Avant Garde Rules: In Praise of Experimental TTRPGs

These days I find myself in circles that focus on mastering the art of the elf-game. Games about adventurers going on adventures, resolved through rolling and talking. How many miles in a hex? How should one to manage torches in the dungeon? Here's 2d6 monstrous snails. I love it! I do it a lot myself! But it's only one corner of what tabletop games can be. When I tweeted out that "I've still yet to see someone bring up a "That's a board game not a TTRPG" argument in a way that feels productive or interesting besides to try to create a specific set of tastes that is "correct" for the RPG" I wasn't expecting to get the kind of mass positive reception it did. All too often it seems people want to make the rules of a game more about components and how you'd market it, rather than just having fun with a medium defined by rules that can be broken. Why define what is an RPG, when we can redefine what can be an RPG? What trails can be blazed? What avenues can we consider?

Last week when I discussed the interplay between art and product, I briefly had an aside where I said "Richard Kelly is singlehandedly pushing the limits of some truly avant garde and rawly joyful design, all without trying to constrain these works into neat little boxes." Today I want to talk about these kinds of works more in depth! So let's jump right in...

What is Avant Garde? [[*1]]

My good friend Merium-Webster defines it as "new and unusual or experimental ideas, especially in the arts, or the people introducing them." Enough said. Do you handle encumbrance by stacking dice instead of rolling them? That sounds pretty avant garde for the tabletop RPG. Maybe your fishing mini-game does involve rolling dice, but not in the way you'd think. I'd classify that as avant garde as well. "Experimental" is the operative word in a hobby defined by "Roll+Stat+Mod" universal resolution mechanics. Sometimes avant garde can mean breaking new ground in setting and atmosphere (you could easily argue the structure and presentation of works like Lorn Song of the Bachelor or Gradient Descent fit this bill) but today I want to focus more on what avant garde can do in terms of written out rules. ((Though both of those examples are honestly avant garde in terms of rules too [[*1.5]] ))

It should be noted avant garde is less a measure of quality, so much as it's a measure of risk-taking, ground-breaking and experimentation. Putting the forbidden fruit into my dumpling soup could certainly be read as avant garde cooking, but I'm not sure it'd turn out great. That said, I would say the games I'm about to go over do strike me as being of superb quality in no small part because they break new ground with flair and gusto.

It might sound a bit silly to say given its ubiquity at this point, but a game like Dread strikes me as a prime example of what avant garde design can bring to a TTG. The premise is simple: Tasks (ඞ) are resolved by pulling blocks from a Jenga tower. If the tower falls the player who was pulling the block loses their character to death, madness, etx. A player can also nobly sacrifice themselves by intentionally knocking over the tower for an instant "critical" success. It's simple, punchy and superbly avant garde when compared to rolling math rocks and counting how many Hurt Pips your character loses.

It's a blast too! I've had a great time running all sorts of one-shots using the system, and its near-instant teachability and tactility makes it a hit among my friends who are math-rock-averse. It cleverly uses components lots of game players have or can readily access (Jenga towers), while effortlessly designing for a feel of actual tension (hence Dread) as the tower gets ever more precarious through a session. These are the sort of design spaces that avant garde works are excellent for exploring and pioneering. Heck, OD&D could be considered its own kind of avant garde given the time and place it was formalized in. [[*2]]

Does Avant Garde Make for Better Roleplaying?

But why bother? If my elf-game is working it sounds like all this does is maybe get new people into the hobby? Well my friend, the avant garde is not meant to replace your elf-game, but rather expand the possibility space of the games and mini-games that exist within and alongside it! Some people come to games to be immersed, others for an emergent narrative. Some people certainly don't come to games looking for new ways to play, and more power to them! But for me? I come to games for what could best be defined as enrichment. Play. I look for the things only a tabletop game can do. Parts to fiddle with. Puzzles to solve. Rules to engage with. Some of that is elf games! Some of that is ostensibly Calvin Ball!

While I adore the roleplay aspect as well, roleplay is a much more freeform social activity that can exist with or without rules. Rules, meanwhile, offer a kind of structure that can be played around in new and interesting ways. Do some of these "get in the way" of roleplay or realism or immersion? Sure, but if the goal is "play" then those aren't really concerns. [[*3]] I'd also argue more "gamey" rules don't necessarily impede on emergent narratives and roleplay, they just take them in a different (often admittedly less freeform) direction.

Some of the most entertaining sessions of "roleplaying" I've had weren't around the table of a totally freeform dungeon crawl, but rather in front of my laptop in a room of other laptops all hooked up to the same game of Civ V, all of us taking the roles of megalomaniacal conquers and capitalists and zealots. Or they were spent in Ameritrash dungeon crawlers, being the voice of reason in Zombicide or the greedy loot goblin in Super Dungeon Explore. These were games that were heavily mechanized and still allowed for a deep kind of roleplaying within the boundaries of their own rules. Something, something, "constraints breed creativity" -Miyamoto (allegedly, I'm  pretty sure this is a just a ubiquitous saying in the arts). But I digress...

While avant garde games don't automatically create the scaffolding for better roleplaying, they can and do create the scaffolding for new and engaging modes of play, including but not limited to roleplaying! And as someone who is constantly looking for the dopamine hit of something novel, that makes me very happy.

Fatal Framing

Let's use another example to put this into perspective:

Deep in the confines of the abandoned Ashihira Estate, there is a rumor of a woman who wails for her child to come home. Your older brother was investigating the story only to disappear shortly after. He left you only an antique camera and a note that reads "Come find me."

Sounds like the perfect set up for an investigative night of horror and fright, am I right? Maybe you should use Call of Cthulu, each ghost encountered increasing your madness? Oh! Or maybe we could simply run it in a Mork Borg hack, who needs more than 3 stats when we have our imaginations? Or Dread! That's abstract and will really ramp up the tension while- 

Have you heard of Shudderspeed? It's a totally free, one page game by the aforementioned Richard Kelly and well worth a look.

The heart of the game is simple: Every now and then while a GM is narrating or players are roleplaying a Ghost may show up. This is represented by the GM subtly waving around an object in clear view for a few seconds. If you can manage to get a clear picture of it using your phone ((either with one hand or zoomed in with two)) you fend it off! If not, well, you know...

There's plenty more you can add on, but even this simple one-page premise is such a genius use of the design space of a bunch of Gamers sitting together at a table. [[*3.5]] It's a design that also offers an incredible well for GMs to pull from, blazing a trail for Tactical Camera-TTRPG Action. To call this mechanic sublime would be an understatement, to simply call it fun would be to do its richness injustice. To call it avant garde? That I can put more concretely into words.

It is a game first and foremost, one where shaky hands or getting lost in a conversation can mean the difference between life and death. It can be goofy (especially if you use goofy props) or incredibly tense (especially if you're evil like me and run it in low lighting so players need to use the flash on their phones). It's versatile, easily teachable and immediately evocative. It is a game about taking pictures of ghosts, and in that specificity of both theme and mechanics it delivers an enriching novel experience, unlike any I've had simply rolling dice.

Is it "More of a board game than a TTRPG"? I don't really care. It's fun, it's social, it creates emergent narratives and I can play it (mostly) away from screens. It pushes the boundaries of the design space (everyone sitting in person) and makes clever use of readily available components (as many folks have smart phones with cameras these days). Is it for everyone? For every setting? Is it the perfect D&D-killer all-in-one RPG? No. And that's why it slaps oh so hard.

Designing for Feel

In many ways I'd express my design philosophy as designing for feel; kinesthetics. Demon Crawl bathes you in blood and has you frantically chugging potions as you wade through literally hundreds of monsters over the course of a night. Burnout Reaper whittles away your hope, funds, d6s and will to live until your PC finally burns out. Their kinesthetics and play focus around the feelings I want to deliver to the player, thus amplifying and informing the narrative they choose to craft at the table. Often I try to leverage ideas that may be more "board gamey" or otherwise "not like an RPG", because to me what matters is that the game feels right. Especially when it involves that rush of agency gone awry, whether that means missing a camera shot or knocking over a Jenga tower.

Which isn't to say more Trad/Narrative stuff like Blades in the Dark can't be a bit avant garde in its own way. Easily the most daring part of that game's design is asking the players to share one communal Crew Sheet and the ways in which that shapes play and interactions at the table. It's also not to say all designs must be super avant garde in their mechanics or presentation, nor that every game should be designed as specifically as possible. A personal favorite of mine, Mothership, is (barring some quite inspired flowcharts) a relatively straightforward game about using math-rocks to weave narratives of sci-fi horror. And it (math) rocks and feels great! In no small part because it has honed its own systems excellently. But it's still quite familiar in its actual mechanical design (which again is totally fine, and has its own merits).

Now let's compare this to something as truly off-the-walls as Ghost Kart Racers. Yes, you read that right. If ever there was a TTG that I could slap in front of people to spark a debate of "what is a TTRPG" it'd be this one. It's another favorite of mine by Richard Kelly, and a game which defines its influences as "Banchou Sarayashiki, The Ring, The Grudge, N64 Kart Racers" and to reiterate, yes this is a real game (and a good game at that!) Within its breezy 20 pages of carefully selected public domain art and spectacularly charming prose, is a most brilliant use for the math-rocks: Flicking them in a race across a 5-foot "course" with the intention of getting as close to the finish line as possible (meaning you don't want to overshoot it either). 

Everything from a d4 to a d20 is up for grabs as your Kart, and you'll slowly get used to the "feel" of each type of vehicle, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. You do this in a set of laps to compete in a single race that weaves into a greater narrative. Add on top of this some item modifiers, some solid narrative prompts and a dead (heh) simple 3-stat-resolution-system (Scare, Care and Beware) and you have one hell (heh) of an original TTRPG system! The ways in which your dice can (and, trust me, will) sputter out of control, and the ways in which your characters slowly become better "drivers" the more you yourself adapt to the racing mechanic feels not only immersive but utterly fun.

Not only this, but both Ghost Kart Racers and Shudderspeed introduce a way to actually "get good" at the game. What it sacrifices in universal accessibility it gains in the ability to master its mechanics. While dice are fickle and hands are shaky (or at least mine are under pressure), you slowly learn to thread the needle in these games in a way that offers a truly new experience for those used to being at the whims of a die roll.

Oh and Ghost Kart Racers doesn't actually just stop being innovative and fun there. Remember that dead simple resolution system I mentioned? It has a fantastic mini-game. If two player characters have to roll off, they make a Clash Roll. Simple enough, right? You're betting they make a competing check an- WRONG! They play Rock-Paper-Scissors like real Gamers! They still make a check based off of what they throw in the match (Rock = Scare, Paper = Care, Scissors = Beware), but they get a +2 to that check if they also win the RPS. Simple, effective, strategic, evocative and dare I say: Avant Garde. [[*4]]

Be Not Afraid

Now I'm not saying you have to be as brave and bold as the designs of Richard Kelly, just that you shouldn't limit yourself in what you think your game can be. Roll a pencil to see how an acrobatic feat goes, give the players an actual map and a real-world timer to solve it, hide a letter under their seat and have its secrets only be revealed if you put it up to a bright light ((I actually did this with a hex map once to great effect)).

I'd highly encourage other designers to push boundaries when they feel stuck as well, even if just in a singular corner of your game. Just look at the brilliance that Mausritter's print-and-cut inventory brings to the classic dungeon crawler! By making encumbrance and inventory management a tactile playful experience, it grants a whole new layer to the game's feel. I can only define this delightful mechanic at the game's heart as "non conformist design" or otherwise "avant garde." It uses its space cleverly and blazes new trails, while still grounding itself in a familiar formula.

By opening yourself up to the possibilities of what a tabletop game can be you can make fun mini-games, or whole sub-economies. Heck you can even reimagine what the physical game object of the TTRPG can be! Look at the ever-evolving Sunderwald, where players permanently change the game book and mechanics themselves as a campaign progresses (a cue taken from "Legacy" board games). Or the far more avant garde and surreal Game Lamprey which has you physically destroy the game book you're playing out of. ((Both works by Richard Kelly, the latter of which feels like it partially informed the former))

There's a whole mountain of other great games that apply this kind of Avant Garde philosophy out there! Games like the purpose-built-for-online This Discord Has Ghosts In It or the somber meditation on death Ten Candles ((I'm realizing horror seems to push the envelope a lot?)) Not to mention whatever they're cooking in the solo-RPG sphere.

End Notes

For those of you who know me, you'll know that I gush about Richard Kelly's work a lot, and hopefully this partially explains why. While he is also a prolific writer in the TTRPG sphere who pumps out an incredible volume of (arguably) more traditional modules, mini-games and all-out-strategy epics, what makes his work special (to me at least) is the ways in which it takes risks and is willing to put itself out there just to see what happens. I feel like this can be best summarized by a passage in the intro of Game Lampreys:

This is a bad idea.

It is driven not by what a designer should make, but what they could make.

And in taking those risks he's able to craft things that are truly magnificent and inspiring in my eyes. So if you make TTRPGs or run them, I hope you'll consider throwing a few bad ideas or throw-away experimental mechanics into the pot next time. You never know when they might cook into something beautiful.

As a final aside, Richard Kelly recently released a a full feature-length 246 TTRPG called Strays, which seems like an ephemeral (if at times melancholic) game about the lives of changelings pulled between the worlds of mortals and fae. I don't typically like to try to "sell" you on actual products in this blog, and I haven't even had the time to sink my teeth into this game yet. BUT I do know if it ever hits 1000 sales Richard will treat himself to a fancy sickle off of the Bezos net that he absolutely does not need and I think it'd be really fun and funny for him to have! So if you've liked some of the works I've talked about here and have money to spare, consider checking that one out ((or otherwise checking out any of the number of his works that may peak your interest, many of which are super affordable, have community copies or are downright free)).

[[*1 : Lordy, OK so I know some of you are going to hear the words avant garde and your eyes are going to start retracting into your skull. If you find the phrasing pretentious then just try to auto-correct it to "experimental" in your head - After years of Comp-Lit and Film Studies courses (including a certificate from an ever prestigious state school) this is just how my brain works 3: ]]

[[*1.5 : OK so arguably Lorn Song of the Bachelor is avant garde in terms of rules because it's largely system neutral yet maintains an immaculate sense of structure beyond what one might define as a traditional rulesets. Similarly Gradient Descent's "Bends" system is downright horrifying and surreal in the best best best of ways, and something that I've not really seen done before. ]]

[[*2 : This is actually hella debatable but it sounds nice and fits well with the myth of the TTRPG's origins. ]] 

[[*3 : It occurs to me that abstract games (like Checkers) are equally formed around the goal of simply "play" and they don't hold the same kind of appeal to me. So maybe what I look for is "Play+"? Play with narrative? Play where the rules are a bit more malleable and the outcomes a bit less absolute? Guess Who is a fine game structured around play. But turn it into a resolution system for an investigation system set in the 1930s where getting it wrong has long term consequence? Now that's infinitely more my bs.]]

[[*3.5 : ...in person, I want to cover how the design spaces of games that can be run online and those that can't are vastly different in a much bigger blog post. ]]

[[*4 : OK so I'm no master of games history, so Richard Kelly may not have been the first to do this, nor might this be the first game this shows up in if he did. BUT I do feel like I never see this used, and it's an excellent example of designing outside of the box in smaller more familiar ways.]]