In the 90s, I ran a 9-13 player game of Vampire: The Masquerade. We would go several sessions without touching dice. We dove into the politics of Chicago and did heavy roleplay about the characters and we thought Vampire was delivering on a promise it had to be about personal horror and intrigue. This system had unlocked something we had been looking for. Except it hadn't, of course. On the one hand, 9-13 players is a ridiculous amount to try to do heavy, interpersonal RP with but I was 17 and had a lot of people who wanted to play. If we stopped to roll dice and use the system, it would become a huge slog. We wanted to keep things moving. On the other hand, the World of Darkness system is a terrible system for personal horror and intrigue. It's very much a trad game disguised as something different with all the dots. It was easy enough to not run out of blood points and avoid Humanity checks. There's a reason old World of Darkness was often played as 'dark superheroes' instead of what was promised on the tin. That's how the game was designed. Hell, even if they'd changed nothing else, Vampire 5th edition's inclusion of the Hunger Die actually makes feeding and The Beast a much bigger part of the game because the system forces you to do deal with Hunger on a regular basis. Suddenly, you're a character who might lash out and cause real damage because The Beast is present and the rules say it caused you to go overboard here. And it does it without making you or your GM look like an asshole. ## What does Support Play even mean? When I say a game supports a certain kind of play, I mean that the rules are written to give specific power to the players and the GM to help create decisions that you probably wouldn't otherwise make that align with the desired outcomes in play. Torchbearer does a lot to make the resource management and exploration of a dungeon crawler important to the players. It has them make the decision to try to drive off enemies or wipe them out in ways that commit the players to more risk if they're trying to go scorched earth, stopping every area they enter from turning into a zone of slaughter and, instead, creating a different dynamic in the fiction than we often see in dungeon crawls. This is in response to [this](https://seraphim-seraphina.itch.io/my-blog/devlog/1200662/what-do-we-mean-when-we-say-a-game-supports-play) blog, which makes an argument for nuance when we discuss how games support play. And, I agree, that there is nuance that is interesting to discuss. I think the biggest problem, however, is a common one that The Internet™ makes much worse. Saying a game doesn't support a style of play doesn't mean that you can't do that style of play in the game. It means the game isn't going to help. In my experience teaching improvisors, new actors, and new role-players, I think this generally means you're unlikely to see what you're looking for do well for a number of reasons. I'll use Player vs Player (PvP) RP as an example. In most games, PvP is pretty miserable. You argue at the table, which can entirely fun and consensual out of character (OOC), and then it comes to either the combat system, a (probably poorly made) social system, or one person giving in. ### Using the combat system Combat in ttrpgs have a few advantages. 1) The players know the kind of leverage they have to bring into combat. 2) There are specific, granular rules to make sure it's not just a single roll and mind control happens. 3) There are usually clear winners and losers. It's clean in that respect. There are also some problems 1) It often, by the rules, ends in death for one character 2) Losing usually fucking sucks. It's not fun. ### Using the (probably poorly made) social system In a lot of games, there's often a single roll where one person may have a massive advantage because not a lot of thought is put into social conflict. They make a roll. They mind control the other person. This is a lot of trad games. My favorite systems for social/emotional conflict give them the granularity of power as combat but also make it as messy in the outcomes as these things are in real life. ### One person giving in While this seems pretty self explanatory, I want to talk about how difficult this often is. ## How well people actually make things happen in games So I've taught both acting and improvisation. My improvisation experience did a lot to color how I look at this. People aren't nearly as good at making interesting decisions in a fictional as they think they are. When I run improv workshops at GenCon, I have one that uses the [Alien RPG](https://freeleaguepublishing.com/games/alien/) Cinematic Campaigns to give the participants scenes where the characters have strong agendas and reasons to jump into them immediately. So long as I don't have someone with experience/training in improvisation, I could pretty much script what happens literally every time. Nothing happens. No one makes the strong decisions they've been primed for. No one goes after the Agendas they've been given. No one uses the pretty strong situation to push them into doing something. I have to come in, give them permission to go after what their characters want, and model the emotion some. I also tell them it's okay for them to be angry. (Emotions are honestly an easier way to get someone to make a strong decision in a scene. If we assume our character has a strong emotion, we understand how people act in those circumstances. Their gut tells them. If they try to think it through, you're likely going to see some strong analysis paralysis.) Most people will go for the middle of the road reaction. When teaching improv, we have to spend a lot of time teaching people who to honor the stakes and how to escalate. While getting there, you see a lot of scenes where nothing happens. So when someone tells me they don't need the system to make some of the more interesting things happen in a game..... it might be true. I tend to feel it more likely is not. ## How Masks lets you do asshole things without looking like an asshole [Masks: The New Generation](https://magpiegames.com/collections/masks/products/masks-a-new-generation-hardcoverpdf) is a game about playing teenage superheroes who make the kind of rash decisions that teenagers make. It has systems that encourage you to lash out, run away, and make bad decisions to get rid of Conditions that have been put on your PC. And it's a system that I've found a lot of players find themselves reluctant to engage with until they see how it improves the game. We had a PC, Johnny, chock full of Conditions. The group was about to go rescue someone who was in danger, mostly, because of something Johnny had done. He was outside the place they gathered and heard the players talking about Johnny and how frustrated they were from him. Johnny's player reacted. It hurt Johnny to hear this. (The player was delighted because it was the kind of drama we played for.) I told Johnny to "Take a Powerful Blow." ![[Pasted image 20251226101910.png]] Take a Powerful Blow is one of the rare moves where you want a failure. He rolled a 10 and Johnny ran away. In another game, he certainly could make this decision but, if he did, this is the player deciding he's going to make everything screech to a halt so the entire group could spend some time worrying about Johnny. It would be thrusting himself into the center of everything and throwing the entire session off of what people thought it was going to be. In the right group, this could be what people want. It could also be one person throwing a tantum and wanting attention. But in Masks, it was the rules showing how teenagers react things. It was the result of all the various ways Johnny had been physically and emotionally beat up (Conditions) and the actions of the other players. He might have weathered the blow and come in with more Potential (XP) because he'd grown from it. He might have come in and lashed out or take more pain on himself. Or he might have run away. This meant there was genuine tension when the dice were rolled. This meant that Johnny had to run away because the rules enforced this without making his player someone who disrupted the game. It made it fun and memorable without us having to worry that we'd think his player was trying to wrest control away from the group. Could this have been done without the rules? Sure. Would it have had the same tension? Probably not. It also shifts the blame from the player to the rules and frustration and setbacks that come from the rules are often more a part of a game than when someone across the table decides to make trouble. ## Placing social and political power in the hands of the players This will be its own blog in the future, but games that give social and political power to players, through the rules, not only let them know what the chances they can succeed are, it means that's not just GM Fiat. In [Smallville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallville_Roleplaying_Game), I have players go into social conflicts wanting to lose because of how the system works. It pushes them into making more drama and Stress for themselves. It supports the soap opera dynamics of your typical Hour Long TV Drama. ## How the rules help you make decisions you wouldn't otherwise make In improv, we do a lot of work on escalation to help us make decisions we wouldn't otherwise make. The other members of the troupe help with that, too. But if you were to watch one troupe over a long period of time, you'll discover that there are places they tend to go in their stories. There are well worn creative ruts they're likely to go down. And changing just on person can mix that up. The Abe Froman Project, which I directed for a decade, at one point did a lot of long form improv that would become allegorical. When a few people moved away and some others came in, we started to do much more grounded long forms. The people become the ways we make new decisions. And, with ttrpgs, that systems help us make decisions we wouldn't make otherwise. The rules suggest things to us or force decisions we might not think are what we want. And these can lead to some really great moments you're not expecting. In a Smallville game (based on the Persona computer games), we had Blake and his adopted sister, Rachel. Rachel was texting with her boyfriend Sean (who everyone in the group loved to hate) and Blake walks by. They start to RP Blake trying to take the phone away from her and break up with Sean. But Blake's Relationship with Rachel was: d6 "She's my sister, I guess....." And Rachel's Value for Love was: d10 "I can't betray love, I just can't" And they realized that this showed that Blake was maybe caring more for Rachel than he had written down. That relationship was changing into maybe seeing her actually as his sister. And Rachel's view on Love was changing because she knew she should break up with Sean. And, in this game, when you Challenge one of your Relationships or Values, it becomes XP. When you choose to rewrite it or not, you can get XP. When you get Stress, you get XP. So the conflict escalated with the players Challenging their Relationships and Values and wanting to lose some parts of the conflict (to get Stress, which becomes XP and an excuse to have a 1-on-1 scene withe someone else to get rid of it and make more XP) and to win other parts of the conflict (because you want your friend across the table to get XP, too) so it became a really nuanced, exciting scene out of what would, in any other game, by 30 seconds of incidental RP. The system made it important and made it an incredibly memorable moment in the game that helped redifine the relationship between 3 characters. (Well....between 4 of them because Blake asked Wyatt's player if he minded getting some trouble made for him and told Sean Rachel was now dating Wyatt.) In a system that did not support the soap opera style game that Smallville is all about, you probably don't see these decisions being made. It's possible, but it would require two players who have a deep understanding of how character and story work. They'd need to have the improvisors skill of making a strong decision and following through with it. They would have had to do a lot of work to make a scene like that something important. But the system, because that's precisely what it supports, did a huge amount of heavy lifting. ## So why use "system supports play" While we can break down the nuance, I think the benefit of more simply saying "Smallville supports interpersonal drama" or "Torchbearer supports dungeon crawling" or "Masks supports playing teenage superheroes," is that we immediately get the strengths of the game. I think it's important to know that Smallville isn't good at granular combat, Masks doesn't care about power levels in supers games, and Torchbearer doesn't have a particularly robust help for what happens outside of dungeons. We get a quick look at what recommends Game X over Game Y. It can be an easy way to know which one I'd take between Smallville, Champions, and Sentinel Comics if I were looking to run a supers games. You can play other types of play with any of those other games, it's just that you're going to have to either fight the system or hope everyone's on the same page and has the skills to push in whatever specific direction those games might otherwise help you with.