Development 11 - Tables and Pre-Provided Information

Ah, setbacks. I've been working heavily on Promethean: The Unborn (with some awesome developments that I'm so excited to show you. Unfortunately, I lost my computer's charger, which means that I haven't been able to work on my Indesign document, which is what I'd want to be showing all of you. I promise that on Tuesday at the latest I'll have some stuff to show you. In the meantime, it's been making me think a lot of thoughts about tables, character sheets, and the levels of information you provide to people.

Games are a shared, negotiated reality. We are collectively imagining a world, between the base text of the gamewriter and the imaginations of the players. When running a game at Wayfinder, we often speak of levels of information - who exactly needs to know any particular piece of information? At Wayfinder, there are three such levels of information:

• Introductory Information. This is something that every single player needs to know about. It is communicated in Story Intro and Game Mechanics, and are things like "We live in the Kingdom of Malthron", "This is how guns work", or "This is a horror game - be prepared". 
• Group Information. This is stuff a select group of people need to know, but not everyone needs to be aware of. This could be the details of a particular kingdom, the way Mage magic works for the purposes of casting spells, or the expectations placed upon a group of monsters. 
• Individual Information. This is stuff only a single person needs to know. Most often, it's communicated by the gamewriter sitting them down and talking to them, but character sheets are also sometimes used. These are most often secrets, or flow-important responsibilities. 

Note that these aren't necessarily secrets (although there's nothing wrong with secrets - a hill I'm willing to die on), but are instead compartmentalized this way to prevent unnecessary information overload. It's a problem I'm running into with The Last Days of Solomon, because, based on the nature of the game, we need to dump all the information on everyone, and there's no real compartmentalization tool! If you want to play The Last Days of Solomon, you kinda need to read upwards of 100 pages (or at least skim them). Wayfinder games get around this problem by delegating and distributing information, allowing it to be discovered in game.

Tabletop games are also very good at information delegation, using one of my favorite tools - tables for information generation. When Apocalypse World says that you can have one of the following names, the Bakers get to do an important aspect of worldbuilding, without constraining you terribly. Or, perhaps a better example, when you see a table like the following:

How were you summoned?

• Through the technoarcana of the Council of Depths
• Through the ravings of a Hedgemage
• By the forces of the natural world
• By the singing of the Roil

This table tells you a ton of information, just from its existence. It tells you that you are a) summoned, and b) through magic. It then tells you that the Council of Depths, Hedgemages, and the Roil all exist in this world, and they all have the capacity to summon. Now, the nature of these entities are going to be heavily influenced by the shared reality your playgroup builds, but all of it allows for the hand of the game designer to show through, without creating a world background that can be overwhelming to read. I think pointed questions are also very useful for that - something like "Why did you leave your brother behind when the soldiers came for your family?" tells you more about your history than an entire paragraph can, and gives you tools to expand it yourself.

I love lists of options, tables, and other things which guide and inform the world without constraining and trapping. The most important thing a game designer can communicate is the sensation, feeling and tone of the setting - everything will build off of that. Well-done tables will feed into this tone, and give players plenty of options that help them exist in the world. I've found that when inexperienced people are given completely blank slates, without a clear understanding of the tone, they tend to get ... silly. Not that there's anything wrong with silly, but people don't want to be serious unless they have the ability to know how to be. Tables can serve as a mechanism for that, as can curated levels of information.