What Miles Davis Can Teach Us About RPG Design
Not the famous trumpet player. Although the Miles Davis I know does play the trumpet.
He studied trumpet and music in college. He's got a masters degree in it, in fact. As a masters student in music, you learn a lot about the writing styles of famous artists and composers. And your asked to compose in the style of so-and-so. This struck him as odd because it's not like Mozart set out to compose in the style of Mozart. He set out to play what sounded good to him. Mozart's style was only later defined by scholars in hindsight.
Miles also told me that when you're a trumpet player named Miles Davis, people expect you to be familiar with his music. And so Miles came to realize a few things. The famous Miles Davis wasn't a great trumpet player in terms of technical ability. And the music he wrote reflected his limitations--how he'd tend to avoid certain notes towards the ends of his phrases because he lacked the breath to pull it off. He learned to innovate within his limitations. One has to wonder, though, what his music would have sounded like had he been a better trumpet player. Maybe he wouldn't have innovated the way he had. Maybe he wouldn't have become famous.
It also reminded me of Roger Bannister, how he became famous by being the first man to run a mile in under 4 minutes. Before he accomplished this feat, it was largely believed to be a biological impossibility. But now tens of thousands of people have done it. The idea I'm trying to highlight is that when you look to the facts of the past, you can only ever observe what has actually happened. You can't see what could have been. And so when you draw patterns or conclusions or devise theory based on the available facts, there's always a blind spot. The best expert opinions on the eve of Roger Banister's 4-minute mile was that it was impossible.
When it comes to RPGs, a lot of the old-school games were about getting you playing. As you played, you'd hash out rulings as befitted the situation. Over time, the theory goes, the rules would become so numerous there had to be a cleaning up of things. The process of cleaning up generally consists of looking back to how the game is played and then finding the simplest, neatest way of summing up and expressing what has been done in the past.
For example, if we were to look at AD&D's strength table and the probability of opening doors, convert it to a percentage, round it to the nearest 5% increment, and then express that as a number to make or beat on a roll of d20, you can observe that the number needed for a 3 strength is 18, for an 17 strength it's 11. Over a difference of 14 points, the open doors target number needed drops by 7 points. Simplicity and elegance practically demands for a nice, simple formula that says for each 2 points of strength, you increase the probability (or decrease what you need on the d20 roll) by 1 pip. From there, all one has to do is define "14" as the base target number on a d20 for someone of 10 Strength to kick open a stuck door, then for each 2 points of Strength above 2, a +1 bonus is added to the d20 roll, or subtract -1 for each 2 points of strength below 10. Is this starting to sound familiar?
The probability for Bend Bars/Lift Gates looks to be off from Open doors by about 26-43%, 33% on average, or 7 pips. So now we can just set a target number for bending bars at 21. Locked doors (which normally require exceptional strength to open) are 50 points lower in probability on the percent scale than the open doors probability, or 10 pips on the d20 scale. So busting open a locked door now gets a target number of 24. And now we've eliminated the need for these tables. Everything is boiled down to a simple formula. A formula that implies how we might handle other feats of strength that may arise. So what drawbacks could there possibly be to this?
Enter the insights of Miles Davis. The formula we've crafted was based on a table. We couldn't have done so without the table first existing. When the rulings were being established that ultimately became the table, Dungeon Masters weren't thinking about how elegant the mechanic would be, or that it had to follow some pattern or formula. There was no rule at the time, so they used their best judgment and ruled according to what was thought to be reasonable. In other words, every single data point had to pass a reasonability test. Such is not the case for our formula!
Is it reasonable, for instance, that one must have at least a 12 Strength to have even a 5% chance of making the target number of 21 required to bend bars/lift gates? I don't know. What I do know is that when it came up in actual play and there was no rule for it, giving someone with even an 8 strength a token 1% chance was considered reasonable. Alternatively, if you wish a natch 20 to always be a success in the system we've created here, is it reasonable that someone with a measly 3 strength would have so much as a 5% chance to bend bars? Back when the ruling was first made, the reasonable standard didn't even give those with a 13 strength that high a probability!
The broader problem is that formulas, while possessing a symmetric beauty and perhaps being easy to recall, shape our thinking and judgment in sometimes unnatural ways. Instead of just visualizing this far-away world with these fictional characters on these fantastic adventures and using our imaginations to feel out what reasonable rulings or probabilities or modifiers would be, we know the rules and formulas in advance, and the tendency is to shoehorn the world to fit the rules. I think there's a strong analogy to be drawn to whether you're going to do like Mozart or Bach and just create whatever sounds good and feels right to you, versus doing as the professor or the text books have characterized Mozart or Bach with minimal deviation.
Moreover, as was the case with Roger Bannister, there are a lot of things that are reasonable, possible, cool, even the best thing you will ever see. They just haven't happened yet. They've never happened before. So there's no data point for it. It wasn't considered when crafting the formula. The formula can't account for them. We've just shut down an entire avenue of play, one of unprecedented excellence because it doesn't fit a formula. Formulas mire us in mediocrity.
And I feel it imperative to wrap up with, this is not a New School vs Old School argument. It's not edition warring. To continue with the analogy of musicians, there are countless musicians, even wildly famous ones, who continue to throw the book out the window and just do what sounds good to them. And there are many other musicians, some of which are also wildly famous, who continue to churn out formula music that embodies the genre. This has nothing to do with era. It has nothing to do with anyone being a "product of their time," nothing to do with anyone being a grognard, nothing to do with anyone being a snowflake. It is, however, two separate mindsets that operate in parallel.
Sadly, the mindset of the formula, I find to be extremely limited in potential, And as time will forget formulaic musicians and only remember the ground-breakers, so too, in time, will those RPGs with what is currently being termed "modern" designs be forgotten. Vampire the Masquerade is a great example since it straddles a little bit of both. It was once seen as the modern, hip thing. It's game system was simple and formulaic. The system now is laughed at as being a terrible and ripe for abuse. But it gets props for the ground it did break in terms of the characters, content, and style. Imagination will endure. Formula will be forgotten.
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