Reading Realis and The 1HP Dragon

“Threshold” is a term I have made up¹ for the procedures a game asks players to follow, to achieve the goals they seek. I called it that because the image of stepping across a line from one state to another represents that act of play to me, with clarity.

There is a loose movement in TTRPG design that is focused on making thresholds less mechanical, passable through out-of-world calculations, and more diegetic, passable through engagement with the world. Before writing this blog, I felt the game Realis² had added to this movement in really interesting ways, and what follows is me working out why.

For an example of what diegetic thresholds are reacting against, let’s take Dungeons & Dragons. D&D has two threshold mechanics: DC, a value a roll must clear for an action to be successful, and HP, a value that must be reduced to 0 for a creature to be killed. These are fine thresholds but the need to clear them has two impacts I dislike. First, they guide the players’ focus away from the shared imaginary world, and towards accumulating more real-world dice, bonuses, or re-rolls, to solve the problems they encounter. This is all fun, but none of it is my favourite TTRPG activity: making stuff up. Second, they reduce difference and distinction. In D&D, and honestly, in any game with HP, a dragon and a goblin are differentiated only by scale (of HP, AC, etc.), not kind. I am looking for thresholds that reflect the qualitative difference of people in the imaginary world.

My first encounter with thresholds of this kind, was Clayton Notestine's 1 HP Dragon blog.³

The innovation Notestine makes in that first post (and expounds on in his follow-ups on Lore Blocks and Doom)⁴ that I found most exciting, is that the threshold to a player achieving their goal is no longer “rolling a big enough number” but is instead “describing an action that would overcome all obstacles”. To quote 1HP Dragon:

'To defeat a monster or solve an encounter, players must narrate an attack that bypasses all the armor or try to negate them individually. Either way, they have to account for everything on the checklist. If they don't, they fail.'

You can read Lore Blocks for plenty examples of what armour consists of, but in essence, it's what in D&D would be represented by AC, a weapon or a spell. Instead of the dragon having a breath weapon it now comes with the sentence ‘Fiery breath of death. All-consuming’, and any player attempting to kill said dragon must narrate how they evade or withstand that fire to kill it. If they do so, it is dead; if they don’t, chances are they are going to encounter the Doom mechanic.

Lore armour solves the issues I have with D&D’s thresholds. The player crosses it by relating an action occurring in the shared imaginary space, and each threshold, each creature or environment, is made qualitatively distinct by these descriptions. However, there is a potential consequence of this mechanic I’m not so fond of, which is, it favours a style of play that focuses more on research than invention.

Say, for example, that I am that player trying to overcome the dragon. I know every piece of armour it has. But, this is fantasy. I can’t follow real-world logic to solve problems. ‘Fiery breath of death’ is all-consuming, but in this world, what does that mean? Does this fire get blocked by brick or stone or metal, or does it all-consume its way through those? Questions like this matter, as an insufficient narration in this game could have a heavy consequence!

This problem is of course resolved if I just talk to the GM or their characters, learn the rules from them of what dragonfire can and cannot consume and only then fight the dragon. I have no problem with this playstyle.⁵ But I would prefer a threshold mechanic that gives players a way to invent narrations that will work, rather than ask the GM for an answer.

Realis Sentences provide two such tools. But first a quick digression on how threshold-crossing in Realis works.

In Realis, crossing a threshold begins with an explicit statement of the player’s goal. This is their Intent. They then both narrate the in-world action they are performing to achieve that Intent and declare their Means for doing so (a Means being sort of an in-world Platonic Form which casts the described action as a shadow). Means mostly come in the form of Sentences, statements of a character’s core capacities, their ‘skills, equipment and knowledge’ and their tragic flaws.⁶ In response to these statements of Means and action, the GM may declare their own Means and action to counter it. Who comes out best is determined by the Ranks of those Means. These run from 0-4, with ties going to the counterer. Sentences with higher Ranks come with conditions that limit the circumstances in which they can be used. The book’s example is the Alchemist’s Sentence “I always cure my patient” going to “I always cure my patient when I have my tools.”⁷

From this description, it’s obvious the first tool Sentences offer the player to help them know if their narration will succeed, is their Rank. Will the player’s narrated solution be sufficient to cross the threshold? Well, if the player’s Means is a +1 Sentence, and the counter-actor’s is a +0 then yes. However, Realis does not encourage players to rely on Ranks. In particular, the rules expect GMs to reveal the Ranks of their Sentences only after both players have declared their Means. Given Sentences usually gain additional conditions with each Rank, it is possible to guess a Sentence’s Rank based on its wording. But it’s not straightforward. This prods players to look for confirmation that their narration will work at the second tool of the Sentence: its limiting wording.

Take for example the first Sentence of the first class of the book, the Berserker’s “I always kill my foe”.⁸ As a +0 Sentence, this has the least amount of conditions. But even at its most broad, there is a precision in the Sentence that limits its application. Berserkers always kill their foes. So, as a player, I immediately start plotting how can I convince the table that I am not this NPC’s foe (bribery? diplomacy? charm?). If I can make that work, Rank comparison would be unnecessary, because this Sentence could not be used to counter me. And the delight of Realis is, the more powerful enemies get, the more conditions their Sentences get, and the more opportunity players have to get what they want by playing to the stated limits of their opponents’ Means. This is the second tool Realis gives its players.

I have not yet had the chance to play Realis. All the above is assumption of how the game should work, based on reading the text and listening to Friends at the Table’s actual play. The flaws in that approach are obvious to all who have played TTRPGs. Many very different games can lurk within a single ruleset. Your version will only emerge at the table. But also, that is the point of this exercise. I am reading Realis to help my future self find the version of the game I want to play. Unrefined, this rules system speaks to me in a way no others currently do, but it is not until I put it in dialogue with Notestine’s blogs, that I could lay out why. And nor am I done! In the process of writing this, I found a whole line of thought about what the Sentence system offers GMs, and came up with what feels like a useful additional Sentence-type. But what’s on this webpage is enough for now. Time to go back to reading.