Matrix Automatons

I've recently done a deep dive into Engle Matrix games (read more here, join the new discord here), and it's reinvigorated my interest in theorizing about solo gaming and making my games flow smoother. 

I typically get some writers block and burn out of many of the more narratively oriented solo games I've played, and what's really worked for me is procedural gaming (hex crawls, combat focused games, etc). But I've also missed some of the tactical depth that comes from OSR gaming in a group in my solo plays, since most oracular systems don't really emphasize strategy and tactics in play over narrative development and using tropes to drive play, and often the hexcrawls I play can lack some of the factional and deep interplay that gets lost in more combat focused play.

I think Engle games can fill in the void here with it's argument structures and narratively defined tactical play, where a given argument mixed with a few dice rolls and some logic can push the game forward (check this post here for a good conversion of Matrix rules to OSR style)  However I think that the rules for matrix development, extracted from Chris Engle's original 1988 article, and it's follow-up, can provide a framework with which to mostly, if not entirely, replace the narrative meta-structure presented with most gm emulators with what I'm calling "matrix automatons". 

Think of these "matrix automatons" as elements you can use to fill in your world and interact with from a player character perspective, without the need for a narrative framing to necessarily push play. You can create any category that can contain these automatons, such as Insitutions, NPCs, Locations, etc. Within a given category, you create the automaton as described in the original Engle article (and illustration in the follow-up one with examples) giving in a name, an upper section containing a phrase that describes it, and a lower section containing problems it has that the player character can hook onto and modify each turn. I propose the following structure for a given automaton:

[Category]. [Name]. 

[Description]. 

[Dynamic Problem List: [[Name] exhibits [property] because [reason]. 1, 2...n.] 

Let's say for example I create an NPC, Jack of the Beanstalk:

NPC. Jack of the Beanstalk. 

Farmboy with a giant beanstalk. 

1. Jack exhibits greed of the giant treasure because he is poor having sold his last cow for the beans. 

2. He exhibits fear of the giant because he fears the giant will take his life.

Let's break this down piece by piece:

1. Category: Define what type of entity this is. NPCs are the most obvious, but an Institution can have problems it's dealing with, as can a Location. Even Items can fit the bill, being interactable. Schools of Thought and Movements could even work, if a bit of a stretch - define their tenants and reasonings, and keep them linked with something tangible a PC can interact with - practitioners, texts, etc. In the example, Jack is an NPC.

2. Name: Names matter. Names can be descriptive and provide depth for a character and their motivations. They can provide cultural cues, change how someone is treated and reacted to. Sometimes, they're just a name, but the act of you remembering it (don't look it up and cheat!) can endear them ever so slightly more to you than before - or make them more angry since this was the tenth time you forgot their name, seriously?! In the example, Jack of the Beanstalk is known for his beanstalk. It's likely people have heard about him due to his beanstalk. Whether he likes the fame, how he feels about it is an interesting question you can interact with him about, just asking him a few close ended questions - and this can lead to uncovering a new problem.

3. Description: Keep these simple. They shouldn't really lean emotionally one way or another, this is what the problem list is for. This is the 1 line summary of what this person would be described as, in as neutral a way as possible. "Farmboy with a beanstalk", "Soldier with the Phalanx Army", "Inquisitor for the High Temple". Treat this as an [Else] Statement. In a given situation, if you go through all the problems in the list and none are directly affected, then default to what their role in the world expects of them. Farmboys aren't soldiers who aren't inquisitors. Fall onto stereotypes here, because any specifics not defined by a problem are stereotypical. In Jack's case, he is defined by his beanstalk, and how this affects his life is an interesting avenue I'd probably pursue.

4. Problems: Start with a couple of obvious ones given an element's description and how they are introduced to you in the story. Oftentimes, NPCs rolled off tables only are rolled because they interact with the PC in the first place. The primary property for the NPC then is how they interact with the PC. Are the PC's being hunted by the NPC - "NPC hunts PC because PC is a fugitive from the law". If an element is encountered as a totally random encounter, it will likely be defined by a reaction roll "NPC is hostile/neutral/friendly to PC" and unless the PC further interacts with it vanishes from existence. If  the PC interacts with it, then using close ended questions to see if and how it opens up/presents more information in a non-NPC element to the PC is warranted. In the case of Jack, he is a well known character I'm ripping off of so I laid out his problems up front, though more can be added through asking questions of him as the PC.

Note: Property and Reason are separated because what is externally observed - the Property - might not have an apparent logic - the Reason - behind it without further investigation or questioning. 

a. Property: This is the externally observed behavior/nature of an entity. An NPC can be greedy, afraid of something, etc. A city can be filled with slums, smoky, clean and bright, filled with street hawkers, contain suspicious folk. An item can be lustrous, old, ragged. All of these are observed elements without the reasoning behind the external appearance not being obvious.

b. Reason: This is the logic behind a given property. It may be obvious or may need to be uncovered through questions. It is possibly this could be erroneous if problems are assumed to be from the perspective of the PC instead of a narrator. It could even be left blank until discovered. An NPC can be greedy because they are poor, they covet wealth due to stature, they like shiny things. Cities can have slums due to mismanagement, having corruption that results in destitute citizens, etc. Items can be lustrous because of magic properties, because it was freshly polished, because it was made of ancient dwarven metal. 

How I see these automations being used is that asking questions about problems and trying to affect them is the primary goal of the PC in the game. Trying to figure out the reason behind an external property, and asking more questions and creating arguments for solutions that could be achieved is the core of the gameplay. Ideally, more problems and entities should be generated by the act of asking questions, which are further defined with their own matrices, and so on as the player using the vehicle of the PC to interact with discrete elements of the world eventually fleshes out the world to multiple moving parts and creates story from within these interactions. These automatons would also serve as algorithms that allow you to run down a list to see how an element would react to an action a PC would take on the world, running through problems that might be affected and defaulting to the base description should the problem list be exhausted to determine "reaction" of an entity to an action.

Oracular Stats

So I stumbled down a rabbit hole the other day ended up on an old reddit post that got me thinking about solo oracles, such as the commonly used "yes/no/and/but" and "percentile chance" systems. Could the stats of a d20 game be converted into their own oracle without the use of an external one? And how much information could be eked out from a single roll? Any information offloaded onto an oracle reduces the creative load on the player. I decided to try and mash together ideas from Flesh of the Tarrasque with the above post to see if I could make a preliminary draft of something along the lines of oracular stats.

To start, take six d20s, preferably physical, but digital tabletops with visual representations could work. Roll the handful of you have onto the table - these are your adventure or world stats (depending on if you're running a story or a sandbox). Leaving the dice where they land, first record the values (range of 1-20) then write next to them relevant modifiers (-3 to +3, extending the end ranges if necessary). These represent the basic stats of your adventure or world. 

For example say you roll: Str 18, Dex 12, Con 3, Int 19, Wis 5, Cha 10 (pictured below).

That could be interpreted on a kingdom with strong military (Str) and sorcerous (Int) factions battling it out at the expense of the populace (Wis), which is ravaged with sickness from said warfare (Con). The mediocre political leaders could be easily manipulated by these powers (Cha), but nonetheless are relatively "flexible" and progressive with policies despite their ineffectiveness (Dex).

Next, look at the dice from left to right - this is your temporal axis. Whether a larger entity or NPC, this indicates the order in which the events in the entity's life - and thus, its stats - developed. For example, in the above roll the first this to develop would be a military presence, hence implying this was originally a military splinter group from another kingdom who took charge. Soon after the sickness emerged and  the sorcerers showed themselves from the shadows, which resulted in all out civil war. The political leaders in the community finally took action, trying to implement progressive policies but it was too late - the kingdom closed itself off from the rest of the world and the leaders became mere puppets of the military and sorcerous factions, which brings us to present day.

Finally, look at the stats from top to bottom gives an indication of importance of the factor in the setting or NPCs life. Continuing on with the example above, it is the sickness that dominates the mind of an average citizen within the kingdom, followed by the civil war and progressive policies being middle, while the societies leaders are seen as ineffectual and are often the last thing a citizen would care about.

The importance of the modifiers comes when creating entities within the larger superstructure, with these nested entities stats being affected by the stats of the level above. For example, a city or a noble within the kingdom would naturally be affected by the external circumstances surrounding them, hence applying the modifiers to their own stats rolls. You could nest these stats infinitely based on the level of granularity you could go to.

Once you've created and recorded some basic facts about elements in a given entity, then comes actual play where the stats start to serve as oracles for the player. For any question, first ask the question, choose the stat most relevant to the question, check to see if any stats would override that stat to apply a modifier, then roll a d20. Any roll equal to or below the stat means the answer of the question should be interpreted as trying to achieve the aims of that stat. For example, a character with a higher strength would be more likely to attack someone than one with weaker stats. But if his charisma is higher than his strength, it is possible he may take a charismatic approach before a strong one, hence the modifier being applied. 

For one off NPCs or larger entities, you could simply use the superstructure. For example, simply roll on the kingdom stats to see how your average Joe/Jane would react to something instead of rolling every stat for them anew. Of course the answer of every question should be interpreted with the context of the question, and based on the stats of other entities. 

Here are some example questions that could be asked for the strength stat:

-Does the man attack (man str 12)? Roll 18, No. 

-How solid is the city wall the dragon is trying to burn (city str 10)? Roll 9, the wall holds against multiple attacks from the beast, giving you time to run.

-What does the letter from the Assassin's Guild say (guild cha 5, overridden by wis 15 -> modifier of +1)? 6, it states that despite the slights made against them as long as the noble doesn't show his face in guild territory again, bygones will be bygones.

Admittedly this limited to classic d20 stats. Maybe it could be mapped onto other systems as well? Most games I've found have a stats basis of some form, its just a matter of expanding those stats to a larger scope. Or maybe the dice needed and the eventual nesting of stats will become more cumbersome than its worth. Who knows?

Getting Rid of HP as a Meta-Resource

So my narcissism finally got the better of me and I made a blog. This way I can spew my nonsensical blather into the ether and still feel the satisfaction of assuming I have a rarefied audience that pontificates over my profound nuggets of wisdom. I also want a place to keep records of games, random tables, and whatever other nonsense appeals to me at the moment, so I might post those here too.

Me IRL

Anyways, this post is a ramble on a thought I had recently about how getting rid of HP as a meta-resource would work. I got the idea from a game I recently discovered, Tales of Mordhearse (also check out their blog, Vile Cult of Shapes, which I also have listed in the sidebar). This game ironically uses a single stat, HP, to determine class and saving throws, alongside a classic inventory system and basic abilities.

Stripping things down to one stat got me thinking about the very point of even having an HP system to abstract an individual's hardiness in the world. What if you could strip the game down even further and bring it down to a purely item based system, in a sense, where your "HP" is directly determined by the items within your inventory?

I don't think such a system would be a stretch, given the fact that in most of the games I play in already focus on gaining resources in the forms of both items and people that can be used in the game world.  There already exists an interaction between HP and inventory systems, with items and tools acquired in the game world being vital to preserve this primary resource (alongside combat abilities, magic, and so on - Lungfungus describes the resource drains and renewals better than I ever could over here).

But I think this resource drain/resource renewal cycle could be optimized even further if meta-resources like HP were eliminated entirely - or rather, eliminated as their own entities and integrated directly with in game resources. Your likelihood to survive shouldn't be based on an arbitrary measure that you determine by a dice roll, but how long you've invested and been part of a game. Your "HP" should be a measure of the items you've acquired, connections you've forged, and knowledge you've gained over time. Losing those items, connections, or knowledge should be the real penalty you incur over the course of play, based on the context of whatever actions you are taking. Itemizing these into a list or record of some form, and gaining and losing relation to these aspects of the game world should be prioritized over keeping track arbitrary meta-resources like HP alongside these in a game. And without these tools that you've built up over time, there shouldn't be any innate protection against the cold cruel universe which can snuff your life out on an off day.

Ha-Ha-Ha, Classic Comedy

Of course, the big thing HP has going for it familiarity, simplicity, and a means of objectively keeping track of life and death in the game. Barring the migration to a purely narrative based format in determining life and death (which I feel robs a degree of tension), all of the above resources don't mesh nicely in a unified system compared to a single, simple meta-resource that accounts for objective survivability while allowing space for a narrative approach to resources and connections. Combining all the above resources earned in game into a cohesive system would probably require either copious note taking mixed with unnecessary complexity, or a simplification to the point that it would make the whole exercise moot. I might think more about how this could maybe be achieved satisfactorily someday, but for now - ain't nobody got time for that.