A gap in Realis

The Misericorde class in the TTRPG Realis¹ has the following Sentence:

‘I always wear the Black Vestment’.²

Sentences in Realis express the core capacities of the character or object that bears them. In some instances, the capacity granted is clear; in others, like the Sentence above, the capacity requires further definition by the table. In other words, to use this Sentence, the Misericorde player needs to decide what wearing the Black Vestment actually does. That information would not technically be a Means, but it is quite important for how that player plays their character. How should it be recorded?

A second gap in Realis

In Realis, there exists a type of Means termed Ephemera. As the name suggests, they are temporary. Use them three times, and they lose their status as Means. But the book is clear that this does not require a change in their diegetic effect.

This does not necessarily represent the destruction or loss of the Ephemera in question. Instead, it means that whatever special advantage that the Ephemera once gave you has been accounted for by the ever-fluctuating, Narrasoulic equilibrium of Realis. What was once a dramatic new development to the narrative weave of the Thousand Moons is now simply another part of the quilt. You may continue to wield your ancient runic blade, but its shine simply does not impress as it once did.³

But, take the one of the example Ephemera Sentences in the book ‘Our new friendship with the Blood Chorale always gives us access to impenetrable places’. Say that Ephemera gets exhausted, but in a way that fictionally the Band remains friends with the Blood Chorale. The capacity of that friendship to open doors should remain; it would be weird for the mechanical shift to override an established feature of the fiction. But at the same time the mechanical shift should be respected. So what to do?

Fiction Sentences

How they work

Fiction Sentences are Sentences that are not Means. They describe the world and the capacities of people and objects within it accurately, but they have no narrative power. Even a +0 Means has greater authority than a Fiction Sentence. To indicate this, all Fiction Sentences are adorned with the symbol (-).

However, while Fiction Sentences cannot be used as Means on their own, they can be used to add an in-fiction effect to a Means.

For example, a Misericorde player has codified the Fiction Sentence “The Black Vestment always fills the faithful with holy awe (-)”. That Sentence cannot be used as a Means by itself. However, the player can use “I always wear the Black Vestment (+0)” as a Means, to have the diegetic effect of filling the faithful with awe.

Rules for writing Fiction Sentences

A Fiction Sentences are always written using the established Sentence structure, marked with a (-) instead of a Rank.

An Ephemera that has been marked three times always becomes a Fiction Sentence.

Players and GMs with a Means with one or more unclear fictional effects may always write a new Fiction Sentence to codify each effect, if the table agrees to the wording proposed.

A player that spends their Token, and selects no other effect, may always write or rewrite (but not Retire or un-Retire) a Fiction Sentence, if the table agrees to the wording proposed.

A player that spends their Token, selects no other effect, is using a Rank 3 Means and is not countered, may Retire a Fiction Sentence. This is a permanent change and cannot be reversed.

Why use this mechanic

Fiction Sentences are codifications. Functionally, writing out “The Black Vestment always fills the faithful with holy awe (-)” is no different to a player saying “Ok so, I think religious people treat people who wear the Black Vestments with reverence, so I should be able to intimidate them into doing what I ask” and the table agreeing to it. There are however some benefits to formalising this agreement.

First, it establishes a clear limit to the Misericorde Sentence’s capacity. The Vestments only do the Fiction Sentence says they do. “Wear the Black Vestments” has a psychological impact, but can’t be used to fly. Second, it makes explicit that the agreement about what the Black Vestments do is something anyone at the table could exploit with a Sentence of their own, if they can justify it, because it is always true. Third, it creates a record of how the world works, written in direct evocative language.

Wait, hold on. TTRPG writing with direct evocative language? But, does that mean…

Oh my god this is keying for nitfol players

Once upon a time a TTRPG blogger whose last name I don’t know and feel weird calling by their first, but who writes at idiomdrottning, invented a typology for playstyles that was both perspicacious and forthrightly silly.⁴ Since then readers have tended to discourse most about the blorb playstyle. The one that resonated most with me is nitfol: a mode of play focused on exploring characters with the ‘core technique’ of ‘swerve to create story’. But what I love most about the source blogpost are the vignettes detailing how different playstyles align with and grate against each other, that I read as occurring as much within a single player as they do between players. And, most useful for articulating the points I want to make here are the agreements and disagreements between an anthropomorphised nitfol and blorb.

Agreement

Blorb and Nitfol fold their hands together tightly and pray “Let us play to find out”. A pre-written story or a fair challenge isn’t interesting to them if that’s not what would’ve happened. A Nitfol player putting their character’s heart out there in Psychodrame, waiting for the hammer to fall as their loved one hesitates to give an answer they don’t want to hear. A Blorb player crossing their fingers and chanting “eight eight eight eigh” as they hope for the best possible random encounter for their Fear-stricken NPC friend as he darted around the corner.

Disagreement

Later, Nitfol tried to tell Blorb about the problems at the theatre club. “So we were standing on the stage…” “How did you get there?” “We walked… anyway, it was dark except for a soft spotlight.” “Who operated the lights, I thought you were the only ones there?” “We set the lights before we got on stage. Anyway, I was trying to add some bongos to the big proposal scene, when…” “Where did you get those bongos?” “I bought them at the pawn shop, remember? You were with me. Anyway…” “Where did you get the money for that purchase?” “Will you please just let me open my heart to you and not fiddle over every single detail! Why can’t you just trust me when I’m speaking?”

The idea this gets at about nitfol, which I feel to my bones, is that this style of play is committed to upholding the reality of the gameworld, and also, does not need or want the gameworld to be detailed. Blorb players love detail. They love describing every inch of a dungeon room, an activity called ‘keying’, and get annoyed enough when writers don’t do that to start whole podcasts. In pursuit of this goal they have developed multiple methods of writing detailed room descriptions in a way that helps GMs digest it quickly, so they can know the room within seconds, and better, know which details to pass onto their players immediately, and which to hold back.⁵ This is cool! I love it when artists throw themselves at a problem like this. But the solutions they have devised are best suited to players who need a world detailed at the micro-level. The Fiction Sentence solves a different problem.

Nitfol, as a playstyle focused on exploring character, needs a world firm enough to shape a person, create struggle, and be worth struggling against, flexible enough to not be in the way of dramatic choices on the micro-level, and responsive enough that player choices can easily leave an indelible mark in the world. Instead of an itemised list of which treasure chests are trapped and how and with what poison, nitfol works better with a principle like “Tavern keepers always booby trap their treasure chests”, and what that looks like precisely can, if it has to, be improv’ed at the table. In other words, nitfol works best with laws, not descriptions.

I am far from the first person to state how good laws are as a foundation for roleplay.⁶ What I want to convey instead is that the linguistic form of the Realis Sentence is an extremely effective way of writing out laws, much as the techniques Gal describes in The keys to my heart are effective methods for worldbuilding at the micro-level. To quickly address why I think this: the core term ‘always’ makes the Sentence un-ignorable, something a player must actively confront or evade; centring the Sentence on a verb means that the world is always acting, moving, living, and a live world brings life to characters too; and the conditions offer a tidy means of changing the established fiction, while still building on what went before.

So, ok, say that the Realis Sentence offers a neat linguistic structure for nitfol keying: what’s the use of this? Well, if we shift perspective on Sentences from seeing them as a mechanic that belongs to a particular game, to a method of communicating information in role play in general (of a specific sort), that suggests we need not wait to play Realis to start making use of Sentences. For example…

Sentences beyond Realis

My first thought for how to use Sentences in the game of Songs for the Dusk I am currently playing in, is to use them to get a better grasp on my character.

More specifically I am using the structure of Sentences to refine an approach to roleplay I learned from Weird Writer.⁷ In her words:

I think that the canon of play is the most interesting version of a character, and therefore prefer to play them for a while, take notes of what actions seemed natural in the moment, and, much like a reader, infer from such actions the underlying psychology that will inform the actions of future sessions.

WW sets down these inferences as principles she then uses to guide future roleplay. For WW the chief goal of roleplay is transparency, specifically transparency of response (‘Everyone else knows what [Giovanna] will likely do at any moment’), because this allows for more collaborative play: when you know how a character will try to resolve a conundrum, you know better what situations to put them in/dramatic questions to ask of them, that may provoke further thought and growth. Unfortunately, when I tried to do this myself with my Songs character Left Field, I don’t think my principles proved to be particularly transparent. I have pasted them below.

Left Field principles V1

Left Field…

• Runs off the cliff, never looking down
• Thinks the bigger they are, the harder they fall
• Associates machines with destruction and death
• Does not want young people to act like he does
• Hates surrender
• Thinks he looks amazing

My problem with these was I struggled to turn them into action. I found them evocative, but not easily useable. Which is the exact problem that the Sentence form resolves, through making the principles unignorable, centring action, and offering conditions. Framed as Sentences, Left Field’s character principles now explicitly state the actions he will tend to take in the world under specific conditions. They are as follows:

Left Field principles V2

Left Field always believes the bigger an enemy is, the harder it will fall

Left Field always tries to persuade with principle not pragmatism

Left Field always throws the second punch

Left Field always supports people he likes by telling them how great they are

And the retired Sentence:

Left Field always used to wear the loudest outfit

Expressed in this form, I think my principles for playing Left Field just got more actionable for me, and transparent for my fellow players. I’m very excited to test them out!

To conclude, this has been a real winding road of a piece. I started with a mechanical tweak to Realis, moved into some dense TTRPG theory/practice replete with purposefully silly terms, and ended in saying how I was going to maybe roleplay a bit better. I have wondered multiple times while writing this whether this blog would not be better served by being split in two, or three. But I have also dissuaded myself from this because, while the thought path of this blog visits many points, I needed every stop to really understand properly why it was that reading and reckoning with Realis has been my brain’s chief obsession for months. Knowing now one reason for this is that, in addition to being a novel type of storygame, it contributes a formal innovation applicable to all games writing, is such a relief! It means I don’t have to wait to play the game to make use of its contribution. No matter what TTRPG I am playing, I can always use the Sentence.