noooooowowowoooow-deactivated20 asked:
prokopetz answered:
The premise of mao isn’t readily adaptable to tabletop RPGs; the social buy-in for tabletop roleplaying is high enough that it’s very difficult to arrange a steady stream of newbies to mess with, so the only way to directly emulate the experience in an RPG context would be to change up what set of rules you’re using on a regular basis - which rather cuts against the notion of using a specific published system to begin with!
(You could probably fake it by grabbing a bucketful of cheap systems that are light enough to learn in the course of a single run, and having the GM secretly pick one at the start of each session, though. I’ve assembled a list of free and low-cost RPGs that might help there.)
That said, there are tabletop RPGs out there where the core of play revolves around collaboratively defining or discovering the rules that govern the game - essentially a hybrid of a tabletop RPG and a nomic. Probably the most well known of them is Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (warning: direct PDF link), which I discuss in some depth in a previous post.
I’m not sure how much it’s supported by the actual rules, but I’ve often had Paranoia pitched to me with the concept that even the rules are above the clearance levels of the players, so they only get to know them as they come up.
Nah, Paranoia has a totally different gimmick. The big idea is that it’s against the rules for players to display knowledge of the rules. It doesn’t matter whether you looked the rules up ahead of time or puzzled them out during play - demonstrating understanding of them will get you slapped either way.
(If you think that sounds like a totally dysfunctional way to run a tabletop roleplaying game, now you’re catching on!)
@notquiteamason replied:
okay thats an interesting idea, though i would disagree that the MAIN idea of mao is just about messing with newbies, its also about being confused as hell even if youve played 50 times, figuring out new rules as people win and everything. even when youve played it a lot being caught up in a rule you completely forgot about is part of the experience, or only realizing after playing for two years that you COMPLETELY had a rule wrong. it helps to have horrible memory!!
i guess what i was asking about was, are there any games that specifically designed to be “learn as you go” instead of “read the handbook”? not just “rules light”, but even if it has a good amount of rules you can drop people in, explain nothing, and run with it, let them figure it out. which i guess you could do that with a lot of games if you wanna annoy people, but any designed/particularly good for that?
Ah, I see what you mean. I’d argue that tabletop roleplaying games are generally unsuited for emulating that aspect of mao’s gameplay, too, for a couple of big reasons:
1. The rules of mao can be as arbitrary as you want, but the rules of a tabletop roleplaying game necessarily have some relationship to the narrative situations they describe. That makes it much easier to speculate and extrapolate; you can always look at what you already know and ask: “okay, given this, how would I expect the rules to model this new situation?”
2. It’s neither possible nor desirable for a tabletoptop RPG to mechanise every single narrative interaction, so large chunks of play can - and will - happen without ever invoking the rules. In practice, rules that are deliberately obscure or difficult to understand risk encouraging players to simply avoid situations that would invoke them. Indeed, some games intentionally encourage this type of avoidance (e.g., by using rules primarily to punish).
Taken together, these features - i.e., that the rules model the narrative, and that engaging with the rules is avoidable - make mao-style exploration of the rules-as-state-space difficult to sustain.
That said, there is an alternative tack: while the rules that govern the dice can’t be arbitrary, the rules that govern the setting can be, and likewise, while you can avoid engaging with the dice, you can’t avoid engaging with the setting. You may be able to achieve a similar sort of exploration using a game that drops players into a sufficiently esoteric setting with no prior knowledge.
For example, Noumenon (shout-out to @cracksandcraters for name-checking it first!) is a game where the player characters awaken, amnesiac, in the bodies of giant insects, and explore a mysterious extradimensional space resembling a disused mansion in search of enlightenment. It’s intended to be played such that, when the game begins, the player characters have no idea who or where they are, nor what metaphysical principles govern the space they inhabit, nor even how their own bodies operate. Discovering all that is the purpose of play!
As for your second question, the primary things you’re looking for in learn-as-you-go games are brevity and consistency. You simply can’t avoid having to read the rulebook if you’ve got a tables of weapon stats as long as your arm or dozens of exception-based powers to keep track of, so you need something that gets right to the point!
- On the extreme end you’ve got stuff like
Die For You,
Lasers & Feelings, Risus and Wushu, whose rules will fit on an index card and can be described and mastered in about thirty seconds.
- Alternatively, you have games that aren’t quite so light, but whose rules work the same for everyone without many situational exceptions, allowing players to easily extrapolate from prior experience; stuff like Fate Accelerated Edition, Lady Blackbird and Pokéthulhu.
- For a third option, you could also take a crack at games that are explicitly structued as teaching tools, like Faery’s Tale, Hero Kids or Mythender, though those are less “figure it out as you go” and more “the GM explains concepts as they come up”.
(All of the games on that list except for Faery’s Tale and Hero Kids are free or pay-what-you-want, incidentally.)
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