Theory Swamp - Conspicuity

About a week ago, Sydney Icarus wrote about Conspicuous Mechanics, a way of thinking about rules in ttrpgs, particularly around dice and what I might call "action resolution." In a rare move for me, I've managed to have a thought in time for it to perhaps be relevant to the conversation, so as a little treat for myself I'm allowing myself a discourse post. Welcome to my theory swamp!

First, my understanding of Icarus' point - as I read it, the idea is that some procedures around dice are "conspicuous" and others are not. To be a conspicuous mechanic is to intrude into playing - Icarus uses the term "unwelcome" (more on this later), and also "friction" to describe how this operates. Inconspicuous procedures can be easily ignored or passed by (have very little to no friction). I'd paraphrase Icarus as saying that the mark of a truly inconspicuous mechanic is that no other part of the procedure depends on that piece. Conspicuity might be a gradient rather than a binary, but predominantly the concern seems to be on this idea of intrusion; does the mechanic/rule/procedure/text force us to stop play to consider it, or not?

The primary examples of conspicuous mechanics are games which use a variable amount of dice - the article compares Blades in the Dark and PSI*RUN. In these games, the argument goes, you must stop playing to determine how many dice you roll. As opposed to Dungeons and Dragons, where you might have experienced a player simply rolling the D20 on their turn and asking what happens. The idea is that D&D's process is so streamlined that a player can just run right to the end of it, but before you know how many dice you're about to roll in PSI*RUN, the whole table gets a chance to chime in.

The other major example are PbtA style moves, and it's there that Icarus locates a call to action in particular, noting some common complaints about PbtA games, and arguing that these are often due to players experiencing friction that doesn't lead to fun.

Maybe I've already given the game away, based on my word choice there - I have already documented my thoughts on the ability of texts to "force" us to do anything. My thesis: I wouldn't make as strong of a distinction between conspicuous and inconspicuous mechanics - it seems to me more that these terms are pointing to a social phenomenon, and are only loosely linked to specific rules and procedures and how those are expressed by people during play.

Here's what I mean - I've been playing a lot of Heart: The City Beneath lately (in preparation to publish NEW BLOOD, which is now complete! Check it out!) - theoretically, Heart's central dice mechanic is more conspicuous than Blades in the Dark's. Both use dice pools, and both require the player to decide what skill they'd like to use, and then check to see how many dice they will get to roll; but in Heart, the GM also has to say which "Domain" is applicable (which might add another die), and other dice can be added here too, if you have something which grants "Mastery" or if you get help (and the GM should also disclose whether or how many dice will be removed after the roll for difficulty). It's not as clunky of a procedure as it might sound here, but it is involved, and theoretically meets our criteria for conspicuity.

Nevertheless, in all of my playtests, my players have gone right ahead and rolled all the dice that they thought would be applicable, with no input from me as GM at all. I've seen this quite commonly in PbtA games too, Icarus' other example - players will simply decide which move they would like to trigger and roll for it. What's going on?

Now, most of my playing these days does happen via asynchronous, play-by-post games, and this in particular seems like a confound for our test, since surely the social activity of rolling dice is much different at the table, where I could intervene on behalf of the text and make it more conspicuous. But I'd actually contend that it points to the idea that conspicuity, in-so-far as it is represented by a "slowing down" of play to consult the text and come to group consensus, is maybe more of a social phenomenon than it is a rules-mechanical one.

It's not the only way Icarus intends to use conspicuity (and friction), so I want to get to that reparative reading, but first I want to note a few other points of divergence! Number one is this idea about "elasticity," which I didn't mention in my overview. Icarus presents the term as opposed to conspicuousness; elastic procedures are ones that are easy to snap back to, if we've plodded on ahead - the example is like advantage and disadvantage in D&D. I suppose the distinction could be made that some mechanics, like BitD's harm, which can reduce your dice pool, aren't very fun to snap back to, since you have to decide which die to remove from the pool, which might be arbitrary and feel bad. But, on the other hand, if you're playing with a digital dice roller, those will often display the dice in the order that they were rolled, turning an "inelastic" procedure more elastic. But what distinguishes Harm (as it relates to the BitD dice mechanic) and Dis/Advantage - shouldn't advantage be a conspicuous mechanic in D&D, if we want to check for it often? If assembling your dice pool in Blades is so conspicuous, then why do my players (and I!) forget to check for Harm all the time? Are pbta moves elastic, since we can decide after the fact that actually, we should have triggered the Battlebabe's specific move? I think the idea of elasticity winds up demonstrating again that conspicuity lives in the social part of the game.

My other quibble is again about Blades - Icarus's enunciation of conspicuous mechanics has assembling the dice pool as conspicuous, but the setting of position and effect as inconspicuous. Putting aside my feelings on how much friction I experience setting position and effect for the moment, let's examine the BitD roll. I appreciate theoretically what might be happening here; theoretically, unlike in D&D, I can't simply roll my D20 and add my numbers after the fact. But I could just roll a D6 and then roll more, after we decided what action rating I was using (since even an action rating of 0 rolls 2 dice, rather than none). Add to the fact that, according to the text of blades, it is always the player's decision which action rating to use! I could say "eh I'll Wreck it. That's three dice." and let the GM pick up the pieces. I see what Icarus is going for - even in this example, our phenomenally disinterested player still had to engage with the game mechanic (they had to know that they were Wrecking, and that they have an action rating of 3 in Wreck), but I don't really believe in the D&D example of a player simply rolling the D20 with absolutely no idea of what it is that they're doing - or, more strongly, I might say that in that case, we could carve out an exception for players who are so disinterested in the procedure as to completely ignore it. I also think it's interesting to imagine what happens next - presumably, there's some conspicuousness in the next moment, after we all decide exactly what it was the D&D player was trying to do, and they have to go searching through their sheet to determine what numbers to add up before the roll can be resolved. 

As I would have it, it's looking pretty bad for conspicuity - the primary test of a conspicuous mechanic, whether it slows down players on their way to roll the dice, seems to generate conflicting results, and as a purely theoretical category, I have misgivings about locating conspicuity in precisely that moment, the moment before the dice hit the table. I'll come back for conspicuous mechanics, but for now, I'd like to turn to friction, which I personally find more resonant.

More than anything else, what I've been thinking about is the way Vincent Baker enunciates his idea of what it means to play a game - playing a game, for Vincent, is to have a conversation. Unlike a "normal" conversation (whatever those are), in playing, sometimes the text will intervene. Well, except the text can't do that on its own - it's up to the people playing the game to intervene, citing the text. Friction, in this view, might just be "how often players intervene on behalf of the text" (or, in the case of complicated games, "how long players have to intervene on behalf of the text"). 

On my reading, friction is again a social phenomena. Ultimately, the game can't force me to intervene. I could be playing PbtA games however I want, and ignoring move triggers left and right, and there's nothing you can do to stop me - I could be playing D&D 5e and making players stop before every roll and confirming whether they have relevant feats or skills or dis/advantage and how much weight they're carrying. 

I'm being a little facetious - I do think that games can inspire different amounts of friction/intervention, perhaps based on the strength of their writing or the cleverness of their design. I'm interested in Masks' Influence system, so I'm often interrupting play (conspicuously?) to examine whether it might be relevant; I enjoy thinking about fictional triggers, so I like to make the table aware of the moves and what making them might mean. A game with a detailed procedure and a promise that a lot hangs in the balance of that procedure can inspire readers and players to imagine the rules as being important to their play. It's this attitude that I credit with the first of the complaints about pbta that Icarus cites; players who cry "what do you mean, I can only do the things the moves say?" have clearly bought in (more extremely than the text seemed to desire, perhaps!). But ultimately, it's something I have to do on behalf of the text (or my friends do, if they want to stop me from just rolling the D20 and rolling my eyes).

At the end of the day, I think I'm basically in total agreement with Icarus' call to action - I do have a sense that there are games whose procedures are uninteresting to me (and so I hope to avoid writing those). I don't think the problem is so much that these games are simply "frictional" with little payoff - it's always in my power to simply ignore the procedures I don't like, and in fact I'm often doing this in pbta games that I like regardless. But I think the presence of procedures that would add friction (meaning, my frequent intervention) but promise little interest, run the risk of making the entire game seem uninteresting. I'm reminded again of Jay Dragon's Rules are a Cage, that the game's intervention is often where I find the fun of playing, when it leads to choices and outcomes that I'm interested in.

On that note, I have one last idea I want to return to about conspicuous mechanics! As I said, I've been playing a lot of Heart, and one of the strengths of that game for me is how opinionated it is. Classes are things like "wizard whose organs were replaced by bees" or "knight wearing armor made from cursed trains" etc. And what I might say about a lot of the player-facing text (what the game calls abilities) is that my favorite ones of them are, well, conspicuous! They often have nothing to do with the dice - that train knight has one ability that says "you can fall distances of up to 3 storeys without taking damage." If I had that piece of text on my character sheet, you know what I would be doing? Jumping off of 3 storey buildings! In short, I think it's a mistake to locate conspicuity solely in when the players roll dice - not just because I'd contend that's predominantly a social component of the game, but also because I think there are lots of ways the text can be conspicuous, can jump off of the page and into our heads and our voices and our games.

Alright! I hope you didn't mind taking a swim with me in the theory swamp. If you want more quagmires, you know where to find me.