Below is a history of game design innovations on the Forge as told by Paul T on the NSR discord, in the Storygames channel. This whole thing was buried in a thread, and I wanted to preserve it somewhere, so I’ve collected it here for easy reference. There was a lot of interaction with other users, but I’ve edited out those side conversations for the sake of this post, including mine. I think they helped motivate Paul T to keep going, but overall there was a clear through line that I wanted to preserve.
I can talk about which principles and innovations specifically we saw around that time (early 2000s) if people are interested. The design assumptions of roleplaying games got blown open around that time: it was a really heady time of experimentation and exploration - new games were “blowing people’s’ minds” and truly breaking the mold. In comparison, we are in a much less experimental period now, with people generally just iterating on existing models (like OSR games or PbtA), although there is still lots of original thought and design going (but gone is the feeling of the Wild West/frontier exploration of the early 2000s).
I’d say the two central insights that started it all were:
- The game’s rules don’t have to be linked to and describing physical reality and success and failure of adventuring tasks. They also:
A) structure interactions at the table (who talks when, and about what), and
B) they can structure or inform the development of character, story, and theme.
- The way the players interact with the imaginary content can be quite fluid and there’s no strict reason to stick to the traditional stances and limitations in a traditional/classical RPG.
So those two things started popping up in small ways at first and then eventually got completely blown open.
For instance, the GM is traditionally responsible for all kinds of things, including determining the setting, style, and premise of play. What if that wasn’t the case? Ok, let’s try some alternatives. And hey, it turns out that if you design them right, it can be tons of fun!
I do feel that PbtA games (especially second-generation ones) are in a really awkward middle ground, which occasionally makes them hard to play. For my taste, they could use a redesign that leans harder to one side or the other, and it would be easier and more fun to play.
Anyway, so what games started the sparks of innovation?
One big one was Sorcerer. Sorcerer did not feature any structural or mechanical elements which challenged the “classical” format: you still have character creation, a GM, all that stuff.
However, it did very much challenge the “adventuring party” format.
Instead of assuming that the players constituted a “party”, which was united in terms of goals and direction, it gave you directions to treat each character’s role and story as individual.
This may not seem like a huge leap (and it’s not like we hadn’t seen some versions of that before, though it was rare), but it’s very significant in terms of how it changes the entire format of roleplaying if we’re interested in exploring Character and building stories.
Very, very few works of fiction feature a coherent unit of people all working together towards the same goal - even something like The Lord of the Rings (which is partially responsible for this trope in the first place!) has suspicion, betrayal, and the “Breaking of the Fellowship”.
It is not a natural or effective storytelling format; it poses a lot of challenges. There is a reason it’s very very rare, and almost absent in the stories we consider truly to be the most powerful, influential, and memorable.
But here was a game that put this first: yes, your character is a protagonist in a story. We’re going to very consciously craft their story - not in the sense of plotting it out, but in terms of doing character creation specifically with the intent of putting into place something powerful and interesting to us.
The focus isn’t on a big Setting book and maps and a “fantasy world”; no, we begin with the character’s life situation, their initiating event. We write a Kicker - and it’s the player that does this, not the GM! The GM then only preps in response to the player’s Kicker. This really changes the relationship between the two of them and lays down a very different paradigm which is really, really effective.
The game is also clear that it is the character’s story, and that it is to be discovered through play, with clear indications for neither the GM nor the player to be planning that in any way, but to play to find out. However, the book also indicates a number of possible endings which indicate that the story is played out, so you can have a sense of the journey and how to know when it’s over.
The game explicitly does not put the characters into a “party” but treats each as having their own important drives, goals, and ends. It’s one thing to say it, but the game actually gives you a format and tools to do it (instead of just expecting the GM to magically make it work somehow).
This was a big deal, I think quite a bit bigger than anyone realized at the time. For me, anyway, years later, and never even really having seriously played or read Sorcerer, I can say that it transformed my gaming life altogether.
The second innovation in Sorcerer was the emphasis on conflict resolution. This is one of those terms/ideas that the gaming scene has kind of “moved past”, having internalized it and then broken it apart and put it back together, and Apocalypse World may have been the first game in this culture of gaming to discard formally enforcing conflict resolution.
However, do not underestimate that impact on gameplay; it’s fairly transformative, and it starts to allow really story- or character-focused play in a way that task resolution (coming from D&D and in all trad RPG design) did not. Once you make it explicit and move some of the power into the player’s hands (which Sorcerer did not do explicitly, but did implicitly through its premise, which I could also talk about if we wish), as started to come around via Inspectres and The Pool, then we started cooking with gas.
So, as far as I know, both games came about independently, neither copying the other. But they had some interesting innovations, and were small, compact, new games which challenged some basic assumptions.
In Inspectres, the GM does not “know” what’s going on. There is a mystery to solve, but the outcome is unknown. As the “Inspectres” investigate, they make various rolls, and when they succeed on an investigation roll, they get to make up/tell us what they find.
The basic structure here results in a somewhat wacky but effective collaborative storytelling mode: lots of people get input into mysterious events and what’s behind them, with the group effectively making up the whole mystery as they go along.
Nowadays, the Brindlewood Bay family of games (including Apocalypse Keys and other descendants) carry on this tradition. Breaking free of a preset and GM-developed “plot”, here it develops somewhat organically as a result of random rolls and narration. (This can get much less coherent, unless players take real efforts to keep it down-to-earth, but is fun in its own way and matches the comedy inspiration very well.)
(Another variation on this around this time I haven’t mentioned before is Donjon, a game by Clinton R. Nixon which is kind of a parody of D&D. In that game, any roll established a number of “successes” or failures, which then turn into “facts” which limit the narration of the your interlocutor. So, for instance, if you roll two successes while looking for a secret door, you could establish two facts, such as (although it could be anything you like): 1) there is a secret door here, and 2) it opens upwards (or is unlocked, or whatever), and then the GM narrates the outcome, incorporating those two facts.)
Inspectres also took inspiration from reality TV (becoming quite popular at the time) and framed itself as a reality TV/documentary. One of my favourite details from the game is that any player can call for a “confessional”, whereupon play stops, and you begin an interview, instead. You sit down, and, as your character, reflect on the events of play. The things you narrate then have to be honoured by the other players. For instance, you might say, “Yeah, so that was when we realized something was really wrong with the Vicar. There’d been hints before, but we didn’t really know. Jamie noticed it quickly, but Rafi didn’t, because, as I would later figure out, Rafi had been concealing a brutal crush on me the whole time, and so wasn’t paying attention.” Now, having said those things, they are true, and the other players/GM must abide by them.
Next up: The Pool.
The Pool was a huge deal because it blew open some assumptions of RPG design in a way that InSpectres had not (that game had stats and damage and all kinds of traditional elements).
In this game, your character sheet is a story! And not only that, but it has a limit - it must be short, and focused. And the examples clearly show that you want to give your character direction in that story - editing tightly, really focusing on the important elements. In most variants, you get 50 words and that’s it. So really think about the core of the character and what they’re after… and then the mechanics reward you for writing what you did. If you write “seeks to bring his dead love back to life”, you can spend dice on that and turn it into bonuses for yourself.
The Pool totally lets go of any pretense of modeling the “physics of the game world” and makes itself an engine for storytelling and dramatic importance. Anything can be a trait - good, bad, or indifferent - and your rating in the trait doesn’t have to be related to its apparent power or relevance or anything of the sort. You can be “the greatest swordsman in the world, 1d” as well as “horrifically clumsy, 3d” if you wish, or you can just write “greatest swordsman” in your story and not even assign it any dice. It all works.
This is quite a departure from almost any game written earlier, and certainly all mainstream published RPGs. Modeling the physical world is completely irrelevant here; there are no stats and no “difficult ratings”, you just engage with this fun and very tense gambling mechanic to navigate play.
How difficult is any given action or conflict? It’s up to the player! Roll more dice, and it’s “easier” (your odds are much higher). However, the game then incentivizes you to seek a sweet spot where it’s not too easy and not too hard. The fluctuations and crashes of your Pool - your only real score or resource (there are no XP or hit points or currency of any kind, except the words you use to write your story and gain after sessions) - determine the character’s arc.
However, the Pool also has another huge innovation, which is the Monologue of Victory.
The MoV gives you the option of narrating the outcome of a successful roll (at the cost of a die). This is quite fascinating, as it really puts into perspective the power and impact narration have on the game.
Once the dice have been rolled and an outcome determined, who narrates it? Normally, it’s the GM. But, in theory, it could be anyone, right? Describe the orc’s head getting chopped off or the hero escaping, it’s all colourful and fun but ultimately it could be anyone’s job.
This is a pretty cool insight. And what’s even more impactful is watching it at the table. Because, boy, does it ever make a difference, it turns out.
Sure, the outcome is already determined and so the important thing is established… but the narration changes a lot of things at the table. What do we care about? How do others react? What style or colour or camera angle or description accompanies the action?
It turns out that this is pretty huge, and, yes, players will clamour for the right to give the MoV and define a certain outcome (and, by extension, their character) in vivid fictional detail. Was the victory easy? Painful? Close? Won by deception? Does “your guy” come off as a hero or a monster? A dunce or a genius? Where do they land when the action lands, and what kind of a position are they in next?
Seeing this in action is quite eye-opening, especially if you’ve never played a game with shared narration rights (which, at the time of the publication of The Pool, almost no one had).
Just trying this experiment really puts into perspective the power and control a GM has over characterization, mood, and so many other things in a traditional playing context. That makes you reconsider how you play games, what you’ve been taking for granted, and what impact it has on the process of play.
Also interesting is that the game gives you the option to do this, but never forces your hand. So players who want to dig into this kind of creative participation can play alongside those who do not want to and just want to tell us what their character does and step back. That’s suprisingly uncommon, actually; most games tend to do one or the other, and then don’t work for people who aren’t into that end of the spectrum.
If you’re thinking about this as you read, you’ll notice that a lot of these innovations and design ideas have gradually started working themselves into “story game culture” and ways of playing which are now becoming fairly standard in some playstyles.
I can add another detail from the early 2000s. Games like The Pool allowed people to see the value of letting folks other than the GM narrate or describe things.
So then we get The Mountain Witch, which is a pretty interesting game. It’s about a group of people travelling together to kill the “witch”, a somewhat nebulous and very powerful enemy.
A lot is unknown in this game. The players, of course don’t know what’s going to happen, but they each also have a Dark Fate, a secret backstory for their character.
It’s a pretty interesting idea, that there is a backstory that is important to find out and play, but that the GM doesn’t know it! (In fact the GM’s job is to keep fishing for info and try to learn about the PCs, try to get them to reveal their Dark Fates! They’re playing in deep curiosity, wondering what the players have up their sleeves.)
An interesting innovation here was an idea that was floating around anyway, but was formalized in this game and thereafter referred to as the Mountain Witch Trick.
The idea was, in a nutshell: what if you have a lot of setting and material which isn’t already known, and you want to move the game forward… AND it’s important to give the players opportunities to express themselves and shape the fiction?
You can kind of see how this flows naturally from the ideas of the preceding games: the characters have individual stories that matter beyond “the party”, and we’re intentionally leaving space for the players to express themselves by narrating information or colour to build setting, theme, and character (we saw the power of this in The Pool, after all).
So the Mountain Witch Trick is a way to build investment and a collaborative space at the table.
Instead of coming to the table with binders and tomes full of setting material (“my grand campaign setting!”), the GM intentionally brings more of a blank canvas and then invites the players to colour it in.
The way it’s done is that when you don’t know something (or you see a good opportunity for character/player expression), you ask the players instead.
“Do the people in this village seem hostile to your kind?” “Oh, yeah, how can you tell? What gives it away?”
Now the players get to imagine themselves in the scenario and fill in a bit of what is effectively “world lore”, fleshing out the game for us all.
You can probably see how this flows naturally from the setup and the idea of the secret Dark Fate.
It’s a very neat maneuver, and of course in the last decade it’s become quite mainstream in story gaming - starting with Apocalypse World and its descendants, GMs are often advised to do this and some game mechanics are even set up to make it happen (e.g. making a Reputation roll in your game allows you to invent an NPC).
In a sense, it may seem like old hat now to people who are just entering the scene today. But, let me tell you, it was some pretty mind blowing stuff at the time, in a culture of traditional role-playing, where setting tomes and all powerful GMs ruled the roost. “You let your players describe the vizier’s outfit?!? Are you crazy?!? They’re going to ruin your game!!!”
You can still have some of these dynamics come up with gamers who only play more trad fare. I think I wrote up some examples of a “bloodlust” power using different techniques at one point for a friend, and he couldn’t believe me that those examples could actually be used in a real game.
The Shadow of Yesterday was wonderful and made a huge splash! It was much less innovative, but that was part of what made it so successful. Very much like Apocalypse World, later, which is a game very much in the same vein. Both influenced so many games that came after them.
There were many games that used Keys. Although Lady Blackbird is the most obvious.
But keys were credited as an inspiration in dozens of RPG’s. If you look at PbtA games, you will see a lot of keys!
For example, “when you forgive your Loved One for hurting you, mark experience.” That kind of move is a Key, straight up.
I also find it pretty fascinating that the Key buyoff gets omitted in so many games, when… it’s pretty key.
To follow up on the Keys discussion, it was an interesting thing because at that time it was fairly rare for any RPG to clearly signpost what and how you “play well” (aside from the original, old school D&D). But The Shadow of Yesterday’s Keys did this with great clarity: here’s what you’re here to do, how to play - a wonderful orienting mechanic for new players.
We often forget how opaque roleplaying can be as an activity if you’ve never done it before; I saw a few new players bounce off the hobby entirely but take very well to The Shadow of Yesterday - “ah, cool, my character is a coward with a heart of gold, I get XP when I ran away from danger but also when I help the innocent… and I have the option to invert either incentive, changing the character forever? Cool!”
It provided a kind of signposting that was very helpful for some.
Although, note that you can write Keys like these as well (or choose appropriately).
For instance:
Key of the Shitty Friend Gain 1 XP when you ask a friend for a favour. Gain 2 XP when you ask a friend to make a significant sacrifice for you. Gain 3 XP when you steal, break, or sabotage something important in your friend’s life.
You can imagine that this person might have complicated and nuanced relationships with their friends. You could even add more complication, like:
When a friend forgives you and helps you get better, give them 5 XP.
Or you can do this simply by choosing overlapping or contradictory Keys.
E.g.
Key of Love and Sacrifice (Gain XP when you make sacrifices for your spouse or put them before your own needs) Key of Infidelity (Gain XP when you are unfaithful)
Here is another interesting thing from that time period:
Eppy Ravachol published Dread, which was A very interesting game indeed.
In many ways, it is an almost painfully traditional RPG: heavily GM-led, with the GM as auteur coming up with a scenario and guiding the players through it.
However, it has a few interesting notes:
First of all, it’s quite explicit about this. And character creation functions via a questionnaire, which the players fill out, and then defines the character and helps the GM create or adjust the scenario to match. This allows some pretty strong use of foreshadowing and other dramatic or narrative devices.
Second, it basically discards any kind of attempt at simulation and instead just provides a powerful, single mechanic:
You play by pulling blocks from a Jenga tower.
This was quite a shocking development! The mechanic has nothing to do with the fictional world or its characters… it’s all about creating an interface with and impact on the player.
(I think you can see how this may have been inspired by The Pool, as well - the die rolling gamble, based on your own guts as the player, is very much like the Jenga tower, in principle. It is not about a character’s skills or the “difficulty” of the scenario but purely about creating some tension and a gamble for the player themselves (with the character as the potential scapegoat, of course; suffering the outcome).
This inverts or reverses the use of game design and mechanics compared to traditional role-playing games, since D&D.
There was a slew of games which experimented with this idea for a while. It was quite influential (and still a fun game to play!).
A more recent example is Ten Candles, which creates mood by having you light and extinguish actual candles at the table. A rather wild example from that time period was…. sadly, I’ve forgotten the name! A game where you create a doll or plushy to represent your character… and when things happen to them, you must physically take this representation you have lovingly crafted and cut off its arm or set it on fire or whatever other horrible thing. (I never played this one, so I don’t know how it was to play!)
During the pandemic, I ran a game inspired by Dread online
And, of course, we couldn’t use a Jenga tower
So I designed a simple mechanic, using something like Pool dice, which created a similar effect. It worked remarkably well! (even though it didn’t have the full drama of the Jenga tower, of course.)
So, in those heady days, games like The Pool started to blow open the idea that “the players play their characters and the GM tells the story”, or “the rules are the physics of the gameworld”, and other traditional assumptions in roleplaying.
So the natural next step was to explore that pretty thoroughly.
Universalis, Capes, and Polaris are all good exemplars here (although there were certainly others, too).
You’ll see how regressive - in a sense - Apocalypse World would be, nearly a decade later.
Universalis aimed to be the “everything RPG”, and it basically discarded every assumption about a roleplaying game and just tore the activity down to the atomic level of “making statements about fictional stuff”.
Quite a distinct take from games which sought to add storytelling or character-focus or theme to an existing RPG framework (e.g. Sorcerer, My Life with Master, The Shadow of Yesterday, Dogs in the Vineyard).
In Universalis, there is a universal currency - I think they’re even called Coins - and you simply spend them to make statements about what is.
You might start the game with a completely blank slate, and then someone can say, “this is taking place in space” (spends a Coin), “…and the Princess is flying in a spaceship” (probably two Coins, for establishing two things; I don’t remember the details now of what cost what).
I never got to play Universalis, but the basic concept is as follows:
Each player can spend Coins to introduce facts or actions to the fiction, and further can spend Coins to lend “weight” or “strength” to existing elements (like a character, say).
How do you get more Coins? Well, this part is pretty clever: fictional conflicts generate more Coins. So you’re incentivized to place elements in the fiction into conflict with each other.
You can imagine how this framework produces a fictional sandbox and the potential for story.
My guess is that how well the game worked (people were quite excited about it at the time) was a bit exaggerated, but nevertheless it influenced many other games and designers.
(One of the reasons I’m guessing this is that it didn’t produce many imitators or successors, although I’d say that Microscope, much later, pays tribute to Universalis in many ways.)
Still, you can imagine how big a deal that was in comparison to something like D&D.
Capes had a similar approach, but it didn’t seek to be universal: you had superheroes and supervillains, and as you built the story, you’d want to start conflicts between them that other players would care about (and spend currency on) as a way to generate some currency for yourself.
So if Player A said there was an honourable vigilante, you’d want to learn what they care about, and then create a villain who threatens that. As the game progresses, you’d want to escalate that conflict so as to get other players to care about its outcome.
Like Universalis, there’s no GM, no setting, no adventure module, no modeling of the physics of the game world, etc.
These games, arguably, are story games, but not roleplaying games. This is one of the reasons that I tend to use the term “story game” as a larger umbrella within which RPGs reside (an RPG is a type of story game) - although this isn’t how most people use the term, pretending that (like on this server), “story game” is just a particular style of RPG design.
Polaris, though, went deep into a pretty cool middle ground between the traditional RPG and this new idea of totally breaking things apart. A striking game, in its vision and implementation, and much more successful, as well, in terms of people actually playing it.
In Polaris, there is a very definite setting and each player does, indeed, play a character: their Knight.
You create this character much like you would in a typical RPG.
However, the game is very different, because a) there is no GM. Instead, we see each character’s storyline in isolation (arguably, that idea originates somewhat from Sorcerer), and the players around you play GM-like roles in your Knight’s story, providing setting and adversity in slightly different ways. Then that spotlight rotates around the table.
The stories are also self-contained and have an “end”, as opposed to unlimited and infinite growth - arguably, a concept coming from games like My Life with Master and The Mountain Witch, but more on that later.
The idea of GMless RPG was not unique to Polaris but it was very, very weird and subversive and shocking.
In addition, Polaris did something even wilder and got rid of (most) character stats, modeling the fictional world, and rolling dice.
Instead, you played the game by engaging in a formalized conversation with other players: you’d use “key phrase” to engage in negotiation with them. As a simple example, if you say that you want to break free from your imprisonment, I might be allowed to say “…but only if you lose your companion in the process”, and then we further try to determine whether you accept that deal or not.
The author wrote that he “wanted the game to feel like you were bargaining with demons”.
Quite a striking game which has spawned relatively few imitators, although many of the Bakers’ more recent “prompts-based” games have some overlap with this, I’d argue.
And of course you can imagine how these games forcibly detached a lot of our assumptions about RPGs from our collective headspace: do you need a GM? Do you need a setting? Do you need player characters? What do mechanics do? Etc.
One thing they have in common is how they move the act or resolution away from “what are these characters doing, and how well?” and towards “how do the players interact?” Notably, they’re all based on heavy conflict, which wasn’t really something that was challenged until much later.
Universalis is very much the “spend currency to establish facts about the world” game. Polaris is much more about playing a powerful but tragic protagonist, but you must negotiate with “demons” (the other players) to do it.
You’ll note that a lot of the games developed in this time period (early 2000’s) were moving towards being very much interested in character and story development, but design-wise they favoured more abstraction and more “rules-first” design.
That kind of abstract design tends to:
- Produce very powerful, punchy, effective games which really get you to the emotional core of the story.
- At the cost of feeling less connected to the details of the fiction.
This kind of the total opposite of something like old school D&D, where - if you’ve never tried it - it’s absolutely shocking how much everyone cares about the most minute details.
“What is the handle made out of? Is it brass?” “I want to put my foot by the candlestick, but only an inch away, and I’m leaning back on my heel as I do it!”
However, in those games, you rarely (if ever) get to emotional powerful content and character-significant moments. (You do sometimes, but if so, it happens somewhat by accident, as an emergent happy accident; it doesn’t happen regularly or intentionally.)
The development of these more abstract tools was a huge deal at the time, and, in many ways, Apocalypse World was an effort to get back to some of the more “trad” feel, after having missed it for a while.
For instance, Primetime Adventures was a pretty important game of the time.
That game explicitly frames your play as the “filming of a TV show” (which was a big deal too, of course!).
In it, you actually “plan out” the “season” ahead of time, establishing the Screen Presence of each character throughout the Season. This might mean that we know that Episode 3 will be the Spotlight Episode for your character, whereas we’ll focus on mine in Episode 5, instead.
The Screen Presence is an actual number which affects your ability to succeed in conflicts (and is the most important “stat” in the game).
This was a pretty interesting way to frame gameplay - and, as you can imagine, pretty alien to anyone mostly engaged in more ‘old school’ play.
Primetime Adventures was a powerful influence on games that followed and helped start a whole trend as well.
One could argue that Primetime Adventures took inspiration from InSpectres - and, of course, Brindlewood Bay is literally a modern version of that game.