Looking through Stances at Luke Gearing's Boast Mechanic

Dead Letters, Boasts & Stances

This blog is about the podcast Dead Letters, Luke Gearing’s Boast mechanic, and also Stances. I’ll introduce these in turn.

Dead Letters is a TTRPG review podcast (available wherever you get your podcasts). Together, Sam Sorensen, Misha Favorov and Walid Raouda read and discuss various TTRPG rulesets and adventures, and produce insights that are clear, interesting, and often completely alien to how I tend to think about roleplay. Listening to them makes me think in new ways, and also, blog in new ways, because when someone else sees the world in a way I do not, it forces me to figure out what exactly it is that I'm seeing. So I very much enjoy the show, but, my experience is not everyone's.¹

Boasts are a level up mechanic Luke Gearing developed for his Wolves Upon The Coast hexcrawl campaign.² They work as follows:

A Character who makes a Boast of Heroic Proportions either gains 1HD or +1 Attack Bonus in addition to any wager or reward offered by others.

If they are found to shirk their Boast, they lose the HD or Attack Bonus and may never again Boast.

Those failing the Boast lose the HD or Attack Bonus, but may try again or make another Boast.

Stance is a system, devised by Ron Edwards, for classifying ‘how a person arrives at decisions for an imaginary character's imaginary actions.’³ In essence, when the GM (or a fellow player) asks “what do you do?”, how do players decide on a course of action? Edwards’ post classifies players’ decision methods into three roles: actor, author (of which pawn is a subset), and director. I however prefer a slightly different packaging.

I see Stance instead as a combination of motive, means, and identity. When asked “what do you do?” in play, a person’s response is shaped by what they want to do (motive) and what they can do (means). But in a roleplaying game, the question of who that person is, is complicated by their dual identity: the in-fiction character and the real player. This combination of motive, method, character and player, produces four different possible bases of roleplay action:⁴

1. Character motive, character means.
2. Player motive, character means.
3. Character motive, player means.
4. Player motive, player means.

I bring Stance into conversation with Boasts due to the following Dead Letters conversation about the mechanic:

MF: I think my fear with Boasts is that it does feel like it definitely requires like a high trust and high buy in table, and it does have a little bit of that like storygame, I can’t push against it, I can’t use this for problem solving…where it’s like, ‘if I’m playing optimally’, purely rules as written, I walk up and I Boast “I’m going to throw a rock at that tree”. And then I-

SS: That’s not a Boast of Heroic Proportions!

MF: Yeah no no but I mean like, what is? There’s not like a clean line on that [SS: that’s true that’s true]. And I think everybody does have to come at it y’know with like a little bit of a…non-cynical, with a little bit of a ‘I’m going to add contributions to the story that like make it more exciting rather than what are purely the most mechanically optimal mode of play’, which is normally something I think that we push back against, but it’s cool enough that I’m open to it.

This exchange threw me, because the belief, and experience, of the hosts that the Boast mechanic always demanded negotiation about whether an act was ‘heroic’, and required a ‘high trust’ table to avoid abuse, is to me bizarre. The Boast mechanic was designed for Gearing’s Wolves Upon the Coast campaign, a hexcrawl set in a fantasised dark age Northern Europe, with a geographic range aligned with viking raiding patterns, and named after the viking raiders themselves (Anglo-Saxon sources often referred to vikings as sea wolves). So surely, the definition of heroic in this instance is ‘what a viking would consider heroic’. A question to which Norse myths and decades of variously stereotypical media should provide a fairly clear direction on (mediated of course by how far along the Hemsworth's Thor to Robert Eggers' Northman scale the table wants to be). In general, killing things that are hard to kill, braving lethal elements, physical competitions (races, wrestling etc.), stealing gold, and eating and drinking a lot, would all be automatic subjects for Boasts. Ascetic denial, commercial activity, doing research, less-so.

But this answer seems never to have occurred to Sorensen and Favorov, and I think this is because we have come to this mechanic from completely different Stances.

Both of us I think imagine deciding to use Boasts with player motive. The mechanic's text describes the benefit Boasts bring to the player (more Hit Dice or combat power for the character), and does not lay out why in-fiction making a cool Boast would make a character hardier or better at fighting. It would be possible to play Boasts with a character motive - it is always the case that people and games are never locked into one Stance, and can slip in and out of different Stances as the need arises - but because the reason to do it is expressed purely in terms of mechanical benefit with no justifying lore (unlike, for example, Gearing's Warding mechanics)⁵ pursuing a Boast from a character motive would require some ideation from the player for how to justify the benefit in-fiction.

Where I and (some of)⁶ the Dead Letters Crew differ, is how we approach Boasts as a means. I think of them from a character means Stance. It is the character doing the Boasting, and as such what 'heroic proportions' means should be determined by the character's worldview (which, following the setting, should be some flavour of "viking"). Favorov on the other hand seems to want to use Boasts as a player means, e.g. something they could use to 'play optimally'. The Boast is viewed as a player means, and so around the table, the meaning of 'heroic proportions' is effectively whatever a player says it is. From this perspective, Favorov is justified in his belief that Boasts require a high trust table. However, this is a problem that I would say gets resolved by adopting a less troublesome Stance.

To sum up, Boasts are an excellent example of how a mechanic can incentivise particular Stances among people using them, and also, be employed quite differently at the table, depending on the Stance the reader brings.

Which leads me to a final exercise. I believe the Boast mechanic incentivises player motive/character means Stance. But what would it look like, if it was written to suggest a player approach it through different Stances?

Alternate Boast Mechanics

Character motive, character means.

Those who become subjects of story, become greater for the telling. Some say this is simply the result of natural hardening, that overcoming the hazards that make for good tales just makes folk stronger, much as the smith, in rising from apprentice to master, grows used to the heat of their forge. Sensible words, and yet there is not enough sense in all nine worlds to dismiss the aura of power living protagonists express, or the desire most Characters have to possess that radiance for themselves.

A Character who makes a Boast of Heroic Proportions, and demonstrates to a public that they have fulfilled it, gains 1HD or +1 Attack Bonus in addition to any other wager or reward that would result from the action.

Character motive, player means

The gods delight in those who double-down. So, when a hero faces death, dismissal or despair, and decides to confront rather than retreat, legend says they should do so with all the arrogance they can muster, to draw the bolstering attention of the divine.

A Character who makes a Boast of Heroic Proportions in the face of physical or social peril, gains 1HD or +1 Attack Bonus, in addition to any other wager or reward that would result from the action.

Player motive, player means

A Character who makes a Boast of Heroic Proportions before one or more NPCs that can understand their language, either gains 1HD or +1 Attack Bonus in addition to any wager or reward offered by others. Whether or not a Boast is Heroic depends on what actions the NPC perceives as impressive. This is adjudicated by the Referee.

Addenda

Addendum One

WR: …I think Boasts are a bit janky. [SS: Really?!] In a setting that feels as complete in its world and its lore and its fiction, I think Boasts add this level of chaos that means I need to negotiate with my player to fit in their Boast in this adventure, right, and maybe if I have run Wolves and in the perfect way their Boast will align within something that exists within the fiction of the world that you’re running in, but because there’s this negotiation there’s a bit of tension there right, you’ve reintroduced the parts in other RPGs that isn’t necessarily here.

SS: So let me clarify, let me clarify, it’s not a player making a Boast it’s a character…if you want to fulfil a Boast, you need to be able to see it [the object of the Boast]. And every Boast I’ve ever seen or heard of is…I see or hear about the monster, I hear about the treasure - they almost always in my experience point to things that already exist because players need to be able to fulfil them…It’s not incumbent on the GM to create content for the Boasts, it’s incumbent on the players to make smart Boasts they can fulfil…It’s a diegetic thing you do for an endogenous [exogenous?] bonus.

Addendum Two

SS: …it’s just saying ok, set your own quests and go do them. In practice…it is a negotiation, of every time you make a boast, there’s this question of like is this a boast of suitably heroic proportions, and there’s some waffling and you gotta like tussle about this a little bit, but generally players have a pretty good sense of it, and the open ended nature of it means you can do all kind of things. You can boast to slay monsters, you can boast to get treasure, you can boast to climb mountains, you can boast to race the bad guys…it unifies the sandbox so well.