Learning How Imaginative Play Kept me Sane During 2020

 Originally posted December 24, 2020 on the Split the Party podcast blog.

Fellowship, one of the eight types of fun as described by Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek in their MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research. Described as “game as a social framework,” it is the type of fun hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. As lockdowns came into effect, gamers sought to gather around a digital gaming table using products such as Roll20, Zoom, and everything in-between. When our game group moved online, I suddenly realized that the fellowship I got from our weekly sessions was missing something big.

Our weekly gaming sessions served as a way for me to disconnect from the technology I’ve tethered myself to and engage with people I felt open to. Playing games online and spending more time in front of a screen at night was hurting my mental health. When the weather warmed up, there was a brief stint of playing games in person outside, but this stirred up a whole other bag of social anxiety. Ultimately, in August, this led me to step away from the RPG hobby for the remainder of the year.

However, I didn’t exactly step away fully.

While I diverted a majority of my time away from roleplaying games and to miniature wargaming, I still spent some time doing what I’ll call “imaginative solo play”. This is doing things like drawing maps, writing down plot germs, reading about a game, and the likes. I’m sure almost everyone in the RPG hobby has participated in this, in some form or another.

For myself, I indulged in a lot of game design. I spent time on projects that I was previously had trouble working on. Projects where I was never sure of who the audience was or how to make others enthusiastic about the game. Alone, the audience of the game was only me and, luckily, I was the one enthusiastic about them. My notebook became full of design skeletons which were going to be left undeveloped. And this was ok because I already got a lot of fun out of them. The fun I got wasn’t from rolling dice, doing funny voices, or playing with friends, but rather imagining “what if…” about those things.

This fun of “what if…” was never something I realized held legitimate value until I read the article The Imaginary Hobbyist in Volume 3 of the quirky miniature wargaming online zine 28 (or sometimes know as 28 Mag). In Pierre Tolmer’s essay he states:

Maybe the value is simply that it feels good. My head is filled with things that will never be, and that is great. I get a lot of fun from picturing them, and I have way too little time to do them all. I would not want to do them all.

This last sentence helped me put into perspective a few really important items that have been weighing on me and open myself up to, well, myself.

At the start of the 2020 pandemic, Uncle Atom, from the popular YouTube channel Tabletop Minions, talked about using hobbying as a way to abate fears. He asked that when people post hobby related things on social media that they use the hashtag #ShelterInHobby. When I first heard this I thought it was irresponsible, and thought it was encouraging us to ignore the issues happening by surrounding ourselves in a make believe world. It wasn’t until recently, when Tolmer’s article helped put things into perspective, that I realized that hobby time, solo or otherwise, was not mutually exclusive to maturity and responsibility.

And this helped set me free from myself.

Rule Zero and Narrative Miniature Wargaming

 Originally posted January 14, 2021 on the Split the Party podcast blog.

When I took a break from playing roleplaying games in the middle of 2020, I began to play a lot more miniature wargames in the time that was available. I was lucky enough to have a small group of friends who were willing, and trusted each other’s safety practices, to still get together in person. While the gaming was a blast, it hadn’t been more than a month or so before I began missing one of my favorite parts of playing RPGs. This being narrative, building a collaborative story with other people. So in September of 2020 I decided that I was going to give running a narrative wargaming campaign in Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team.

I’ve played in wargaming campaigns in the past, but this was going to be a narrative wargaming campaign. Your typical wargaming campaign, like you would find with Warhammer 40,000’s Crusade rules, are structured so that you and your group of friends build an army that you’ll play against each other with which you could, through some kind of an advancement system, earn perks for further army customization. The goal with these campaigns is that you end the campaign with an army that’s different to the one which you started with. While possible, these rules don’t typically incentivize building some kind of narrative. You still play competitive style games against each of your fellow opponents. You may set your games on the same world you make up, or even come up with a cool tale for why you’re fighting each battle, but I would argue that those aren’t really narrative games.

What I think is needed for a game to be a true narrative wargame is a Rule Zero. The Rule Zero, or sometimes known as the Rule of Cool, is a concept that “games are entertainment; your goal as a group is to make your games as entertaining as possible. If that means breaking the rules temporarily, or permanently as a house-rule, then so be it.” It can be found explicitly stated in many RPGs, including the 1980’s Basic Dungeons and Dragons where it states:

Anything in this booklet (and other D&D booklets) should be thought of as changeable – anything, that is, that the DM thinks should be changed… The purpose of these ‘rules’ is to provide guidelines that enable you to play and have fun, so don’t feel absolutely bound to them.

The Rule Zero is intended to give the power to the players to create (or remove) whatever is needed to suit whatever they are having fun with.

While in many RPGS, you can sometimes also find a version of the Rule Zero in board games and miniature wargames. In the board game and wargaming ecosystems, these Rule Zeroes typically revolve around confusion in game mechanisms or intent and are often seen as a mea culpa to poor game design or rules writing. As an example, here is the Rule Zero from the core rulebook of Warhammer 40,000 (Eighth Edition):

In a game as detailed and wide-ranging as Warhammer 40,000, there may be times when you are not sure exactly how to resolve a situation that has come up during play. When this happens, have a quick chat with your opponent and apply the solution that make the most sense to both of you (or seems the most fun!). If no single solution presents itself, you and your opponent should roll off, and whoever rolls highest gets to choose what happens. Then you can get on with the fighting!

This Rule Zero gives power to the players to make rules decisions, but doesn’t explicitly give the players power to make the game their own. Without that power, players feel locked into running what’s in the book and every game will feel like every other. With that power, the players will now be able to add or break what is necessary for a game to feel different and flavorful.

To make a proper, power granting Rule Zero for a narrative campaign I believe it needs three things. First, when I decided I wanted to run a narrative wargaming campaign, I made sure my opponent knew what they were getting into. I told them that I was going to run it like a Dungeon Master runs a game, and that I will add, change, and break any rules necessary to make the overall story as engaging as possible, and that they had the same ability to take power of any narrative bits when the need arose.

Second, I needed to make clear that I wasn’t running a game to win, but rather tell an epic story. In the case of this campaign, it was to tell a story of a small elite squad of soldiers and the discovery and recovery of an ancient artifact. My friend had just bought a Chaos Renegade Knight for their Warhammer 40,000 Death Guard army and I wanted to make a cool story about how it was acquired into the army. They weren’t just going to be given that Renegade Knight, they were going to earn it. I built and printed cool terrain, painted up some thematic enemy models, and made a big show about the whole thing.

Lastly, for a Rule Zero to work well there needs to be a understanding of what makes the game the game. If you use a Rule Zero to change 75% of the rules in the game, are you still playing the same game that you started with? Changing only what you need to for a narrative to come together will help keep the players focused on the cool bits, rather than having to worry about all the changes that were made. Also, keeping the general themes and intents of the game will help the players remember what their goals are. You don’t want to take a game like Warhammer 40,000, a game about fighting in a grim dark future, and turn it into a political intrigue game. You’ll want to keep the focus of bashing heads in as your main modus operandi.

There will always be a place for competitive wargaming. A game of skill and chance has its own worth in the thrill of the challenge. With an epic story and an understood Rule Zero at the table you can start opening yourself up to the narrative fun wargaming. However, with a greater understanding of what makes both types of games fun, you can choose to play a game anywhere on that spectrum now.