The Smell of Burnt Toast

 

As you will know if you've been following this blog religiously, I tend to take a jaundiced view of videogames these days. Not all of my friends are so jaded, though, and thanks to their influence, I occasionally get roped into some zeitgeisty new hotness. A little ARC Raiders here, a little Clair Obscur there. I'm glad to have had a chance to try them out, and at least equally glad not to have wasted too much time, or my own money, on them. But every now and then, something really seizes my attention. Like today. Today, I got to play Crimson Desert.

I keep seeing people describe this game's story as “bland,” “boring,” or “forgettable.” I do not know what kind of brainrot these people have been exposing themselves to that Crimson Desert strikes them as being on the bad side of normality. It is terrible, to be clear, but “forgettable” is the last thing I'd call it. Others have called it “convoluted,” “incoherent,” or “nonsensical,” which are all closer to the mark, but I think those adjectives, sapped by overuse of some of their power, also fail to do it justice. Crimson Desert might have the worst story I have ever seen in a game, and it also might have the worst storytelling I've ever seen in a game. It is fucked up in ways that have permanently rewired my brain.

* * * 

The game is actually in pretty good shape, technically, for a new release. No game-breaking bugs, nothing that impedes progress, hardly any minor visual glitches, even. It's a rat's nest of insanely bad design choices in every possible area, from the user interface to the control scheme to the inventory system, but it all seems to be working as designed. Not bad for a big-budget game at launch.

And the life-changing badness of the story sneaks up on you. It all starts the way I've seen people write about it, with some generic but incongruous elements slapped together in a way that's a bit discordant but mostly just tiresome. First there's an attack by (one presumes) the main bad guy on the good guys' camp, and our protagonist gets repeatedly stabbed, his throat is slit, and he's thrown in a river. Seems like he ought to be dead! But instead (or maybe as a consequence?) he goes to techno-heaven and learns the first of many abilities that have been shamelessly cribbed from other, better games. There are no NPCs in techno-heaven. There are no explanations. Is it real? Is it a dream? Does it matter? Eventually, our hero returns from whence he went and washes ashore, uninjured.

His name is Cliff, by the way. They spell it “Kliff,” but…come on. It's Cliff. He has a friend named Duane. This is in a world with orcs (with names like Oongka) and ogres and wizards. There's some guy called Jian (Chinese?). The realm we're all in is called Pywel (Welsh?). Zero effort whatsoever to make things coherent or give any of the proper nouns legible relationships to one another. It's great. The whole thing seems haphazard, slapped together, just an excuse for a beautiful open world to roam around in. Fine.

But there is a main quest, and if you follow that main quest, the sense that things have merely been kludged together lazily begins to give way to something more uncanny. More unsettling. A couple hours in, you realize that you're playing out a waking fever dream, and that your actual flesh-and-blood brain is overheating. The following is an actual sequence of steps in the game's main quest.

* * * 

You jump off some sky islands, which are 1) one of the very most shameless of Crimson Desert's many, many deeply shameless borrowings from the last couple of Zelda games and 2) called “the Abyss” for no reason I can even begin to imagine. You land back near the starting town where much of the quest line has taken place thus far. You are prompted to go to a watchtower nearby. Nobody actually gives you the quest; no NPC has even mentioned the watchtower. You just know: It's time to go there. The holy spirit, or the insistence of the 10-year-old Zelda-loving DM running this most unholy railroad of a D&D campaign, compels you.

As you approach the tower, you hear NPCs yelling about bandits. Seems some bandits have captured the watchtower! You'd better fight them. You do, which is pretty fun, to be honest—trampling them with your horse, hacking at them with a one-handed axe—and the instant the last one falls, the screen fades to black. You've been teleported off your horse to the base of the tower; all the dead bandits have vanished (their gear has helpfully been whisked away to a chest in your quarters, from which you can extract loot, but which you cannot actually manually add anything to; you can only store things in your personal inventory). Up come several of the game's never-ending blizzard of tutorial screens explaining one minigame or arcane sub-mechanic (claiming territory! fishing! investing in the stock market! arbitrage!) after another. You close them out. Your quest now is “Go to the top of the tower.” Do you smell burning? Is something burning?

To get inside, there's a sort of puzzle where the solution is basically, “Hey, you played Zelda, right? You know how this works.” (If you hadn't played Zelda, you'd probably have no fucking clue what's going on. You have played Zelda, for better or worse.) You go inside. There are some extremely half-assed traps, easy to bypass, trivial to evade even if you do trigger them. Did a human being design this? Like, in the game, are we meant to believe that an NPC put these traps here, on purpose? What kind of a watchtower is this anyway, with only one door and no windows? Is any of this real? Is it meant to be? Did a human being design this? Like, was this made by AI, in the real world? Is any of this real?

You hike to the top. There are three traps, and maybe five stories to the tower. Or maybe fifty. It all looks the same, and it's taken you so long. You're feeling a little dizzy. There's nothing at the top except loot. Better get to looting! Halfway through picking up coins and books and random flatware—everything is labeled ??? until you pick it up, and I do mean everything, from grasshoppers to cheese—you accidentally pick up a weird helmet. Your quest now is “Put on the weird helmet.”

You put on the weird helmet. There's a hologram of a wizard who made this helmet to record memories or something. He says something about you being the chosen one, maybe? Or maybe that was somebody else. Who can remember? It's all hallucinatory, and it's hard to hear him over the ringing in your ears. Your quest now is “Talk to the child.” What? Who? Where? Why? (At least you know when. Right now!)

You go back down the stairs and out the tower's front door. There's a kid on the wall. Ah, you do recognize her. For a moment, things snap back into place. The ringing recedes. Back in town, you helped her rescue her cat from a rooftop. Also, she's probably not actually a kid, because that earlier part of the quest line involved an old beggar who turned out to be off-brand Merlin and a noblewoman who turned out to be…a talking bird? Like, a seagull, but magical? Gandalf, but a lady, and a seagull? Don't think too hard about it; you'll only hurt yourself. Follow the cat, the kid says. That's your quest now.

You follow the cat. It takes like an hour. The cat goes halfway up a mountain, and it's not that fast, and it gets stuck in a stream and on a rock along the way. Time unspools. Your eyes lose focus. You shake yourself. How long were you out like that?

Oops, the cat's moving again. Up on the mountain is a magical ruin that's the 185th thing you've seen in the past two hours (four hours? six?) that was shamelessly lifted from Tears of the Kingdom. You watch a hologram do magic to a holographic door, which teaches you a magic spell that lets you do magic to a real door. You go inside the magical ruin. You learn another magic spell by watching a hologram. A different one? The same one? It's all running together, but it doesn't matter. None of this is real, you promise yourself.

You are presented with a puzzle that, perversely, is solved with neither of these new magic spells but one you learned three magic spells ago, back in the Sky Islands, excuse me, the Abyss. Your quest is, once again, “Talk to the child.” What the fuck? How'd the child get here? What happened to the cat? Was there ever a cat? Was the cat the child all along?

You go outside. Oh. It's not that child from before. It's a new magical child. The kid blathers at you about destiny or the balance or something. Your ears are ringing again. Blood trickles from your nose. Wipe it away. A wave of dizziness buffets you. Fight it down. You can't really understand what the kid is going on about. You can't concentrate. But you can stay on your feet. Your head swims. Stay on your feet. Your quest—that's simple enough. That you can understand. “Go back to town.” You can do it.

You go back to town. Some guy wants to fight you. Sure, you say. You say yes to everything. There literally aren't any dialogue options in this game. You simply do whatever the 10-year-old DM railroading you through life and death and unlife thinks would be cool next. Every step of every quest is just “Make the next thing happen,” or “Go to where the next thing is going to happen to you.” You have no choice. You kick the guy's ass. Oops, he has a second health bar. You kick the guy's ass. He compliments you a bunch. You respond with great humility. You are always extremely humble. You have no choice. Your quest now is “Speak with the man who seems to have something to say.”

That's actually from the game. I mean, all of this has really been from the game, but I've been paraphrasing the quest text, mostly. This one is verbatim. That's what this next step of the main quest is: “Speak with the man who seems to have something to say.”

You experience a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

The Importance of Being Earnest

Valeria made a great observation in her recent review of Daggerheart:

TTRPGs have utterly failed to communicate how lighthearted this hobby is to outsiders. When I tell my coworkers that I play D&D, most of them are imagining […] a Lord of the Rings LARP mediated by complicated math. Therefore, most new converts to the hobby - intimidated by the serious game they imagine D&D to be - try to pull the game in a direction more comfortable to them. They play clowns and humanoid bears to protect themselves with a layer of detached irony. 

But the real irony is that this is the most popular way to engage with the game! The most beloved D&D stories are all absurd bits! So the same cycle keeps playing out at table after table. New players enter the hobby expecting D&D to be the butt of their jokes, realize everyone else is also doing bits, then become so emotionally invested in the joy the bits brought them that the game acquires genuine narrative weight.

This got me thinking about my own experiences—not so much my own early ones as a player (deadly earnest, I'm afraid; please pretend to be shocked) but the several times now I've seen other folks sit down at the table for the first time, and in particular my experiences with first-time GMs. I've thought about related questions a fair bit (like, what's a good first system for brand-new players, and what sort of adventures should I, as the GM, send them on?) but I'd never thought directly about what Valeria articulated. It struck a chord, obviously, and it helped me clarify something that's been bugging me lately.

I've been reading through a ton of Mothership stuff. As is tradition, I've gone way deeper than the group (which has for the time being moved on to Tales of Argosa anyway) ever needed. It's just fun! It's a great scene, there's a ton of creativity out there, there's a ton of diversity to what people are writing, and there's loads I'm looking forward to running. But there is a thread running through a lot of third-party Mothership material that I find a bit irksome: a tendency to get jarringly silly. Goofy names, obvious references to popular media, zany gags, all manner of unserious stuff that takes me out of the immersive space I'm building in my imagination.

The part that has bugged me, to be clear, is my own stuffy reaction. Am I a spoilsport? A killjoy? As we established above, TTRPGs are silly, and writing silly stuff is fun. Who am I to scoff at somebody else's silly fun? The sort of dork who approached his early experiences with D&D 3.5e and 4e in deadly earnest, of course. What suits me definitely isn't for everybody! And yet…

* * * 

This week, I also serendipitously happened across a video gently poking fun at director Robert Eggers for how disappointed he is by his much-lauded feature debut, The Witch, and how relentlessly negative he is about it on the film's commentary track. Punctiliousness about historical accuracy matters to Eggers to a degree that seems borderline pathological even to the sympathetic video creator.

For my part, I'm an admirer of Eggers, love The Witch, and am all for pathological devotion to historical accuracy in film. For me, The Witch stands in stark contrast to one of the recent films I've been most out of step with critics and other cinema dorks about, The Brutalist. I hated the latter for any number of reasons, but among the things that most immediately upset me, and then just continually galled me throughout its voluminous running time, was the film's sloppy disregard for historical accuracy. Any movie whose Holocaust-survivor protagonist emerges from Buchenwald with eight-pack abs has burned up all of my goodwill right from the jump, but this one also featured a slew of anachronistic dialogue and had very obviously been filmed in Central Europe (I correctly guessed Hungary during the intermission and have witnesses who can corroborate that!) despite being set in Pennsylvania. I used to live in Germany and spent some time in Poland and Hungary. I recognized the architecture, the trees, even the damn dirt. It quickly destroyed whatever ability to be immersed I had left after the abs.

In an interview clipped in that video above, my man Eggers says, “I didn't obsess over Puritan buttons just because I like buttons. I didn't obsess over the saw marks in the floorboards because I like saw marks. […] It's in the purpose of telling the story. It's about immersing you in the world. If you can't be actually transported to the 17th century, then you can't actually be transported into the mindset of these English Puritan Calvinist settlers, and if you can't do that, then you can't believe in the witch, and the whole movie just doesn't work. […] The more you let things slide, the more the whole thing doesn't work.” Now, it's certainly possible that you can set the bar too high; errors that are only in frame for a fraction of a second, things that only a subject-matter expert or a world-class pedant would recognize, it's probably fine to let them slide. (There are a couple King Hu movies set during the Song dynasty, which ended in 1279, where people have dried maize hanging in their homes despite the fact that maize didn't exist in China until after 1492; this only bothers me a little bit and has not diminished my adoration for Hu or his work.)

The thing is, though, that although nobody will ever notice any of the work that went into raising the bar higher than it needed to be, everybody's going to notice all of the work you didn't put in if you don't set it high enough. The bar depends on the audience, and it depends on the subject matter, but it's always there.

The immersiveness and tone of any roleplaying game depend on a lot of factors, and of course the overall composition of the group is an important one, but nothing is more important than the example the GM sets. Let's carve it in stone right here: My First Law of GMing is that the players will always take the game less seriously than the GM does. This is almost always true on a one-on-one basis (i.e., each individual player in your game will take it no more seriously than you do; nobody wants to out-nerd the boss nerd), but it is always true in the aggregate. I have never been in a game where the average player seriousness (or earnestness, or “buy-in”) was greater than the GM's, and I am 100% confident I never will be—at least not for long. If it ever happens for even a couple sessions in a row, the game probably falls apart.

As a filmmaker, if you're trying to immerse your audience, you want to err on the side of being too punctilious. As a GM, you're definitely trying to immerse your players, so you want to err on the side of being embarrassingly earnest. You can always tone it down! It's a lot easier to relax and let your players inject some silliness into the proceedings (which, again, they're almost always going to do) than it is to tighten things back up. Like a jury tainted by impermissible evidence even after it's been officially stricken from the record, players are probably going to stay in the silliest headspace they've been in even if you enjoin them with “Come on, guys, take this a little more seriously!” Start earnest and let things find their level. Be the straight man to the players' comedians.

By that same token, if you're writing TTRPG material intended for GMs to use, obviously they don't have to run it exactly as you write it and are welcome to revise it to make it more immersive, serious, earnest, or anything else for their table…but you might as well err on the side of earnestness, because it's a lot easier to make things more silly than less. Give your reader all the tools they need to play the most earnest, serious, humorless version of your material possible. They, and especially their players, will have no trouble finding humor at the table.

How Much Detail Is Too Much Detail?

One of the worthy finalists in the Advice category for this year's Bloggies was Sam Sorensen's “Ten Intangible Tips for Development Editing Your RPG Manuscript.” I like the way Sam writes these “ten tips” articles; he adopts an authoritative voice, like he's the author of a style guide (which I suppose is exactly what he's going for, after all, on a small scale). Maybe it's professional bias speaking—although my day job entails mostly writing now, I spent most of my career as an editor—but there's little the TTRPG scene needs more than good, authoritative editing advice. There's a lot of beautiful writing out there, a lot of tremendous creativity; there isn't a lot of rigor or polish.

Accordingly, my favorite tip from Sam's post is #10: “Write to Be Read, Do Not Write to Not Be Read.” You know that (apocryphal) Michelangelo quotation, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free”? Writing is like that. The first draft—all of the writing, in a sense—is just getting the marble from Carrara. Your big, bloated, excessive first draft is your raw material, assembled and ready to be worked. The real artistry is chipping away everything that doesn't need to be there. Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher. “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.” (Saint-Ex really did say that one.)

Which is a good segue into one area where I'm kind of in disagreement with Sam, or at least where I'm not sure where I stand. On a continuum between Sam's way (do all the legwork for your reader, so that once they've assimilated the information, they can take it straight to the table without having to do any additional prep) and, say, Luke Gearing's way (where important factions, events, and NPCs are roughly sketched, or even exist in name only, and the reader must develop them at length—maybe with tools the text provides, maybe not—before play begins), I definitely tend more toward Sam's philosophy, but I'm not all the way there, and I also recognize that this is a matter of philosophy. Some people want pick-up-and-playability; others want to make commercial material their own, or leave room for replayability (attractive for one-shots like Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine). “How much detail is too much?” is ultimately not really answerable, at least as long as we avoid the extremes of the continuum. Different strokes for different folks. But what about the extremes?

The extreme Luke end of the continuum is obviously a problem—it sometimes gets to be not so much an RPG manuscript as a mood board the reader can use to homebrew something. But the extreme Sam end of the spectrum has its perils too. He argues, if I can oversimplify things, in favor of great specificity both in the sense of rejecting the generic and in the sense of providing meaty details. Below, I quibble with both.

 

HOW MUCH DETAIL IS TOO MUCH?

The first place Sam loses me a bit is #8: “Clear, Specific, Evocative.” He gives a series of examples of dungeon dressing, which begin vague and generic:

In one corner are caged animals. Sometimes, they make a loud noise.

He makes the description clearer:

In one corner stand a collection of cages, each holding a wolf. Twice a day at a certain hour, they howl.

He makes it more specific:

In the northeast corner stand 8 square iron cages, 5’ on a side, each holding a scrawny, mangy wolf. At 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. each day, they howl.

And finally, he makes it more evocative. Or tries:

In the northeast corner stand 8 chain-link cages, 5’ on a side, each holding a fat, grinning hyena. At 10:10 a.m. and 10:10 p.m each day, they yowl with synchronous laughter, their cackles harmonizing into a B minor Mixolydian scale.

I'm with him to a point. The scrawny, mangy wolves and fat, grinning hyenas I can picture; that's certainly more evocative than simply “a wolf” or “animals.” An individual five-foot cage, whether iron or chain link, I can picture too. But eight cages in the northeast corner? How are they arranged? Are they all jammed together, taking up a 15-by-15 area? If so, how does anybody get to the wolves to feed them? Are they stacked one on top of the other? If they're all on the floor, but spaced out enough for a kennelman to move among them, they're probably spread out across like 600 square feet. Is that really in the northeast corner (just how big is this room)?

To me, an excess of detail has now made things less clear. And what's with them howling at exactly 8:00? Again, it strikes me as being too specific, to the point of being glaringly unnatural—it's accidentally moved back into the realm of demanding extra prep; the GM might need to come up for an explanation of why these guys howl or yowl with clockwork precision. (I'd do away with the precision and opt for something more like “Twice a day, sometime after dawn and again after dusk, one wolf begins to howl, and the others all rush to join in.”)

The final change, introducing “a B minor Mixolydian scale,” has gone way too far for me. I don't know anything about music theory! (I played the drums; you know the jokes.) This surely means something to one of the players in one of my groups, who went to a music conservatory, and probably means something to one of the players in my other group, who has forty different hobbies (music among them) and is confoundingly talented at all of them, but it means nothing to most of my players, and even if a couple of my players get it, it doesn't really mean anything coming from me, a guy who is just parroting words he does not understand.

You have to know your audience when you're writing, but when you're writing TTRPGs, you also have to consider your reader's audience. One of the advantages to not sewing everything up tight, to leaving a little extra cloth for other folks to let out or take in as they see fit, is that you can write for a broad audience, and let them tailor your material to their own little micro-audience.

HOW MUCH ORIGINALITY IS TOO MUCH? 

“Clear, Specific, Evocative” ends with Sam asserting that “an iron cage holding a howling wolf is bog-standard dungeon decor; a chain-link cage holding a chubby, giggly, singing hyena situates the reader someplace far more unique and unusual.” In #9, carrying this thread forward, he enjoins us to “Push Past the Obvious.” And again, I say yes…but let's not push too far. Bog-standard material should never be front and center, but it makes fantastic set dressing. You don't want everything about your setting, your dungeon, your scenario to be unique and unusual—this not only requires a lot more written material, it puts a much bigger cognitive load on your reader and their players. Bog-standard elements are useful shortcuts. In Sam's terms, they're legwork that's already done, legwork your reader and their players have already committed to memory.

We all know what an elf is. We all know what an orc is. We all get the vibe established by some iron cages containing mangy wolves. Not having to do the mental labor of understanding those elements from first principles (if every ancestry, every creature, every magic spell were unusual or original) frees up resources for wrapping our heads around the limited amount of extremely creative, cool, polished-to-a-mirror-sheen stuff that the work is really about. Push harder to make things shine, to make things polished—again, polish, not originality, is what is most consistently, conspicuously lacking from the indie TTRPG universe—but don't make everything weird without purpose. Make things exactly as weird as you need them to be to for maximum effect without disorienting or overwhelming readers and players. (And, again, know your audience; they might have a near-infinite appetite for weirdness, after all.)