Levels of play
Channels of engagement
I was rewatching Quinn’s review of Mothership (as a nerd like myself does) and got stuck on something he complained about. Namely, he complained about a lack of connective tissue between the PCs.
I had a kind of strange reaction to this insight: You know you don’t need rules to do this right? If the players want that then they should make it happen, they don’t need mechanics for this?
This might sound like I’m about to go on a rant defending old-school play. Not quite. This got me thinking about the types of play that humans can engage in, and how different games focus on different kinds of play.
Let’s get cracking.
Level 1: Directed play
Imagine you’re a kid on a playground and you use whichever piece of equipment a parent/guardian tells you to. You use the equipment exactly as they tell you. They point at the slide and tell you how to use the slide, you go get on the slide, and you slide down it.
That’s directed play: an exterior force, the rules or a GM, not only tells you exactly how to play but also tells you what to play with. It’s the most basic form of play.
Level 2: Play as selected but also as intended
You’re a kid on a playground again, but this time you choose which bits of equipment to use. The adult is still going to tell you how to use the slide though: if you pick the slide, you’re going to climb up to the top using the steps and slide down.
At level 2, you might be picking what kind of character ability to use in a tactical combat game or engaging with a specific procedure by choice (perhaps a carousing procedure for example). You’re picking what to play with, but you play with the thing in a way as expected by an exterior force.
Level 3: Free play within an intended domain
You’re on that playground again, but now you aren’t beholden to the specific intended function of the equipment. You’re using the playground equipment as a free climbing jungle, with only the physics of the world, the equipment, and your body, limiting what you can do. You walk up the front of the slide, you do backflips assisted by the swing chains.
You’re still engaging with the equipment in a physical way, which is the domain of the intended play of the equipment, but you’re not beholden to artificial rules: only the laws of the world itself, rather than a rulebook.
This is the domain where the character sheet falls away: you ask to do something in a game, the GM judges if it is reasonable, and it gets resolved as needed, with procedures being used if they are helpful and suited.
Level 4: Self-actualised play
You’re on the playground, but decide you want to add another layer. You’re going to pretend to be an explorer as you climb the equipment, in fact you’re going to label each piece of equipment as some kind of landmark to be found.
Nothing about the equipment or its design explicitly tries to invite this, but you make it happen anyway. This is self-actualised play: when a person or people playing a game expand the scope and domain of a game without instruction or intention embedded in the game as presented.
You’re still limited by the physics of the world, but you’re stepping outside the intended domain of play.
In Mothership, this is exactly what Quinn’s players could have done. They could have actively built relationships between their PCs whilst playing the game despite there being no rules for it. They could have made it happen.
The function of each level
Level 1 play is ideally minimised in an rpg because it lacks agency, unless the objective is to limit agency as a form of horror, narrative theme, or fail state. Level 1 is often featured in fail states: you walked into the trap so now you will make a save. You don’t get to choose, the GM calls for the save and now you have to engage with the mechanic.
Level 2 is often the focus of ‘tactical’ rpgs or rpgs where the aim is to encode as much of the game as possible in the rules. You’ll also see this used in rpgs focused on level 3 when they actually want to not care about something. Combat in OSR games is often a level 2 form of play: it’s a procedure. That’s because they don’t care about combat so much.
Level 3 is what we see in lighter games, and is probably best exemplified by Free Kriegsspiel Revolution (FKR) since it minimises mechanical rules to the extreme. It enables, to my mind, the most diegetic form of play: the physics of the fictional world are above the rules. Rules are not provided for swimming because a GM can make a better judgement on swimming than the rules can (in theory).
This is often a junction point: many people who like level 2 play struggle with level 3 play because it is less calculable and asks for a player to understand a world rather than a set of rules. It’s also higher trust: it requires players to trust a GM above the rules.
Level 4 play is when the game table self-actualises and adds their own forms of play on top of the rules or game world that is presented by a GM. In the case of Mothership: there are no rules for character relationships.
Level 4 play is deciding you want that and building it through play. For many people, they end up needing to construct something extra at level 2 to make this work, but others don’t need explicit rule frameworks and are happy to make things happen diegetically.
A conflict explanation?
In retrospect, I think a lot of player (and GM) incompatibilities I’ve witnessed come down to people having preferences for these different levels of play. Particularly what I’ll call the level 2 - level 3 gap. This is one of the biggest differences I can see in systems: some focus on level 2, some on level 3.
Players who like level 2 style play struggle with the openness of level 3, and level 3 preferring players struggle with the constraints and anti-diegesis of level 2.
No game is purely one or the other, but games often lean one way.
Level 4 play is often what I think is lacking when you hear stuff like ‘I didn’t really like this game because it didn’t support me in this’. My instinctual thought is: did you try to make it emerge diegetically from your game?
And often the answer is no if the players prefer level 2 fun, because they require an explicitly stated structure to engage with something.
Mothership is a level 3 play focused game: and so it expects that if you want some other flavours in there, you’re going to add it via what I’ll call diegetic invocation.
Diegetic invocation
Diegetic invocation: The act of players engaging diegetically with the world to create forms of play not currently in the game.
If you want there to be a homebase-building aspect to your game but it doesn’t have rules for it, you can still make it happen by diegetically focusing on that objective. Now of course, your GM might say no if you attempt to build a homebase, and I’d respect that.
There are no rules for homebase-building in Mothership, but I’m sure plenty of Wardens would comfortably arbitrate that happening in their games without inventing a whole level 2 system that gave you specific rules for doing homebase-building. They can use what the rules already give them plus judgement to honour that diegetic invocation.
Not a strict model, just a framework for thoughts
This isn’t an attempt at a formal theory here, just a way of thinking about the ways in which we play. I think it might be useful for understanding:
Rules/system design.
Preferences of players.
Why people have such different experiences with rulesets and adventures.
I’m going to keep this in mind when looking at rpg stuff in the future. Now I know what was behind my thoughts about Quinn’s comment. His table doesn’t have a preference for level 4 play: they want level 2 structures. And that explains a lot!
When running MoSH games I have every person develop a succinct background for their character to allow them to explore who their character is, what motivates them, and what they tend to do or respond in certain situations. This information is for the player and they determine when to share if ever. When playing the game, I tell the players to not tell me what their characters wants to do, but tell the table what their characters are doing. When playing the game, you are the character. This gets into the theater of the mind and allows the characters to play off one another organically. I like it as a Warden because it keeps me on my toes and gives the entire table a space to create the story together. MoSH modules tend to support this play by producing frameworks that I can use as a scaffold to build an engaging world that can be as fluid as you want or need it to be.
There was a moment in my second Thundarr the Barbarian game (using TSR Marvel Superheroes) where they had found the wizard Gemini's "hoard." They asked me what was there, and I asked them what they were looking for, what they wanted to find. It varied from player to player, but some of their heads kind of exploded. We haven't gone back to that campaign since. https://randallhayes.substack.com/p/never-you-mind-lizard-man