The need for Loresheets

 So okay, I wanted to talk about Loresheets today. I’ve made a lot of fans of Legends of the Wulin nervous with my cavalier and sometimes dismissive attitude towards them. I think there’s this notion that I don’t “get” them or that I don’t care about them and I want to address that. 

Because the people that love loresheets do so for a reason, and I feel like they deserve to have their concerns answered. 

The state of roleplaying games during the design of Legends of the Wulin 

So Legends is a surprisingly old game. I ordered my copy before I became a father, a small lifetime ago. In the early 2010’s, tabletop roleplaying games were largely defined by the 3rd-edition era of D&D gamemasters and the style of game mastery that they either adopted, or the burgeoning movement against that style that embraced a radical, authorial style player-agency, what came to be known as storygaming. 

It’s important to understand that the one shaped the other; storygame conceits were an answer to a shabby, frustrating style of Game Mastery that emerged from the 3rd-edition era of design, a style I’ll call “Scripted” style. 

 Scripted Style GMing 

Scripted style works thus: You, as the GM, prep a short script of events for your players to follow. Typically locations involved in the script are detailed, as well as any adversaries or NPCs. 

Importantly, the ending of this script assumes that the characters succeed and the game session(s) end, allowing the next script of the game to be prepped between arcs. 

Long-time fans of the blog will doubtless note how much this diverges from the more prep-intensive “crawl” style of gaming that I advocate, and have also been thoroughly inundated by my invective to prep situations, not plots, so you have a strong counterpoint of comparison that throws both the benefits and weaknesses of this style into sharp relief. 

However, its important to note, that a massive volume of literature in this era of gaming assumed that this was the only or at least default style of how roleplaying games were run, and that the majority of GMs did this exact thing. This assumption was not only reinforced, but propagated by modules and GM advice assuming and teaching this as the “way it’s done”

A ton of gaming culture for ttrpgs is bedrocked in the assumptions of the Scripted Style, even to the point of defining players as “good” or “bad” based on how well they follow the script (i.e.: “behave”). Or how skilled a GM is when they make the structure of this script invisible to players, so as to make an imaginary agency for them and let them feel (but never be) empowered to make their own decisions with consequences for the game.

Many, many irritating issues arise when you run a game in this style. Players going off-script is a huge problem, as GMs in this style lack the tools to create a wider world, so exploration is an enemy to the nature of this prep style. Events as well must be adhered to, so player death and greater-than-predicted-success both effectively ruin this fragile causality, requiring either the abandonment of all prep from the GM or “cat-herding” the outcomes back within the original script’s purview somehow. Even unexpected events, such as “random encounters”, essentially upset the fundamental pacing of the game’s cadence and so are undesirable, as they introduce “noise” to the game’s rhythm.

Bizarrely, the elements that fought must fiercely against this style of GMing are fundamental to the older D&D style Crawl experience, to the point where most gamers were utterly baffled by their inclusion. What’s the point of a “random encounter” in a script? It seems like a non-scripted, potentially disruptive fight scene barging into an otherwise carefully tailored experience. Why were HP totals so low, monsters so deadly, saves a do-or-die affair? Player death was undesirable; they’re supposed to WIN at the end of the script, dammit! What’s with all the artificiality of hexes and underground dungeons; aren’t the walls of the script, and the techniques for getting players back on-track, wall enough?

A style of games that was an early contemporary of this movement was White Wolf’s Storytelling system, a much more accommodating system for the style. 

Storyteller had simpler, non-level stats, allowing characters to assume a more specific (but importantly, simplistically defined) shape. It had a big, rich, believable above-ground setting, based in the familiar modern world (so you didn’t need an arcane knowledge of pre-industrial society to freestyle when your players went off-script). It had big power players that could scare your players into following your scripts. 

And vitally, it was socially-focused, not goal-focused: you never got the treasure and leveled up. You simply dug yourself deeper into the font of future scripts by getting closer to the seat of power in your monster society.

Where D&D’s structure chaffed at Scripted style, Storyteller thrived.

But the way in which it thrived is important to note here. Players were bullied in ST systems; the monsters and leaders of the factions were unfairly, impossibly difficult to vanquish. Travel in sunlight was a death-sentence to vampires, social interaction with the human world impossible for Werewolves, etc. You were chained into a small box of easily-controlled places and scripts and annihilated or steeply punished for deviating, losing life, limb, sanity or soul if you pushed too hard against the Script’s boundaries.

And worse, if you DID manage to succeed, despite those obstacles? The game was over. If you beat the Wyrm, you had nothing further to do as a Werewolf. If you Diablerized the Prince of the city, then what? The game literally devolved into ennui; there was simply no drama if you weren’t the victim, or the doomed hero. It simply did not know what to do with success.

The counter-movement to these systems and their failings posited a radical solution to the problem of restrictive, de-protagonizing, and frustrating scripts: what if the players, as well as the GM, got to edit the script?

The Storygame movement was born out of this radical idea. Games began to get Meta, with players being offered limited resources that they could use to change the player-GM power dynamic. Not merely changing the things their character did, but the circumstances within the game world itself. They were now co-authors, and the game was a script which everyone suddenly had the power to edit.

An important aspect of this is that this movement was attempting to answer a problem introduced by the adoption of a script in the first place. The restrictions and frustrations of being funneled, herded and vetoed in favor of a pre-written set of events and outcome produced a paradigm in which any power less than authorial control was a joke. 

The techniques used by Script-GMs undermined the agency of any player actions, to the point that only forcing co-control over the meta-level script had any real power to grant agency to players.

The frustrating element of this for me, as a GM that never uses this style, is that it is both highly effective in it’s goals, and utterly redundant in any other circumstance. Reason being, we’ve had another movement take place in the wake of the Storygame revolution that taught us the value of the original style of GMing; namely the Arnesian, Gygaxian style of “Playing to find out what happens” or, more contemporarily, the ‘Crawl style.

And although I COULD go on about how ‘Crawl style solves the issues of Scripted style…. Like, completely, I’d rather remind you all that Egoraptor already did that for me. 

Basically it’s this: If, in the Ocarina of Time, the PROBLEM with the script is that it invades the gameplay and forces you into situations and outcomes that both run counter to the logic of the game world AND remove your freedom to choose how and when you access the game’s content, the SOLUTION could reasonably be:

(A) For Storygame style: Allow the player a “Mario-Maker-Esque” level of control over the programming of the game, so that they can co-craft the experience they want to play

OR it could reasonably be:

(B) For the ‘Crawl style: Just toss the damned script and let players do what they want.

And although BOTH are valid and fun solutions to the problem, for the majority of players, the more desirable and elegant solution is B.

So let’s come back, finally, to Loresheets

What did they do? Why was that desirable?

The exact function of a Loresheet was thus: There was some setting material, stories and area, character and situation descriptions, which were real and true elements of the setting of Legends of the Wulin. They had costs associated with different elements, which could be paid in XP by the players to “make it relevant” to the game.

In other words, they were an appeal to player agency via a co-opting and seizure of GM game-narrative authority. They were answering the issue of “wanting something cool in the setting to be important in the game” by giving players a minor GM role in introducing it and ensuring it’s ongoing inclusion in the framework of an assumed game-script.

What happens to the need for this player-ability, for this expenditure of XP to make a game element script-relevant, when we simply omit the script? What we’re left with is an alternative, meta-resource approach to getting an in-game element; a secondary, undesirable venue, when you as a player have the capacity, guaranteed from your avatar-strength, to simply go to where that element is and interact with it?

It is, in other words, essentially vestigial. Players access the setting content by… Well, playing the game. You don’t need to edit the script; there isn’t one to edit. There’s just content, and the obstacles to that content can be overcome within the framework of a player’s in-game capabilities.

Okay, so… What do we do with Loresheets, then? How can we keep this beloved piece of game design in the game, when half of it’s function, the unique and innovative half, is redundant to the point of pointlessness?

When we return to the need being fulfilled by Loresheets, we find that abandoning Scripted style doesn’t completely answer the problem they’re trying to solve. Although we’re giving players agency by allowing them to pursue game-relevancy by in-game means, we’ve not got any meaningful setting in which they can do that.

Writing setting will solve part of that problem, but consider the issue of players going “off-script” when you have a robust setting; we still don’t fundamentally know, as GMs, what to do to translate the prose of that setting (“fluff” as it’s known) into interactable game-elements. We have no translator between instruction manual and game level. Functionally, the knowledge that there’s a dungeon somewhere, even a really cool one, does not give us the blueprint of that dungeon nor instruct us in the techniques of dungeoncrawling.

Now the processes of the game gives GMs the tools they need to run a robust setting, so we have two parts of the solution within the framework of the rules. But, we’re still missing that essential bridge which translates setting into those explorable game-elements.

So there’s still a functional element of Loresheets that needs to be served; giving players the tools to interact with a setting doesn’t give GM the tools they need to create it.

How do we do that?

I’ve spoken about the subtle and majestic genius of Yoon-Suin before, so I won’t retread that ground here. But I will demonstrate how Yoon-Suin gives us the techniques we need to translate fluff-into-crunch in a meaningful way, thereby giving us the final puzzle piece of translating the function of Loresheets into this game’s conceits.

The only remaining bridge is that between the writing of the the setting material descriptively, and the creation of game-content that can be interacted with via the game’s mechanics and processes. Yoon-Suin’s author understands that bridge intimately and masterfully crafts a guidebook not merely for constructing a single, ideal bridge, but for constructing a process by which an enormous volume of ideal bridges can be made.

The charts pictured above create 480 unique sets of circumstances, but these are mere building-blocks which invite further refinement and specificity. However, each of these myriad circumstances still falls within the purview of what is permissible and expected from the setting material we’re given.  We know there are cockroach farmers, we know they have rivalries, and we understand that friction can exist between them and other castes of society, such as Archivists. 

This blossoming of structured, but unpredictable content from such simple and usable lists represents a machine by which the true elements of a setting’s broader reality can be made manifest uniquely within the circumstances of a game. They are setting detail engines, solving the issue both of translation and of expedient generation of unexpected (but reasonably present) content.

We can now prepare a social circle, complete with conflict and rivalry, before play begins and we do so in a way that reflects the setting we’ve read and functions to reinforce it’s reality to the players. But additionally, we can generate another social circle of equal setting-appropriateness and complexity with such efficiency that doing so while running the game is possible. This ensures that the setting remains fresh, explorable and vibrant both to the players and to ourselves. Their exploration of Yoon-Suin’s society becomes ours in a true sense.

The most impressive genius of this is way in which that vibrancy, the sheer imaginative energy of the setting can be encoded into the sets of elements that comprise the lists. Contrast, for example, the bustling and socially exotic urban environment that the Yellow City charts evoke with the foreboding, eerie and hostile environment made from the Mountains of the Moon charts. In both cases the population of the charts themselves is a sort of programming for the at-the-table play.

Good, evocative charts that create the places, people, and situations suggested in the setting material. That’s it; that’s the way.