Getting Started

Something that occurs when learning how role-playing games work is that we are often met with the awkwardness of ourselves at the time we learn. For most of us, we learn in the midst of, or just before puberty. This leads to an incredibly weird introduction to the idea of make believe play as we are leaving childhood and entering into that torpor-like space before adulthood. While we grow up, get used to the ideas of the world, of the norms of the world, our relationship to how to "role-play" is often stunted, forgotten, or undeveloped. 

Over the years, I come back to this idea again and again. My own introduction to RPGs was not Dungeons and Dragons or RIFTS or GURPS, but Stuperpowers. In Stuperpowers, you play a super hero with an incredibly stupid super power. For example, my character could get anywhere in the world in 29 minutes but it always took him 29 minutes to get somewhere. It didn't matter if he was going to the bathroom, driving from Maine to New Zealand, or Earth to Mars. 29 minutes. I found that regardless of how I approached this character that I was always in disagreement with someone about some aspect of my character. It could be that I shouldn't have to drive somewhere or take 29 minutes to get across a hallway or it could be that my speed mattered little when it was my strength (or lack thereof) that was necessary for whatever we were doing.

I could never just play this pizza man living 29 minutes at a time. I had to live with other people with other skills that often had a tremendous impact on how I thought about those skills. Pair that with puberty, with learning the intensely goofy world of adults, and you have an entirely strange but accurate depiction of what being an adult entails. Quite often, this awkwardness comes about during moments of improv. Games like Once Upon a Time, A Quiet Year, Icarus, Microscope, or RPGs often referred to as "Story Games" all press us to reconnect with a skillset that we might never have developed. 

I love improv games, story games, narrative-driven games. I love thinking about how silly, serious, or underhanded I should be. How happy, how angry, how does my giant strength stat matter for this stupid character? How much does a maximized wisdom mean for a character with little intelligence? All of these things that I love about RPGs are often pushed to the wayside as the gap between a Tabletop RPG and a video game grows ever smaller. 

As an academic, I find that the Christmas Break is often a time to recharge. I spend so much time thinking, producing, and fighting for publications that the christmas break is a time to be creative, to rekindle my love of games, of improv, and of design. And so, this is where development of this game begins. I might never finish. I might finish and be unhappy with it. I might forget I even created it. But it's something to do and it makes me happy so we might as well.

Lately, i've been doing a deep dive into the history of RPGs. One of the first real innovations made by Dave Wesley and developed further by Dave Arneson, is the idea of the saving throw. Everything was a saving throw and at first, you didn't roll damage or to hit someone else, you rolled to see if you dodged a hit. It was a saving throw that would get inversed to be a roll-to-hit, which would then evolve further into one of the first algorithms many of us got exposed to: ThAC0. 

Something computers do and do well is take starkly defined variables and execute them. We can see this in D&D with our attributes: 

Strength
Dexterity
Constitution
Wisdom
Intelligence
Charisma

Each attribute is in charge of something. Its boundaries are stark and defined by the system through bonuses, links to skills, and other kinds of feats, saving throws, and checks. 

Yet, in real life, these skills are often not so stark. I may be strong but if i'm an idiot then being strong does little for me. I may be intensely intelligent, but with my low constitution and wisdom, my intelligence can be misconstrued, warped in some way I may not be able to convey through a starkly defined system like D&D. 

To that end, I think there's a space here to reach back even further than Braunstein, than Blackmoor, toward something like Diplomacy. What if improv were secret? What if all I had to do to contribute was to read sentences aloud? 

And so, Saving Throws was born.