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Part 3: Conclusions
(This is the third part of a three-part entry; read Part One here and Part Two here)
An astute reader may have noticed that this entire post is flirting with one of the gravest and most unforgivable sins in roleplaying: thinking about the game from a mechanics-first perspective, or what is sometimes known by the pejorative of "metagaming." And yet here, it not only works (in my most humbled of opinions), but the game arguably functions better when players are thinking about the game mechanics and how best to use them as tools to achieve the goals of play.
The reasons why this maligned activity is such a good fit for Shinobigami are, I think, two-fold. The first is that the level of control the game gives character-players over scene framing and description means that, in a sense, Shinobigami functions as a "GM-ful" game, one in which the traditional authorities of the GM are diffused among all of the participants. And in practice the stricture against metagaming is frequently lessened—if not lifted altogether—for GMs; a GM is expected to understand how to use the game's mechanics to progress play towards its goals, to direct fictional focus, to prime the players, and cetera.
The second is that Shinobigami is a game whose mechanics are frequently dripping with flavor. It is a game with strong fictional antecedents (practically the entire battle shounen genre is descended from Yamada Fuutarou's Ninja Scrolls series, and Shinobigami effectively takes both that series and the whole of the genre it spawned as inspiration), and perhaps more importantly these antecedents are found in highly visual narrative media. This means that the fiction produced by these mechanics in turn also carries both an easily visualizable element, and a strong narrative element; that is to say, it holds implications that can denote a character's position in any number of common storytelling structures which savvy players are likely to reach for when constructing the fiction, structures which can strongly influence the ways in which the other players likewise perceive and incorporate those scenes as an active audience expected to add to them.
In fact, this is one place where the heterodox structure of Shinobigami succeeds at something that is often held as a sort of holy grail for RPG design, but only rarely and stiltedly achieved. Most games that manage to produce strong, tight, and evocative linking of mechanics and fiction usually focus on doing so only within their combat rules; taking media like superhero comics and martial arts movies as a model, these games aim to actualize characters through the ways in which they fight, giving them any number of unique, expressive options to use in combat. Attempts to repeat this success in other domains of play frequently fall flat for a number of reasons: a paucity of semiotically charged examples to draw from as girding for the fiction, the "party conceit" of traditional RPG play encouraging specialization among characters (so that implementing complex rules for each domain of play introduces the so-called "hacker problem", where one character enacts their build while everybody else goes out for pizza), attempts to merely rote copy combat mechanics into another domain ("roll your Social Initiative and then make a Social Attack Roll to reduce your opponent's Social Hit Points"), and the like.
Shinobigami manages to sidestep common pitfalls of this design goal by centering the Social/Investigative domain as the primary focus of play, and divesting itself of the typical "Trad" RPG technique of structuring play around curated task resolution "obstacle courses" designed to showcase PC competency. In its place is a system that invites players to draw image and inspiration from outside sources, one that abstracts its own resolution checks from strict correspondence to a fictional inflection point defined by an indeterminate outcome (a common technique expressed in the maxim, "only roll when the consequences for failure are interesting"), and in so doing helps to decouple the successful expression of character from the whims of dice or even in-fiction notions of success and accomplishment.
Another theme running through this example of Actual Design is the idea of expressing or actualizing a character, about directing the player's focus towards the goal of making a certain kind of fiction happen, and the tools which the game puts at the player's disposal to do so. Not accidentally, many of the examples reference other media (something that Shinobigami's designer also noted his players regularly doing in play); these reference points furnish us with a number of interrelated systems of signs that players can hijack to bootstrap their character as a novel semiotic object.
In the introduction to The Socialness of Things, the sociologist Stephen Riggins writes that
The third and fourth sources (if they are present at all) provide largely fixed meanings; respectively, these might be our media references, and the setting text that tells us what something like the Otogi Academy or a Red Wizard of Thay actually are. The second source of meaning is interesting, as it's the one over which we have the largest amount of control during play. We engage in a kind of "painting with concepts" when we place our characters amid a milieu of other fictional objects (or vice versa); similarly, when we maneuver our characters in play from one set of fictional objects to the next (for example, from the town to the dungeon, from travel to camp, from the Shire to Mount Doom), these movements are not just tactical or narrative choices, but also have the capacity to be expressive transformations.
The first source of meaning may also present a conundrum, for how can we best understand the "physical characteristics" of purely conceptual objects? Perhaps by analogy we can replace physical existence with the machinic ontology of roleplaying game mechanics—the characteristics of a given fictional object expressed as a function of those game mechanics which can meaningfully interact with it (for example, in D&D an object with Hit Points can typically interact with the rules for dealing/taking damage). In this way, the range of possible transformations that can be mechanically enacted upon a character are always present in that character as virtual possibilities, metastable potentialities that have expressive force even while the mechanics in question are not presently acting on the character. This could be of great importance for how we interpret mechanically-complex games, and hints at one of the factors at play in the popular RPG question, "What do game mechanics do for us?"
A Spirited Defense of Metagaming
An astute reader may have noticed that this entire post is flirting with one of the gravest and most unforgivable sins in roleplaying: thinking about the game from a mechanics-first perspective, or what is sometimes known by the pejorative of "metagaming." And yet here, it not only works (in my most humbled of opinions), but the game arguably functions better when players are thinking about the game mechanics and how best to use them as tools to achieve the goals of play.
The reasons why this maligned activity is such a good fit for Shinobigami are, I think, two-fold. The first is that the level of control the game gives character-players over scene framing and description means that, in a sense, Shinobigami functions as a "GM-ful" game, one in which the traditional authorities of the GM are diffused among all of the participants. And in practice the stricture against metagaming is frequently lessened—if not lifted altogether—for GMs; a GM is expected to understand how to use the game's mechanics to progress play towards its goals, to direct fictional focus, to prime the players, and cetera.
The second is that Shinobigami is a game whose mechanics are frequently dripping with flavor. It is a game with strong fictional antecedents (practically the entire battle shounen genre is descended from Yamada Fuutarou's Ninja Scrolls series, and Shinobigami effectively takes both that series and the whole of the genre it spawned as inspiration), and perhaps more importantly these antecedents are found in highly visual narrative media. This means that the fiction produced by these mechanics in turn also carries both an easily visualizable element, and a strong narrative element; that is to say, it holds implications that can denote a character's position in any number of common storytelling structures which savvy players are likely to reach for when constructing the fiction, structures which can strongly influence the ways in which the other players likewise perceive and incorporate those scenes as an active audience expected to add to them.
In fact, this is one place where the heterodox structure of Shinobigami succeeds at something that is often held as a sort of holy grail for RPG design, but only rarely and stiltedly achieved. Most games that manage to produce strong, tight, and evocative linking of mechanics and fiction usually focus on doing so only within their combat rules; taking media like superhero comics and martial arts movies as a model, these games aim to actualize characters through the ways in which they fight, giving them any number of unique, expressive options to use in combat. Attempts to repeat this success in other domains of play frequently fall flat for a number of reasons: a paucity of semiotically charged examples to draw from as girding for the fiction, the "party conceit" of traditional RPG play encouraging specialization among characters (so that implementing complex rules for each domain of play introduces the so-called "hacker problem", where one character enacts their build while everybody else goes out for pizza), attempts to merely rote copy combat mechanics into another domain ("roll your Social Initiative and then make a Social Attack Roll to reduce your opponent's Social Hit Points"), and the like.
Shinobigami manages to sidestep common pitfalls of this design goal by centering the Social/Investigative domain as the primary focus of play, and divesting itself of the typical "Trad" RPG technique of structuring play around curated task resolution "obstacle courses" designed to showcase PC competency. In its place is a system that invites players to draw image and inspiration from outside sources, one that abstracts its own resolution checks from strict correspondence to a fictional inflection point defined by an indeterminate outcome (a common technique expressed in the maxim, "only roll when the consequences for failure are interesting"), and in so doing helps to decouple the successful expression of character from the whims of dice or even in-fiction notions of success and accomplishment.
Some Thoughts on RPG Semiotics
Another theme running through this example of Actual Design is the idea of expressing or actualizing a character, about directing the player's focus towards the goal of making a certain kind of fiction happen, and the tools which the game puts at the player's disposal to do so. Not accidentally, many of the examples reference other media (something that Shinobigami's designer also noted his players regularly doing in play); these reference points furnish us with a number of interrelated systems of signs that players can hijack to bootstrap their character as a novel semiotic object.
In the introduction to The Socialness of Things, the sociologist Stephen Riggins writes that
meanings read into artifacts are now thought to derive from at least four sources of information, only one of which is an artifacts' actual physical characteristics. The other three include: the information conveyed by objects (and space) which surround an artifact; the observer's life-long experience with similar types of artifacts, few of which will be present in a given situation; and texts about artifacts.
The third and fourth sources (if they are present at all) provide largely fixed meanings; respectively, these might be our media references, and the setting text that tells us what something like the Otogi Academy or a Red Wizard of Thay actually are. The second source of meaning is interesting, as it's the one over which we have the largest amount of control during play. We engage in a kind of "painting with concepts" when we place our characters amid a milieu of other fictional objects (or vice versa); similarly, when we maneuver our characters in play from one set of fictional objects to the next (for example, from the town to the dungeon, from travel to camp, from the Shire to Mount Doom), these movements are not just tactical or narrative choices, but also have the capacity to be expressive transformations.
The first source of meaning may also present a conundrum, for how can we best understand the "physical characteristics" of purely conceptual objects? Perhaps by analogy we can replace physical existence with the machinic ontology of roleplaying game mechanics—the characteristics of a given fictional object expressed as a function of those game mechanics which can meaningfully interact with it (for example, in D&D an object with Hit Points can typically interact with the rules for dealing/taking damage). In this way, the range of possible transformations that can be mechanically enacted upon a character are always present in that character as virtual possibilities, metastable potentialities that have expressive force even while the mechanics in question are not presently acting on the character. This could be of great importance for how we interpret mechanically-complex games, and hints at one of the factors at play in the popular RPG question, "What do game mechanics do for us?"