Press The Beast

blorb sucks and Nathe Principles

Recently, beloved blogger elmcat wrote a good post providing some clarifications about what blorb is through describing what it ain't. While I get that the blorb principles have helped people, they are less helpful than they seem: blorb is wrong about numerous elements in roleplaying games and gives the wrong lessons about facilitating games, missing the forest for the trees and misleading probably hundreds of very anxious people.

Let's lay out some Nathe Principles, through which we will discuss blorb:

The players have no agency within the game world because the world isn't real. The referee makes everything up and it is by their judgements that the world lives or dies. It is for them to retcon, alter, change, destroy, etc, any established fact at any moment based on their whims.

The players have agency because they are real human beings sitting at the table. Like the referee, they are able to transmute elements in the game world via negotiation, declaration, bullying tactics, bribery, or through whatever means their morals allow. The character never does anything—the player says stuff and negotiates with the referee, and if they bring beer they will be more successful at achieving their aims.

It is very easy to make things up if you practice at it and have a strong imagination. The blorb principles state that:

This is why you see so much OSR stuff that’s just a terse list of enemies and their HD pretty much. That’s the least-improvisable part.

It is so easy to make up as many monsters with as much or little HD as you wish. It is easy to do this during sessions—the ease at which "game elements" (as in, things with mechanical bits and bobs like monsters or spells) are quickly whipped up on the fly doubletime is the prime advantage of systems in the OD&D family as opposed to others.

blorb presumes a primacy of game elements that is counter to the nature of the hobby: it is a social hobby, and treating the game elements as prime forgets that, actually, people are core to games—it's thinking the disc is more important than the homies in a game of frisbee.

To referee is to perform, and performance at the table is always more important than prep. The primary skills in refereeing RPGs are very similar to those of performance, improv, and storytelling. You are performing to your players to impart a certain tone or urgency and using emphasis in narration to concretize elements of the game world in play. Your prep will be better if you throw out all the blorb advice and instead focus on dramatic and descriptive clarity. Render characters and places with a single stroke!

There are hundreds of unwritten blog posts on techniques of referring, a subject vastly more important than how to make encounter tables, or whatever.

Prep is obviously useful (It's the script for the rehearsal, but crucially not the rehearsal itself), yet I often see it being done to address a compulsive itch or a habit of anxiety, instead of for any useful end. This is because people are afraid of performing and try to cover this deficit with spreadsheet-headed ruminations, or because the hobby they actually want to do isn't RPG playing but aspirational game design.

Being excited and genuine and bringing your biggest and best self to the table will do more for your game than any amount of prep. Being genuine friends with your players and developing rapport over months and years will do more for your game than anything else. The answers aren't in your prep.

Make things dramatic when you feel like it because it is fun and may be appropriate for your game. Make encounters, weather, etc, up based on your Natheicle (a Nathe oracle, a little muscleman inside your head that tells you to be brave) and do what feels right. The basic schematic of the OSR sandbox game are so simple that once your training wheels are off you can use or abandon procedures as you see fit, and should. Remember that these are games for children.

Tools need to be useful to be worth investing time in. The worst part of the blorb principles I will quote in full:

The DM is asked a question like, for example: what’s in the office?

Always work in that order, top to bottom, only falling to a lower tier of truth when you have to.

A campaign that’s built on all T2 and T3 truths isn’t as engaging as one that has some solid T1 framework in there (in a cloud, bones of steel), but as you patch holes (as T3 instructs you to) feel free to patch them with mechanics and general solutions (i.e. T2 truths). That’s you building a DM’s toolbox.

The problem here is simple: what if it doesn't matter what's in the office? Who the fuck cares? If you are playing a game called Office Crawlers or 9-5 Billy then, yeah, a solution is probably in order. If you are playing The Harlem Shakers then fuck off, "What's in the office?" "Office stuff." Holy shit, I am aghast at the manifold horrors—the players have to imagine on their own what is in the office!!

More broadly, this line of thinking is similar to a very famous and good blogpost called In Praise of Legwork. The key is that the latter article is specifically about complete modules written to be used by others—yes, those should have all the requisite detail needed to experience their adventuresome highs and lows. The home campaign is a different sort of beast, and prep could, for instance, be a list of adjectives which are used and scratched off, a small hex region with one sentence descriptions, a cool picture, a memorized series of events which the players will have to respond to, a game of mafia: I have used all of these examples to great success and many more.

Being stressed about what is in an office is a waste of time. It is dumb, unless it comes up repeatedly and you decide, as a human being instead of a fella using a heuristic, that, yeah, it's time to make the office procedure. This goes for the rest of the game. Cook that shit low and slow—do not invent problems for yourself, "patching holes" that do not exist. Do not worry about the "salience" of your game: it is not real. The game is a chimerical moment that exists between you and your players, entirely false and invented.

There is no quantum ogre because the game isn't real. Quantum elements are completely okay. You can make up as much or as little is needed for you to facilitate your game, and introduce whatever you like whenever you feel like it. The use of quantum elements in game does not necessarily invalidate player choice, that doesn't make any sense. I assume you know what the quantum ogre is: an encounter that occurs whatever path the players travel. Yeah—if you want players to meet a certain NPC just plop him in the next village. If you decide the next encounter roll will be a spurned lover chasing her former paramour, the party's Cleric, then that's very based and cool. How does this invalidate player agency? What are you talking about? Other quantum elements are the same. As you invent and introduce elements into the game world, context slowly accretes and it is how that context is deployed by players and referee that determines agency and a feeling of solidity. The referee may draw on established threads or relax them as they see fit; same for the players, who are their own kind of god.

Likewise, it's okay to balance combat on the fly if you had meant for it to operate one way and you fucked it up and you didn't know, or whatever. How could that not be okay? Who is saying these things? I already know it's people spurned by the 5e play culture, don't even tell me. If you presume the need for balance feel free to hotfix live, or just be cool and make every encounter 1d100 Ghouls.

"Diegetic mechanics" or not don't matter, who gives a shit, use what is easy and nice for you and your players. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun; gaming power grows out of... mechanics you are comfortable manipulating.

blorb sucks. Beyond these various exciting and novel Nathe Principles, the reason runs as follows.

Elmcat states in summary that "Blorb is making sure the prep isn't compromised so referee discretion doesn't undermine player choice." This is, on the surface, a fine idea, except that it includes the misleading assumption that prep can be compromised. Woah! This is a scary world for me. I'm out here playing games and having fun and shit, I'd never play games again if my prep could be "compromised". Likewise, "undermine player choice" frames whether or not player choice is respected as hinging on the prep that exists, instead of the player's own will, the referee's capacity to respond to player decision, and the ability of both parties to negotiate in good faith based on precedent, rapport, etc. It is fundamentally a matter of referee discretion first and foremost—a thing implicitly demonized in Elmcat's summary and blorb as a whole.

I would go as far as to say that blorb is "evil." It is a bad step mother that tells you to distrust your instincts. It is a wicked Dilbert, who consigns thee to spreadsheets when you could flit about in the fairy realm of imagination. Likewise, it looks down on players who, apparently, have very little to do or say about this whole roleplaying thing.

In short: imagine the chad gumshoe referee next to the virgin blorb referee.