Appendix T&T

This post is part of the "Appendix N" blog bandwagon. I decided to share some of the many influences that have shaped a game I've been working on for a few years called Tricks & Treats.

It's a game about having spooky adventures on Halloween. You roleplay as kids and teenagers celebrating the best holiday ever, taking advantage of a rare night of unsupervised freedom, navigating the complex and unforgiving social landscape of adolescence, and investigating a mysterious horror that needs to be thwarted in order to save the day.

It's built for one-shot mini-sandbox scenarios, each one revolving around a major Halloween activity (trick-or-treating, going to a haunted house, attending a costume party, etc.). They always prominently feature a cast of NPCs thoroughly stocked with conflicts, rumors, and various hooks, and a unique "puzzle monster" that can't be defeated without gathering clues and forming a clever strategy.

There are many obvious cultural touchstones that you can connect to this game. You might expect the Appendix N to include things like Goosebumps, Hocus Pocus, The Monster Squad, The Goonies, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, etc. Maybe even adult horror like IT and Halloween. And like, sure. Those things are all part of this game. But they weren't part of what I personally put into it.

That's what this post is about. If someone playing it says "wow this is really giving Scooby Doo" or "I'm getting big Over the Garden Wall vibes from this" then that's awesome. By all means, bring those influences to it when you play. But those aren't my influences. These works are.

My (Moderately Tested) Theory of Fear

This post collects a lot of miscellaneous observations and advice, some from other thinkers and some from myself. It's all basic-level. There's plenty of stuff out there far more advanced than this. This is not written with any particular game system in mind, and it includes a mix of game master advice and game designer advice.

Here's the fundamental problem of this topic: most of the time, preserving the players' agency is paramount. But fear complicates this priority. Fear is an involuntary mental state, but it can shape your behavior in profound ways. No heroic adventurer would choose to be afraid when faced with peril.

Ideally, you trust the players to roleplay their characters' emotions on their own. "If it seems like your character would be afraid of this, then try to play them like they're afraid." And if everyone is participating in good faith, they'll try their best. But unlike other emotions, authentically roleplaying fear is much easier said than done.

There are a number of ways to help resolve this problem. Different games and playstyles offer their own answers. Some of them contradictory, some of them mix well. Here's the stuff that makes sense to me based off of all my experience. I'm splitting this into three sections: 1) Player Fear, 2) Mechanical Fear, and 3) The Overlap.

Action Mysteries

Mystery scenarios are probably the second-most popular genre of gameplay in RPGs after dungeoncrawling. Despite this, quite frustratingly, most detective-y games don't provide much support for facilitating the actual act of investigation. Call of Cthulhu, for example, just has a skill system for resolving basic tasks, much like any game would. Same with Delta Green, same with Blade Runner, same with Liminal Horror.

But even if the most popular options dodge such a big question, there's actually a lot of existing literature on the subject of running mystery games. Tools, techniques, and advice abound (mostly in the blogosphere).

Some offer techniques for robust level design. Justin Alexander famously has the Three Clue Rule and Node-Based Scenario Design. The disgraced Zak S wrote about Hunter/Hunted and Investigations-as-Dungeons.

Others give advice for refining the act of inspecting and uncovering information itself with smarter adjudication. Alexander also described his Matryoshka Search Technique which is a simple trick. Mindstorm wrote a post called Ransacking the Room which I find utterly brilliant. DIY & Dragons gave us Landmark, Hidden, Secret which I'm pretty sure Nintendo must have studied very closely to make the last couple of Zelda games.

Sean McCoy has argued that the answer lies in smart visual information design. Give the player a literal tool that helps them solve a mystery. I took a class in college called "intelligence analysis techniques" that had a lot of very gameable things I think could be a great foundation for a system (timelines, network diagrams, cross-impact matrices, analysis of competing hypotheses, etc.).

Still others reinvent the genre entirely by way of novel game design. Robin Laws built the GUMSHOE system to bypass the issue of players missing clues, which was further iterated on in Cthulhu Dark by adding some dice. The game Brindlewood Bay relies on "quantum mysteries" that everyone co-authors as they go along, which Prismatic Wasteland has also described.

Alice is Missing is a totally unique example because it's built around gamifying one specific mystery and set of ingredients that go into it, having players draw cards from preset decks in order to form the truth as they're discovering it.

The world of video gaming has plenty of insights, too. Game Maker's Toolkit has a really nice video identifying three types of detective challenge: investigation (uncovering and collecting information), contradiction (noticing inconsistencies and flaws in information), and deduction (interpreting available information to extrapolate new information).

These are all perfectly cromulent additions to the collective body of RPG detective theory. I am here today to offer a modest contribution of my own to that corpus. I'm going to refer to it as an Action Mystery.

Imaginary Roller Coasters

Long ago, a theorist named Wolfgang Iser writing on the subject of literary anthropology came up with a concept that's very valuable in game design: the distinction between free play and instrumental play. It's how you answer the question "why are you doing the thing you're doing?" during play. When your answer to that question is, "because I felt like it" or "because it's funny" or anything about its intrinsic appeal, then you're engaging in free play. When your answer is "because it's what I should do" or "because it's how you win" or anything about pursuing a goal, then you're engaging in instrumental play. The moment any notion of "should" and "should not" enters your actions, you're in instrumental play.

Picture Bob watching Alice play a video game. Alice is getting really frustrated with a hard challenge, or like, spending hours doing something monotonous and repetitive. Bob asks "why are you still playing that game if you aren't enjoying it? That's such a waste of time when you could be doing something you find fun instead." It's easy to see Bob's point. But if you've ever been an Alice, you probably understand that a person can be motivated to do something unenjoyable if it's in service to a desired outcome. The process might not be fun, but winning is fun. Or leveling up, or unlocking collectibles, or getting the best ending, or whatever.

In short: this is why Minecraft has a survival mode and a sandbox mode. Some people genuinely do not understand the appeal of survival and others don't understand the appeal of sandbox.

Let's talk a bit more about this and how it ties into RPGs specifically.

Christmas Adventures

[What better time for such a post than July 5?]

Because I make Halloween adventures, I have often been asked, "are you going to make a Christmas adventure next?"

The short answer is no. But because I've been asked so many times, I've put a lot of thought into it. Here's my full answer.

The first and most important reason why I wouldn't is that I don't really like Christmas. Some years I'm in more of a "it's just not for me" mood, but other years I can get pretty Grinch-y. And so I wouldn't really be the right person for the job. I hope that anyone who reads or plays Tricks & Treats can tell that I fucking love Halloween. But if I'm correct and that shows through in the finished work, then surely my lack of love for Christmas would show in any attempt I make at a Christmas adventure. It deserves to be made by someone who has enough passion to do the task justice.

But I also have a weirder, less convincing reason why. A train of thought where I've talked myself into believing that, ackchyually, a Christmas adventure would be inherently inferior to a Halloween adventure for XYZ reasons!

Stranger Things and "Puzzle Monsters"

[This post will contain spoilers for Stranger Things up through season 4]

The best monsters are not merely a big sack of hit points you hack-n-slash your way through because of a random encounter table. No, they're something more. They have qualities possible only through the conceits of fantasy. They challenge your brain just as much as your stats and dice. They stick in the mind. They're not just a one-and-done encounter. They're grounded in the world and its rules, and can't be understood merely with numbers. And maybe most of all, they're robust enough that reckoning with them is the whole adventure, or at least could be the whole adventure.

A very popular piece of advice in the OSR is "Just Use Bears." The basic argument is that, "monsters which don't have elaborate special abilities could probably be represented sufficiently with the stat block of a bear, since the minutiae of individual stats rarely has a significant enough impact on a fight to be worth the trouble of always having a custom stat block prepared."

As practical advice, this is good. But in spirit, I feel like it's a concession. A failure. If you're using a monster that could be substituted with a bear, then maybe you shouldn't even have that monster at all. Monsters should be special. You could be running a better game where you never use that advice. Not because it's bad, but because you've made monsters good enough that the advice isn't applicable.

To illustrate what I'm calling "puzzle monsters," we're going to go through the monsters used in the Netflix show Stranger Things as well as some examples I've created for my own adventure scenarios. After that, I'll walk you through the steps I take to create a puzzle monster, and other considerations that help a lot in the creative process.

Tricks & Treats: Harvestland Horror

The final day of Halloween is less than a week away, so have another free Halloween-themed one shot adventure you can run before the end of the month. It took me a bit longer than expected, but this is the promised follow-up to my last Halloween adventure.

This scenario is built for use with a Lasers & Feelings hack called Tricks & Treats, created by Octava Oculta (Reddit username u/shardsofcrystal). It's an ultra-lite system fit for all ages or experience levels, and is great as a nostalgic little novelty adventure. Just follow that link, make a copy of the folder and its contents, and use the materials within to play a fun session of spooky adventure.

Here's the pitch: play as middle schoolers on a field trip to a pumpkin patch on the morning of Halloween, encounter a big horrifying monster that the grown-ups are helpless to stop, use your noggin to save the day. This is especially good if used as a sequel to the last adventure because all the students have aged a year and you can build on previous events and relationships. That said, most of my own players created new characters for this year, so do what you feel like.

Not sure when part 3 will come out, but one of my players suggested we also do some spooky adventures during tax season, the other Halloween. If anyone runs either of these adventures, I'd love to hear about it and how it goes.

-Dwiz

Tricks & Treats: Jack-o'-Lantern Nightmare

Happy first day of Halloween! Have a free Halloween-themed one shot adventure you can run this month, built for use with a Lasers & Feelings hack called Tricks & Treats, created by Octava Oculta (Reddit username u/shardsofcrystal). It's an ultra-lite system fit for all ages or experience levels, and I made a kick-ass adventure for it last year during lockdown. Just follow that link, make a copy of the folder and its contents, and use the materials within to play a fun session of spooky adventure.

Here's the pitch: play as middle schoolers going trick or treating in your typical North American suburban neighborhood, encounter a big horrifying monster that the grown-ups are helpless to stop, use your noggin to save the day. Stranger Things is a really useful touchstone here, because it's the perfect balance of family-friendly adventure and supernatural horror. Basically, I aimed for "more tense and easy to take seriously than The Goonies" but "less violent and mature than Stephen King's It." When the monster is present, it should feel legitimately threatening, but at the same time, you won't see it tear a 9 year old in two pieces and spray blood everywhere.

At least, that's how I run it. It's your table, do whatever you like. Maybe you and your group would prefer a game where the monsters violently massacre the neighborhood, but you also decide that you don't want your players to get called a homophobic slur by a shitty 12 year old. Use your grown up judgment on what's best for your group and what you want out of the game.

A note on audience: hypothetically, you could run this adventure for a group of kids about the same age as the protagonists. Pretty easily, in fact, since it's such a simple rule system and the scenario is easy to grasp. However, I personally feel like the ideal audience is actually a group of adults, since much of the appeal of the adventure is 1) nostalgia, and 2) being able to laugh at the cringiness of middle schoolers.

In a couple weeks I'll be releasing my sequel to this adventure, so if you enjoy this one then stay tuned so you can run another one before the end of the month.

-Dwiz