Gaming: A Discussion of Sanderson's Laws of Magic and Gaming Systems

Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has three laws of magic that might as well be extrapolated to any fictional system, be it martial arts, technology, or even social systems.  These rules are generally expressed as:

1. An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
   
2. Weaknesses, limits and costs are more interesting than powers.
3. The author should expand on what is already a part of the magic system before something entirely new is added, as this may otherwise entirely change how the magic systems fits into the fictional world.

While a great deal of words could be thrown at these (I considered talking about how J. J. Abrams apparently completely lacks understanding of #3, and how this impacts storytelling in every franchise he's ever touched), this post clearly says "gaming" in the heading, so that is where I will be focusing my efforts.

I should preface this discussion by saying that I view role-playing games first and foremost as collaborative storytelling; if it doesn't serve or aid storytelling, it doesn't need to exist.  Thus, there was no pressing need for Tolkien to specify the nature of Istari magic when Gandalf threw a pinecone, even if he had an idea what he wanted to do with it: the magic existed to create wonder, and were there more as background to Bilbo and Frodo's actions than as important plot points.  If that magic had been a foreground element, then its mechanics would have been important - as, in fact, happened with the Ring, where it became important that it had a corrupting influence, that its use drew the attention of Sauron, and that its use changed the perceptions of the user in both subtle and drastic ways.

Thus, in the battle between mechanics and narrative which drives game design, I come down fairly heavily on the side of narrative.  The difficulty with this is Sanderson's First Law: preserving a sense of wonder and interest in a story relies very heavily on the table's shared understanding of the scene.  Additionally, because this is a shared narrative, there must be at least a minimum of rules to explain how that sharing works.  Thus, some level of mechanics are required, meaning that there must be standards for establishing that a conflict exists, determining the success or failure conditions, and determining a mechanism for testing those.  Strangely enough, those are also the defining characteristics of a game, whether that game is paper-rock-scissors or global thermonuclear war.

The problem that you run into is that mechanics very often get in the way of story.  D&D and its various offshoots and derivatives have traditionally had a real problem with this.  The idea that a party "needs" to be composed of a healer, a wizard, a rogue, and a fighter flies in the face of any number of pieces of genre fiction, including many pieces of D&D-specific genre fiction, but it is received wisdom at this point in D&D-derived fantasy game design.  Similarly, one of the results of the trend of "gear porn" books is that gear selection, instead of being character or story-driven, winds up being either a chore, or a checklist.  Gear might as well be a metaphor for a problem with having a theoretically infinite number of options, but an actual too-long, too-specific list of individual choices facing characters, which results in decision paralysis and game delays, and entire subsystems of the game that, because they're not worth dealing with on a regular basis, get ignored rather than used.

Even one of the most central aspects of RPGs - combat, for good or ill - winds up being boring when reduced to a system, and when the system overshadows the story, regardless of the best intentions of player and GM, the system winds up driving the bus.  The game of "roll to hit" has no sense of what it feels like to be hunched in a shield wall, breathless and heaving, where time has lost all meaning and there is only muscle ache, bruises that you don't remember getting, and a sudden, stunning blow.  There's no sense of the pendulum swing of immortality and vulnerability that comes with sprinting cover-to-cover, heart hammering as you hope that the OPFOR hasn't spotted you, in "I make a double move."  The actual chess game of longsword combat, with stance against stance, cover against blow, line against line, weak against strong against weak, the tiny weight-shift that suddenly produces a clean blow - it's all missing from most RPG combat, and too few players play for the magic of it, compared to playing by the system of it.

The result of all of this is that an overly-systematized, overly-mechanized approach winds up taking something that is supposed to be wondrous, and reduces it to the banal - at which point, back to Sanderson's First Law, it ceases to be magic.  Characters in combat don't behave like people, they behave like pawns, because the player loses all sense of risk, because it's really hard to sustain that sense of immediacy after an hour of "I roll to hit."  Even the way characters grow becomes unrealistic and mannered.  It is exceptionally unlikely that, in character, anyone is going to do the kind of statistical analysis that we consider routine in gaming when finding a new piece of equipment, or to spend near as much effort as players routinely spend agonizing over advancement.  They just do it, because there is a natural course to actual people's behavior.

I don't have a clean answer for this; I suspect it varies table by table.  I personally have never learned to love extremely low-crunch systems like Cypher, because I feel like they err too far on the side of not having a clear understanding of the "magic," but I also find, for instance, GURPS to be a game of too-great mechanical detail.  My perfect system, if such a thing exists, allows the rules to become more or less transparent to the story.  There will always be some degree of story-opacity because describing actions and rolling dice (or paper-rock-scissors or coin flips or...) takes longer than actually doing most actions, but in a perfect world, the story flows smoothly without turbulence induced by the mechanics.

In any case, it should be the goal of everyone at the table to have a story to tell at the end of it.  If that story is "roll to hit" - well, that's a piss-poor story.

Next time - Sanderson's Second Law, and why the best stories are about when you blow a roll.