The Meta-arc
The Past
There are two hobbies I enjoy above all others; worldbuilding and roleplaying games. They're symbiotic activities for me. In the former I get to imagine new worlds, what events created them, the structures and boundaries and edges. In the latter I get to take on a role in these fictional worlds and feel what it's like to inhabit them, what sorts of creatures and characters would occupy them.
I took up tabletop roleplaying games in my teens. I don't generally remember my childhood, huge swaths of my past are blank space, but my gaming memories endure. I remember the social moments, the stories, the people, the epic moments hinging on the caprice of the dice... but I also remember the books. I remember the joy of opening a new sourcebook or adventure and exploring not just the fantastical, but the structure placed around it, the ways in which the author conveyed their mechanical aesthetic, the way they built challenges and threats out of text and tables, the way the rules as much as the setting demonstrated how they played.
As someone who has always struggled with social interactions TTRPGs offered a way to interact with others, but these books and the worlds and rules within them showed me a way to build structure into those things without predetermining narratives or characters.
The broader game defining rules, the 'core rules', provided a sense of fairness and safety, a common language for strengths and limitations that a group could gather around. An architecture for social engagement. I needed this because I was a small, shy, and awkward kid with anxiety and emotional issues who didn't really know how to interact with people in the real world. Not everyone came to the game with that baggage but some people did and for me the core rules were like a treaty, an agreement that offered guidance and psychological safety. The core rules were the boilerplate for a group consensus or constitution. The DM/GM/Referee/Storyteller might guide the events, interpret the rules, but the rules themselves gave some assurance about what was possible, reasonable, or appropriate and what wasn't. Each decision by the DM was setting precedent and each 'table rule' or homebrew system was a new treaty. These were moments when the group self-defined; the setting, the story, the aesthetic, and their relationships to each other.
Within the core rules and throughout the artefacts of the genre though, there was another kind of rule that always deeply appealed to me. A clever game or adventure designer could, in a single paragraph or table, express some feature of the setting and system that could produce a thousand interesting narrative moments. A table for rolling outcomes of using a magic item, a paragraph outlining possible actions and responses that might occur in an adventurers investigation of a room in a dungeon, or a list of things an NPC might believe or know. Functionally, these were if/else statements, logic hidden in tables and text, tools for the overburdened DM. Each one was like a gem to me. Each one let my imagination run wild with possibilities and each sourcebook or adventure could have dozens or hundreds of these and they scratched an itch I couldn't name or define at the time.
The Present
I don't know how much of this is me and how much of this is a common experience but as time passed the core rules became background. There weren't really arguments or discussions about them, we just came to know each others intentions and expectations. We knew what the DM would let us get away with, where we could push things, when to roll the dice and accept the outcome, and when to put the dice down and tell a story. The rules had established a pattern of practice that made them reference instead of law. But then I started to notice two overlapping things:
- The rules became extensions: When rules came up it was usually because some new system was needed either outside and beyond the core rules, or extended from them. Balance breaking higher level abilities, vehicles, followers, strongholds, etc. The rules came up when new elements entered the game because they fell outside the main game activities of "explore", "talk", "fight". They were ways to add variety and opportunity.
- The rules became friction: When it wasn't about some new system, referring to the rules became an indication of a problem. A place where the party diverged in some way. The rules were referenced as authority, as a way to decide the path out of a real-life conflict of intent, aesthetic, or belief. The treaty always held but for some the rules chafed.
For my part I was somewhere between a peacemaker and a storyteller. I was always trying to find the answer or frame the decision in a way that would keep everyone happy and tell a good story. Because what was the point of this fun social activity if people weren't having fun and what was the point of telling a story if it was a bad one?
Undeath
I started with D&D 2nd Edition but its edges were too constrictive for the story for my DM wanted to tell so he made a custom system. It blended elements of D&D, Fallout, White Wolf's World of Darkness and probably a hundred other influences I was too daft to understand. Character advancement was with points from a catalog, there were action points to define what could be done in a turn, the system supported non-human and non-demihuman characters. My DM had a binder with the rules, a source book for our table alone. It was great. Most of what I've made today wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't watched my DM carve out his own space for his own stories.
There was also something poetic about it all. It was in the context of a Ravenloft campaign where our characters had all died and come back as some form of undead. It was a story of death and rebirth as something different and more powerful and the system had done the same thing as the characters. You could see the bones of D&D in it, but it had developed new abilities by feeding on other systems. It was messier, had more sharp edges, but undeniably more interesting.
Exploration
Around that time I started to branch out into other game systems. The first one, and one which has stuck with me, was the World of Darkness. WoD exposed me to a much more narratively driven game system, one focused on tone over technicalities. Early on it was copies of the LARP handbook and I remember being enamoured with the flexibility, the tone, the drama. I wouldn't actually play the game with others until later, and only attended 2-3 sessions of a Vampire LARP, mostly in the dingy upstairs of a bar. You had to know someone to get in really. I could pretend I was above it all, but it felt really neat and I just couldn't hack it. I felt too awkward, too rural and I couldn't grasp the political intrigue of it. I wanted action and plot and excitement and I had a few moments of it, but my memory for faces and names is atrocious, and my sense of style doubly so. The ungenerous version: I was not made for a game that mostly amounted to hanging out with other horny teens and twenty somethings and doing improv exercises. I was just too stiff and awkward (rizzless?) and too in my own head to fake it. But I learned a lot and it sticks with me to today.
Other games came and went with varying durations. GURPS, Cyberpunk 2020, Scion, Firefly, and more. Each one was a learning experience. But the two other biggest games for me were ones I ran. New World of Darkness and D20 Modern. There were four different campaigns and I only remember the broad order, not which ones actually came first:
- Bound Spark: A near-future pre-apocalyptic cyberpunk style story run using a modified World of Darkness system. Badass characters, big fights, lots of big epic moments in a world that was in some ways weirdly prescient; isolationist USA, pandemics, megacorporations like 'McMicroBucksMart', rapidly emerging technology pushing the boundaries of identity. Not the first time I ran my own game, but definitely the first time I finished one.
- The City of Nod: A modern urban fantasy story with people pulled from the real world into the crossroads pocket universe of the eponymous city. Again, using heavily modified new World of Darkness rules. More big moments, drama, focus on myth and legend over science but still informed by cyberpunk with corporations drafting monsters for use in their plans, dragons imprisoned and used as fuel, strange magics and creatures that referenced real world religion and myth seen through a skeptic's eyes. More religious fanatics than Bound Spark. No ending that I recall but lots of great moments.
- Green Earth: The sequel to Bound Spark, taking place in a world changed by the choices the characters made at the end of that story. A world of arcology cities fighting against an ever expanding and intelligent 'Green', a nanotech plague. This one used a blend of Modern 20, World of Darkness, and Star Wars rules. This was more science fantasy than cyberpunk with 'Sentinels', individuals who could use the ambient nanotech of the setting to do incredible things (modelled on select Jedi abilities from Star Wars and nWoD abilities). Wild legions fighting the Green, chaotic outpost cities, strange monsters, urban intrigue.
- Pax Noctis: My second kick at urban fantasy, this time in the fictional city of 'Midway'. This was a cross-species New World of Darkness story. PC's included a Promethean, a Changeling, a Mage, a Werewolf, a Kitsune, a Hunter... all working for the 'St. Germaine Foundation', a sort of pre-SCP SCP doing monster of the week style adventures. I took the nWoD creatures out of their predefined social structures and largely positioned them as a motely crew in conflict with said structures. Took some big shots and not all of them landed, but the effort to find some balance between the various types of character, to create a story about the power in differences, was well worth it.
Then came Aeldos, an original science fantasy setting and the associated unnamed system that would eventually become Praxis. Aeldos deserves its own post some time but it was basically my focus for me 30's. I ran four different campaigns in it and a couple one-shots but Aeldos was only possible because I learned from the previous stories and systems. And I haven't even mentioned the campaigns I played in, other than that first one. Lots of D&D, but also forays into stranger domains like a GURPS game where I played a monster, an original scifi setting called Event Horizon, a Scion game as a child of Anubis, a Firefly game as a dashing male courtesan. Nor have I touched on the "interactive fiction", the online games where the rules were thin and character and story was the focus...
Praxis
If you've read this far, and if you're familiar with the systems I've mentioned, then you can see the edges of Praxis. It's current iteration, informed by all of the above, actually started as a collaborative attempt between three DMs to brainstorm and build something that we could share, that aligned our sensibilities. Shared documents, in-person playtesting, integration into campaigns. It was a fun second project but we were all busy, valued different things, and thought in different directions. One of the DM's moved away, the other had a kid, and the energy to sustain it slipped. But that early work sparked something in me, a desire to carve out my own specific mechanical space for telling stories with my friends.
The current iteration of Praxis is the progeny of that system and all the cobbled together systems before it. It's a system that was built out through the construction of a half-dozen fictional worlds, thousands of hours of game time, and countless dice rolls and dramatic moments and this latest version is my attempt to create something that's distinctly mine. A system with a solid core, modularity, and the ability to cross genres, but moreover an attempt to not just build rules but also tools. Tools for storytellers and players to build what they want, play how they want. Tools for roleplaying, worldbuilding, and collaborative storytelling online that aren't focused on replicating a tabletop experience. The kinds of tools that help me and hopefully the ones that help others. So that's what Praxis is.
Conclusion
I've no illusion that Praxis will be of note in the annals of gaming. It's got too much DNA from other systems, obvious conclusions, too much simplicity or complexity in the wrong places. It's got enough of me in it to be awkward and stiff and I'm constantly getting lost in the meta, in building tools instead of running the games I should be running to vet and evolve them. Short of some radical shift in my circumstances I doubt I'll ever put the effort into marketing it and it might be years until I run another game.
But that's fine. While I want others to be able to enjoy it, I built it (and continue to build it) for myself more than anyone else. As an ST and as a person with social anxiety and OCD, I need the structure and as a person into their 40's it's the rough equivalent of puttering in the garage on a kit car or making tables and chairs or gardening. Whatever it is, I enjoy the effort, and I'm making a bit of progress every day. Right now the goal is to put it out there in a way that makes it useful, easy to read, to commit to a core, a structure and share it.
Maybe a day will come soon when I'll be done that step, when the rules and tools will be good enough and I'll get that urge to put the signboard back up looking for players.