Against Replicability

just something I have been stewing on for a bit

I do not value a consistent and replicable experience the most. I do not. Every few years or so the British internet will suddenly remember ISO 3103 and get miffed
“Oh this isn’t the best way to make tea” and yeah they are right, but the point isn’t that it’s good it’s that it is replicable. You can follow the instructions and get the same cup of tea. It’s fine for what it is. It’s fine for science, it is not fine for art.

RPGs are two forms of art that exist on two separate levels. There is the art of the book, and the art of the game. The book is the text used to negotiate the framework to understand the events of the game. The game is what happens at the table. The game (unless in very specific “AP” style game a la Critical Role) is a form of folk art. The book is sometimes folkart, hastily assembled in google docs, stapled together so on and so forth, things in the DIY sphere I typically run in. However, overwhelmingly it is not a form of folk art. It is a standardized commercial product. The book is the book is the book. One day your friend might not be able to make it to the table so you shape what you have to better fit the changing and fluid nature, there will never be a day where you wake up and chapter 3 is suddenly blank.

When people discuss rpgs critically they are faced with a problem, they can only truly experience the folkart interpretation of someone else’s art. Simply the nature of the beast. There is a problem with this, some people are simply bad at game. They are boorish, unimaginative, think too slowly, talk over people too much, are too forgetful, or many other thousands of beautiful human imperfections. There will always to some degree be a gap between the text of the book and the game. This is quite mortifying to someone who pours their heart into something. What if my hard work fails to accomplish what I set out to do, the experience I intend to create?

So things are codified, best practices written down, advice passed from one human being to another. A fine thing to do, however we live in a world of book worship and soon these best practices metastasis and calcify, into laws. It stops becoming a dialog between reader and writer treating each other as equals and instead becomes burdensome edicts. This may happen within the course of play as book worship sets in, or through reinterpretation of the work in the form of hacks.

Soon the high water mark becomes how can we lessen the gap between Authorial Intent and actual play to the bare minimum, how can we standardize the experience and make it replicable. Soon the teleportation fog sets in and returns your characters to the dungeon, or the dice mandate it’s time for a character to have the saddened condition. What your character thinks and does is simply too troublesome to let the folk artists decide, it could contrast with the intended experience. Soon a book’s ability for minimum deviation is the selling point, no matter what you will always get this result. Most of the time this is the plotting of someone who doesn’t have it in them to write fiction so they write rpgs instead.

Fuck it all, it doesn’t matter if someone has a bad time with your book. It doesn’t, it has no bearing on you, and no bearing on the quality of the book. No two tables are alike so no two games are alike. Let a million flowers bloom, just because two flowers that bloomed from the same ground are similar does not mean the ground was better.

An rpg should not have to deliver on a specific promise consistently, it should have room to flub, to fail, to shoot for the moon and sometimes utterly and truly reach them. To me a good book is not one that makes a specific experience, but accommodates many. The truly great books are the ones that demand no two games have the same shape, just similar elements.