30. Effect — Generating Potency against Formalism
I would love to begin by acknowledging Dice Exploder by the wonderfully thoughtful Sam Dunnewold. Specifically, there’s an interview with John Harper about PSI*RUN (M Baker, 2011) and the risk sheet. It’s worth looking at as we discuss effect, because Posn/Eff is a modern way of representing the same formalism that PSI*RUN played off.
And luckily, formalism is the thing I want to talk about when I talk about Effect!
Here’s the hypothesis, for those that want to skip to the end:
”Harper’s presentation of Effect is a fascinating attempt to combine formal and aesthetic approaches to play that ultimately make conversations around Effect feel too mechanical. Harper’s rejection of the formalist structures of PbtA and PSI*RUN serve Blades well, and players must go further and continue to reject the systemic approach to Effect in order for it to be useful for the best parts of play: dynamic storytelling.”
If that makes sense to you, you’re welcome to skip down to the Reconnecting to Blades section below. Otherwise, I get to digress.
Digression: Formalism in Game Design and Analysis
“To assess effect level, first start with your gut feeling, given this situation. Then, if needed, assess three factors that may modify the effect level: potency, scale, and quality. If the PC has an advantage in a given factor, consider a higher effect
level. If they have a disadvantage, consider a reduced effect level.”
I’m going to ask you to begin by reading three Austin Walker (2015) tweets. Here’s the link, and here’s the text:
[…]
//[1]
Part of why @Fengxii says "we don't know what we mean when we say systems" is that we reduce them down to mechanical interaction
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When I say "the nemesis system" I think I mean "the set of operations that creates and manages orc relationships." But that's reductive.
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Janine's piece made me realize is that "The Nemesis System" is also the art assets, the voice work, & everything that "sells" the flashy bit
//
[…]
[1] I don’t know how people are marking tweet breaks in quotes these days. I feel like they’re an important part of the medium/communication.
Austin Walker is here discussing the inherent failure of formalism. As a philosophy, Formalism is about the, well, form: The compositional elements that exist and can be perceived (Toussaint, 2019) “The form” as opposed to “the content” and “the context”. Citing Clive Bell’s Formalist Theory: “What is interesting, when you look at a piece of art, is its form. And that’s all you need to understand to really figure out what’s going on in a piece of art. You don’t really need to care about what’s being represented in a piece of art, who made a piece of art, what their emotions were, what the historical context is[..]” (Knoll, 2021). Formalism in art is a specific prioritisation of form over content (or, more specifically, the factual existence of form over the perceived experience of consuming that content). Critique of Formalism is usually a rejection of premise: One cannot separate art from it’s social (and, specifically, economic (Thorn, 2022)) influences. I have previously written a piece indicating my stance on Formalism (“Games can be tools, yes, but to make that our only lens is to miss so much of the beauty they contain. […] There is joy that isn’t action. There is art that isn’t actionable.” (Icarus, 2019)).
In games, the Formalist debate rages. In part because discussions around games have an awful signal-to-noise ratio, and in part because our art form’s youth and our terrible archival practices lead so many debates to be had again and again. I urge you to read some of Tadhg Kelly’s 2013 piece Formalism is not the Enemy. Couldn’t you imagine this being said today:
“The label issue is also one that only exists in the zinester space. Outside of it, nobody gives a good god damn. In the everyday world, “game” is a noun that describes a mode of play. “Game” means sport, puzzle, task, problem and test. Games can be won or lost. Games can be practiced. Games may open a door to understanding and emotional enlightenment, generate heroes and cultural lodestones, but they do so through creative constants. They must operate under the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.
Otherwise, as games, they don’t really work. And the judgement criteria for why this is so comes not from patriarchy or shadowy cliques, but from players. If a game is not fun it is simply not played for long, regardless of its intent. Games are meant to be played. However none of that is true of interactive performance art if the player knows that it is not meant to be a game.”
This is 2013 and I feel like I could read that in a Medium article critiquing RPGs today. Or per Michael McMaster’s actual 2014 Medium article called “On Formalism. (re: Mountain; videogames; watching ice melt)”:
“Without an explicit narrative or means of interaction, Mountain is assumed to be hiding something. There’s assuredly something to “get” — some fundamental meaning or motive that needs uncovering. If it’s not fun, it exists to be analysed. Because Mountain presents its audience with so little to cling to, analytically speaking, it shouldn’t be trusted.”
Eagle-eyed readers will recognise this as rhyming with the ludonarrative dissonance debate from TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING THREEEEEEEE. This is what I mean about us cutting laps. We’re doing well, we’re progressing. It’s wonderful that I don’t hear (good faith) Ludonarratology debates as much these days[2]
The change across our current approach to games analysis, especially in RPGs, has been to recognise the less mechanical parts of game design as impactful to the play experience. Back to Walker (2015) tweets above: "The Nemesis System" is also the art assets, the voice work, & everything that "sells" the flashy bit.
Right, 2015 Austin (who later that year wrote an amazing piece on the rejection and weaponisation of formalism)! The Nemesis System is more than just the systemic interactions that the game offers (weaknesses and promotions etc). It’s all of the content that “sells” that. And so we’ll see that Formalism’s critics will often talk about form vs content vs context (ie my second Duchamp reference in this blog) depending on their critical lens.
[2] My personal conclusion to the ludonarratology debate is the one from Bogost’s 2009 DiGRA Keynote:
“By pitting one kind of formalism against another, the result became a foregone conclusion: formalism wins. Really, it doesn’t even matter which one, since the underlying assumptions are so similar. The ludology/narratology question may have appeared to look like this:
Is a game a system of rules, or is a game a kind of narrative?
But really, it amounted to something more like this:
Is a game a system of rules, like a story is a system of narration?”
Video Games are a Mess - (Bogost, 2009)
Digression 2: The Issue with Formalistic Approaches to Game Design
My own personal criticism of strict formalism in Systemic Design (and why I reject the job title of “systems designer” for something more broad) is that players rarely experience games from a systemic-first lens. Per MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research (Hunicke et al, 2004) (which I’ve described a few times as “the first lesson every game designer should learn which is already obsolete”) players experience games from a position of emotion first, then induction, then formalism. Per Hunicke et al (2004): “From the designer’s perspective, the mechanics give rise to dynamic system behavior, which in turn leads to particular aesthetic experiences. From the player’s perspective, aesthetics set the tone, which is born out in observable dynamics and eventually, operable mechanics.”
So, players experience the Nemesis System (Brown, 2021) as a visceral experience first. Per Brown (2021): “The game needs to create strong emotional connection to these orcs. They’re not just characters: They’re rivals and nemeses.” And that visceral experience is crafted with the support of mechanics (of course. MDA says that’s how designers make these experiences), but is delivered by (and interpreted through) the audio-visual-interactive experience. The player views the system as a function of their experience, rather than viewing their experience as a function of the system. This is what Walker (2015) means when he tweets that these “flashy” parts “sell” the system.
This isn’t…unique to games, at all. Which should probably give us some hope for game criticism and design. To quote Frank Lantz (then of Gamasutra) in a 2015 blog comment: “The thing is, I get it. I get that *within* games it seems like a focus on interactivity, or mechanics, or gameplay, or systems is ubiquitous and dominant. But in the larger context of the world these other things – visual art, music, storytelling – these things are *already* considered important, deep, profound, worthwhile, meaningful, magical, sacred.” Though, I’ll admit, it’s not as simple as Lantz’s comment makes it out to be: Formalism isn’t just dominant in games while “these other things” figured it out long ago and have never held a formalist thought since: The 1950s and 60s were a battleground for formalism vs expressionism in music theory and Formalism is still a strong tentpole philosophy in modern film auteur theory (and thus adds another reason auteur theory can fuck right off).
The point is that far from the evocative title of “the debate that never took place” (Gonzalo, 2003), I would contend that the formalistic arguments of ludology and narratology have been taking place for as long as humans have been making formalised art, or at least since David Hilbert and Clive Bell got their grubby hands on it.
Thus, having this conflict does not diminish us as players, Blades as a game, or Harper as a phenomenal designer. In fact, the fact that Blades can shrug off formalist readings and play as an aesthetic-first (or “fiction-first”) game speaks to its excellence.
Reconnecting to Blades in the Dark
Welcome back.
The point I want to make is that Blades in the Dark is not experienced by players primarily as a set of formalised systems, or at least should not be. And this makes it different to more formalised games like Burning Wheel (Crane, 2002), or even D&D 3.0/.5 (WotC, 2000 onwards). Going into Blades considering the mathematical position of scale and effect creates a poor expression of what the system is trying to do:
“The reason we assess effect is to set expectations and make the fictional situation more clear, so everyone is on the same page.
[...]
If you’ve played other roleplaying games or video games, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “hit points” for a character or a progress bar during a boss fight.
The effect system in Blades is this type of pacing mechanic, abstracted so it can apply to any type of situation, from fighting, to social manipulation, investigations, arcane powers, infiltration, whatever! Every action has an explicit effect that everyone playing the game can understand—either resolving the current situation so we
can move on to the next one, or incrementing progress toward the current goal.”
The HP analogy is telling, because in the same way that formalism is a dry, systemic way to present games; listing HP number (ie formalist descriptions of health or fighting ability) is dramatically less aesthetically/emotionally pleasing (enjoyable, or god help us, fun!) than fictional descriptions, keywords like Bloodied, and the roar-inducing “How Do You Want To Do This” (Mercer et al., year unknown).
Blades’ Effect System is at its best as a conversation. A way to set fictional expectations, as John says. Which is why it feels so frustrating to read the sections on Potency, Quality/Tier, and Scale as if they were mechanically self-justifying. This is taken further in Blade’s amazing drift into Band of Blades where Acimovic & LeBoeuf-Little formalise Quality into “Threat” (Band of Blades p30 and more) in which a Legionaire is defined as threat one, and a Gut-Sack is threat 2, right up to the threat 4 and 5 Broken. Think of it as a concrete approach to Tier.
In their best moments, the Blades conversation is expressive as well as instructive, as we discussed with respect to Preemptive Consequences. Stating that an action has limited or no effect is an expression of your disempowerment. Not because you are tier 1 and they are tier 4, but because you are a street rat and he is Lord Fuckmothering Scurlock.
And I think that this is honestly what John wants Effect to be, per Effects in the Fiction (p26) “Effects aren’t simply a matter of a level name or ticking clock segments. After the action roll, when you narrate the outcome, answer the effect questions by describing what happens “on screen.” The answers to the questions will tell the group what the new situation is like, creating a natural bridge to further actions”. This is as much “why we do this” as the hp analogy, maybe even more so.
The nature of playing Blades in the Dark as a formalised game of ticklists is known in game academia as “being fucking mid”. There’s a limited amount of joy in telling players that a tier 4 enemy means they’ll need some fine weapons, or to trade Posn for Effect or whatever. Instead the joy is in the fiction. You can’t fight a Red Sash and win. At best you can survive: Limited effect. Maybe limited effect on a 6 clock. That’s got nothing to do with tier, that’s the nature of going 1v1 rust fox only no items with a Master Swordsman. But now you outnumber them and your sword is the finest balanced blade in all the land and you’re hopped up on a Cutter’s Rage Virus. Fuck yeah. Bring that diegetic position. Now we can talk about how you face the mightiest swordsman in the land and do so from a position of not just equality, but strength and dominance. And all without using +1, or invoking Object Classes like Scale or Potency.
The other benefit to diegetic (non-formalist) framing is that it’s resilient. If I say that the player has limited effect, the game offers them two ways to get that extra effect….basically without having to engage the fiction. Pushing oneself for effect, and trading position for effect can both be approached formalisitically. Neither of them require the player to actually think through how the resources, effectiveness, position, or even character of their scoundrel interacts with that system. The exchange of position for effect, for example (p 26) is formalised into a 1:1 explicit “offer” that can be made to the player by the GM. The example, however, shows how the conversation should be had, not formalistically, but narratively -
“I don’t think you can make it across in one quick dash. The scale of the courtyard is a factor here, so your effect will be limited. Let’s say you can get halfway across with this action, then you’ll have to Prowl through the other half of the space (and the rest of the guards there) to reach the other side.”
“I didn’t realize it was that far. Hmmm. Okay, what if I just go as fast as I can. Can I get all the way across if I make a desperate roll?”
“Yep, sounds good to me!”
Here the term limited effect doesn’t mean 4-clock or ticks or anything, it means that narratively the play can’t cross that distance in this slice of time. When the “Scale” is referenced, it’s an abstraction. An aesthetic. The player, understanding because of the structure of The Conversation, doesn’t respond with “I’ll trade position for effect". They respond with a fictional trade off - If you’re telling me that it’s a long way, I will run, acknowledging that it increases the degree of risk. The conversation need not involve the player referencing game mechanics at all: Fictional Positioning is primary. The game says that it must “make sense” (p26) as Blades tends to say at the end of big concepts, but really it’s saying the same thing it’s been saying since the start: The forms of play are (mostly) subservient to the content of your narrative. And this is what I mean by “resilient”. If someone wants to conduct a Limited Effect action, let’s say they want to shackle a spirit to an earthly object. The capacity to trade position for effect formalistically means that the PC always has a way to push the situation into fully achievable, standard effect. However, creating space in the conversation for negotiation means that the player may find that no, there’s no tools available to them that give them that bump to effect (a move which is within the GM’s toolkit as a way to set tone). Blades as written says that GMs can just refuse the trade (actually, it says that GMs must offer it, but in practice/play I’ve seen a lot of players just assume they can auto-trade because of how it’s presented in text). Now, this is fine. This example of always being able to get to Standard Effect is actually what Blades wants to have on the table. It loves Scoundrels, and it’s very generous at giving them opportunities to achieve things that wouldn’t or shouldn’t be possible. My only concern is that it gets it by being formalistically permissive, not narratively permissive (see my earlier Daily Blades about Pushing and what “+1D” even represents in fiction).
So, my wish in how Blades communicates ideas is that it didn’t try the Object Oriented thing here. It didn’t say that the Cutter has “Potency against ghosts” (Cutter Playbook, bold from source), it didn’t say “when you X you get +1 effect.” Instead, I wish the game met us on the fiction, and allowed us to negotiate out the position and effect considerations. Instead of trying to take our fiction and funnel it through a formalist lens, I would rather we focused on the experience of play, and used the mechanic set as a way to bolster those conversations rather than as a necessary part of it.
This is probably the key difference between Blades in the Dark and PbtA in my play experience (and why I’m less convinced that Blades is a PbtA game, but I really don’t care to argue this one resultant point). I actively seek the structure of PbtA to interrupt, to force players into moves, to get the interesting things said. And yet, in Blades, all the interesting things are the fiction. I’m so much less inspired by fine pistols than I am by a Leech using gunpowder mixed with Leviathan blood. And I’m so much more inspired by a player describing how their physical form interacts with the spirit world than I am by Potency against Ghosts.
Band of Blades, to balance out using them earlier as a critical example, does this exceptionally with One Eye from the Sniper Playbook: “You’ve replaced an eye with an alchemical construct. You can see invisible targets clearly and identify supernatural forces.” (Band of Blades p96). It’s not potency to resist their shades, or +1D to study etc. It’s pretty clearly a straight permission ability, and these are SO great for this kind of game.
If position and effect is about getting us on the same page, then we don’t need systemic forms like Potency and +1 Effect. What we need is aesthetic, emotional, fictionally relevant shared-understanding that allows us to understand and agree that having an eye that can see the enemy just gives you better effect to track them. If it’s about understanding, let’s understand through the language we use: Not the dice roll, but storytelling and nuance and shared constructed fiction. Not the mechanic, but all the flashy stuff that sells it.
The header image is Two Sides of the Same Coin by Lucien Smith (2012), an exemplar of Zombie Formalism
