lack of confidence in knowing how their players work.

The published and standard rules are a common ground between players and GM – never mind with everyone else who uses the same game system.

That said, I’ve always regarded a willingness to adjust the rules when there is a problem perceived as being a positive trait in a GM. It’s a commitment to doing whatever extra work is required to support the campaign – and a sign of how much the GM values what the players are contributing to that campaign (or are expected to contribute).

Fortunately, there are a number of side-benefits to the approach described.

Meta-level differentiation of campaigns from one another

By varying the interpretation of the Genre’s standard elements, introducing new Genre Elements and Optional Genre components & influences, you make each campaign distinct from all others.

A long time ago, I was speaking with one of my players (no names) about another GM’s campaign. They were describing how that GM fumbled interpreting the rules to cope with the in-game situation with which he was presented. Another player, overhearing the story, interjected, “That’s just [GM’s] way, he always does that.”

Another example that may help provide a little clarity – one of the GMs that I have known for almost 40 years now (a little under a year to reach that milestone) has always opposed the Vancian magic system of D&D because his meta-level signature is that all magic is psionic in nature but misunderstood by the practitioners. For some readers, that statement says everything that needs to be said; others may be saying to themselves, “Vancian? What’s that mean?”. For the benefit of the latter, then:

In Howard Jeff’s 2014 “Game Magic: A Designer’s Guide To Magic Systems In Theory And Practice” (Link is to Amazon.com; limited copies remain. The hardcover is quite expensive – but you CAN get it as an e-book. Yes, I get a small commission.), he described the salient distinction as:

“In the Vancian model of magic, magic users must memorize all the spells which they wish to cast. When they cast a given spell, it disappears from memory and must be memorized again if the magic user so desires.”

The idea of spell memorization was inspired by the way magic works in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories. Gary Gygax was very clear about the reasons for the choice, writing in 1976,

“If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D&D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly… It is the opinion of this writer that the most desirable game is one in which the various character types are able to compete with each other as relative equals, for that will maintain freshness in the campaign.”

But others have described it as an imperfect way to produce an artificial equality between spell-casters and more martial character classes.

Different formulations of the Pseudo-science behind how and why magic – a staple element of the Fantasy Genre – works yield different restrictions (I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t agree that magic in an RPG needs some restraints on it if the other characters are to do anything more than become meat shields for the protection of the Spellcaster). For example, a non-Vancian approach might be to reduce the number of spells substantially, and have spells of any given Spell Level usable at full force only a limited number of times a day, thereafter halving in effect with subsequent castings. With four hours of rest per halving, plus four hours, the clock is reset.

This example shows quite clearly how this approach permits the consistent customization of campaigns, regardless of core rules system.

Bonus Verisimilitude

This side-benefit derives from the increased internal consistency that results. It doesn’t need anywhere near as much explanation as the previous one! The more internally consistent and harmonious you can make the rules structure and metagame concepts that the rules are intended to reflect, the more you permit characters to engage with the campaign at a conceptual and character-driven level, rather than at a game mechanics level. And that makes the whole campaign feel more “real” to the players.

Better Roleplay

Inevitably, this side-benefit manifests as a consequence of the preceding one. The more you can keep players “in character”, the better they will roleplay those characters. There are rare exceptions, just as there are some actors who can drop into character on cue – but they tend to be noteworthy. It’s far common for actors (and players) to have to put their character on, like a cloak, every time they break it.

Even simply engaging the game mechanics can be considered a partial break – often, it’s easier to step back into character if the disruption is not protracted – but this is very much a best-case scenario. Only the best players are still firmly “in their character’s heads” at the end of a major combat sequence, for example.

The more paths back into verisimilitude that you can provide, the more easily the players will be able to roleplay their characters, and that makes it easier to drop back into character after a disruption.

Better Game Mechanics

Another way at looking at the whole issue discussed by this article is to describe the genre conventions and elements as “intentions” – they are guidelines to what the GM “intends” to achieve within the game setting and mechanics, which in turn makes the adventures that he has in mind a better stylistic “fit”.

The term “better” is always a subjective one, but by making the game mechanics more responsive to those intentions, you make them more fit-for-purpose – and (provided that there is no “hit” to playability), that makes them “better” by at least one objective criterion.

Meta-interpretations of outcomes = Better Narrative

Understanding conceptually how the more fantastic elements of gameplay would be expected to function if the game world were a reality makes narrative descriptions of that environment easier to write and more accurate to the intention, too. Again, “better” is both a subjective and relative term, but if one of the purposes of the narrative is to bring the world to life for the players, I would argue that any change that makes the narrative more fit for that purpose makes it “better”.

What’s more, the internal consistency means that narrative communications are more likely to be clearly and correctly understood and interpreted by the players – and that makes the narrative “better” in a second, major, respect.

And finally, the verisimilitude makes the subject of the narrative more believable, making it easier to suspend disbelief in the otherwise impossible. That makes narrative “better” in still a third respect.

Unification of function and purpose

The last side-benefit is the most abstract and abstruse. You could describe it as making the campaign more robust by better-embedding the central genre elements and their distinctive interpretations within the components of the campaign at several different levels, so that they can mutually reinforce and support each other.

Okay, surely now the article can come to an end, right?

Note quite yet. I haven’t yet explained where this article came from – a real world example of everything that’s been discussed here.

The Woes Of Piety & Magic, Part II

The section title is a direct reference to my 2009 contribution to the Blog Carnival (one of many, that month, because Campaign Mastery was hosting it, as we are right now), My Biggest Mistakes: The Woes Of Piety & Magic – well, to part of it. This article can be considered a sequel to that discussion, at least indirectly.

In the 2009 article, I discussed the failure of my first attempt at codifying a magic system for use within the Champions game system (now known as the Hero System):

The Hero system doesn’t do AD&D-style spellcasting any favors. It’s designed for characters who have only a few abilities, not a vast repertoire of spells. Designing a magic subsystem for my superhero game was high on my list of things to do after exhausting most of the possibilities offered in the 4th Ed rules.

I wanted a system where each spell was designed like a formula – plug in values for range, character points of effect, etc, multiply them all together, and what pumped out the end was a cost in “Mana” – effectively a points pool of available magic, similar to Endurance; look that value up on a table and you got the skill roll needed to successfully cast the spell. The virtue of this approach was that if you wanted to double the range, you could double the mana cost, or halve the number of dice of effect, or halve the area of effect, or whatever, and the rest was unchanged – it was universally flexible while remaining balanced.

In theory, it worked brilliantly. In private testing, the few spells I tried out also worked exquisitely well. In practice:

I’m at home working with formulas and mathematics. Others are not, and found the design subsystem for spells to be very difficult to follow, and the casting system for spells to be impossible to use in play. So much so that the first player to try the system ended up as a mage who refused to cast spells – when the ultimate design objective was a system that permitted a mage to use magic casually (Want the coffee from across the room? Cast a spell to fetch it).

And the second player to try the system became obsessed with the penalties for spell failure, which were modeled on the “side effects” rules, to the point where, once again, the character also refused to cast spells.

It needed to be replaced, and so it was, by a system modeled in part on early Elemental Controls, and which is far closer to the standard powers description. It’s actually less flexible and less elegant from my perspective, requiring more work in designing spells; but it makes designing spells and casting spells easier for every player who’s tried it, and they are the final arbiters. If anything, the revised system was [is] too powerful and too flexible, requiring a number of additional tweaks and restrictions on ad-hoc spellcasting to maintain game balance; but these have been (relatively) minor adjustments; on the whole, the system works.

The problem with that write-up, which wasn’t obvious at the time, was that what works at one power level may not scale all that well. Come the big finale of that campaign and its evolution into the current one in 2011-2012, the spell caster was able to take advantage of a number of temporary boosts and system flaws to start lobbing 5,000 dice spells around.

Yes, you read that right. On a scale where 5d6 is roughly a stick of dynamite, a pound of C4, a car-bomb, etc. What’s more, every additional 2 dice (roughly) doubles the amount of firepower – so 21 dice is roughly a ton of high explosives (20 dice is roughly a tonne), 41 dice is roughly a kiloton, 61 is roughly a megaton, and so on. 72 dice is roughly the size of the largest nuke ever created by man, the Russian “Tsar” bomb. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs had an impact the equivalent of 112 dice. At 130 dice, you get the average output of the sun – per second. 176 dice is the size of the typical nova, while the typical supernova clocks in at 210 dice. The biggest explosion ever witnessed by man was an exploding galaxy some 40,000 light years away, and it works out to be 310 dice in size. The Big Bang has been calculated as producing the energy equivalent of 402 dice.

Which really puts that 5,000 dice into perspective, doesn’t it? 3.1×10^728 times as powerful as the Big Bang.

To make sense of the nonsense, I was forced to assume that the ratio of increase didn’t hold true – that it might be for every additional 2 dice for a while (the useful part of the scale, up to say a Mt), then it becomes a doubling for every 10 dice for a while (up to the largest nuke, say), then a doubling every 20 dice until you get to the sun’s output per second, then a doubling every 100 dice until you get to a nova, then doubling every 200 dice until you get to a supernova, then doubling every 1,000 dice thereafter.

That gives the following:

• 1 stick of dynamite etc = 5 d6
• a tonne of high explosives = 20 d6
• a ton of high explosives = 21 d6
• a kiloton = 41 d6
• a Megaton = 61 d6
• Largest Nuke ever detonated = 116 d6
• Dinosaur-killing Asteroid Impact = 671 d6
• Average output of the sun, per second = 1,251 d6
• Typical Nova = 3,551 d6
• Typical Supernova = 6,951 d6
• Largest Explosion Ever Witnessed = 56,951 d6
• Big Bang = 152,951 d6

So the spells were roughly the power of a “baby” supernova. This was enough that I could get through to the end of the campaign, and various adjustments were already planned that I thought would deal with the problem on a more lasting basis.

About 40% of the way through Adventure Structure: My Standard Formatting, I describe the plot of the big finale in question in a boxed-off area as an example, for anyone who’s interested – it’s not especially relevant to this discussion.

It then took me about 3 months to get all my ducks in a row for the start of the next campaign (with mostly the same characters).

I have to pause at this moment in the story to mention Ian Gray. A bit more than 25 years ago, Ian made the biggest mistake of his life when he offered to help update the Rules. Large parts of the essential game mechanics existed as amendments to some typewritten pages with virtually no explanation. Other parts of the system were quite detailed. 25 years on (and counting), and we still haven’t finished – even though we’ve been using this iteration of the game system for 23 of those 25 years.

Anyway, Ian had decided that the rules for Magic were over the top and needed paring back. So he wrote up a whole new magic system a couple of years ago (without telling me), based on an analogue of the second law of thermodynamics. He also drew on in-game experience of the metaphysics of how Magic was supposed to work, which in turn had been based on the old and expunged game mechanics. He had explained the new rules to the mage player, gotten his sign-off, and even converted the character over to the new mechanics.

All along, then, there has been step-wise evolution as the rules reached their current status. The mage is now capable – if he really pushes himself – of getting up to maybe one or two hundred dice. Most of the time, he’s dealing with 10-20 dice of effect – on a par with every other PC. And, so far as I’m concerned, we’re back on the universal doubling-every-2-dice, which is MUCH simpler.

During the Covid-19 shutdown of the campaign, which lasted 5 months, I had time to review those rules beyond simply skimming them, and to tweak the existing metagame simulation concepts to match. In our first adventure back underway, a couple of weekends ago, the opportunity presented itself (in the guise of a more educated mage) to explain the ‘reality’ of magic to the PC mage, along with some of the more interesting metagame consequences that were not yet encompassed within the rules.

Because of the understanding of the revised metagame concepts that I had, all I needed to run this segment of the game was some bullet-points and my portable whiteboard – sometime in the next month or so, I intend to write them up (with more permanent illustrations) for presentation here at Campaign Mastery as a change of pace.

For the last year, the concept of magic and how it worked had been at odds with the game mechanics in place within the campaign. The result was all those negative impacts described earlier in this article. All those melted away, to be replaced by all the positive impacts mentioned, in the course of about 45 minutes of roleplay, which had all the other players kibitzing and following along, fascinated, as their world grew in richness around them.

Of course, at the time, i was unaware of everything else that I’ve described in this article; it was after the players had left for the day that the contents came to me while reflecting on the day’s play. I started outlining this article immediately – because if the impacts of a contradiction between game mechanics and conceptual mechanics weren’t obvious to me, even with all my experience and expertise, I didn’t think very many others would be aware of them, either.

I usually put this sort of preamble at the start of an article, but in this instance, I thought it would distract from the points I was trying to make, and sound too much like I was trying to sell the reader on the problems and fixes to them that I was proposing. I wanted the analysis and solutions to justify their own presence – but thought that this context, as a real-world example of the things I had identified ‘in theory’ was too important to leave out.

So that’s how you came to be reading these words instead of something else!

What we used to need in the Zenith-3 Campaign was greater synergy between the game mechanics and metagame pseudo-science – but I fixed that, last week. You can, too. Because if there’s one lesson from this story, it’s that it’s never too late.