Harmonizing Mechanics and Narrative
In RPG design, this effect may be the most powerful tool for helping GMs simulate the world authentically.
His Majesty The Worm has been an epiphany for me. I’ve been dungeon mastering for a while now, across a number of different systems and genres. I’ve read a number of books in the hobby space that light a fire within me, inspiring me to run yet another game, inspiring me to finish the one I’m playing so that I can get to the next big thing. My players are probably exhausted of hearing me say, “I totally know what we’re playing next!” every other week for years, only to never hear about that game again. So when I say that His Majesty The Worm is definitely what I’m playing next, that level of self awareness should tell you that this time, I mean it.
The attribute of this game that makes me feel utterly compelled to play it lacks, to the best of my knowledge, the proper world in the English language to encapsulate the concept. I will try to describe it over the course of this article, beginning with an example from the combat mechanics of the game.
For those not yet acquainted, the game forgoes dice in favor of Tarot cards - a very bold decision in a hobby which enthusiastically elevates the crazed, frenzied hoarding of math rocks to the level of holy virtue. In the Challenge phase, more often than not involving combat, players draw a grip of Tarot cards that they will play at different opportunities, including to take an action.
The first thing a character does is more important, though - they take one of their cards and lay it face down. This is their initiative. Initiative does, as one might expect, determine what order players take their main turns in, but it also serves as an ascending armor class. Low initiatives act first, but then you have low armor; high initiatives act later in the round, but have higher armor class in return.
Narrative Harmonization
Right away, there’s a narrative harmonization to this mechanic. This is the design effect that I am so struck by when reading this book. Players make a tactical game decision - to play defensively and delay their turn, or to strike aggressively, and first, opening themselves up to later attacks.
What makes me excited to run this game is how this aids the GM in their own decision making. In other, modern RPGs, you simply roll a dice and that’s your turn number, and your armor class is written down somewhere. In this game, the GM asks themselves - would this creature act cautiously, or aggressively? Are they wary, or nervous, or unsure? Or are they leaping at their prey with reckless abandon? Depending on the disposition and instincts of the creature they are roleplaying, the GM makes a decision that is informed, not arbitrary.
It can be so difficult for a GM to play enemies and NPCs in ways that make sense in the fiction, often because there are simply so many and, in the case of systems like 5th Edition D&D, there’s very little in the system that harmonizes the narrative and the mechanics this way. Any system that goes out of its way to “play itself” deserves accolades, and His Majesty The Worm makes such considerations on every page.
Turning Reactions into Dispositions
The 2d6 reaction roll is a staple of old school play. Roll your two favorite cubes, and interpret them simply - low numbers are hostile, high numbers are friendly. Some systems will overload this dice to imply a bit more about the scenario, but at the end of the day, regardless of how much you overload it or how many versions of the tables you create, it’s still a non-harmonic endeavor. You roll a value, look it up on a table, and use the result.
For a harmonic alternative, creatures have dispositions in His Majesty The Worm. They run the gambit of emotional and psychological states, and can be manipulated by players, the environment, or conditions. Moving along the star-shaped graph of dispositions makes sense both mechanically and narratively - you’re not going to move an angry naiad directly to a trusting disposition because you complimented their waterfall. Instead, you have to shift them from angry to annoyed, then to content before accepting. If you succeed, you have the opportunity to make them trust you.
The graph of dispositions and the mechanics for moving NPCs from one part of the graph to the other make sense mechanically, and gives the GM an easy-to-follow path to get them from angry to trusted, a path that the party has already chosen. Making things straight forward in this way, for the sake of the overworked GM, shows a level of thoughtfulness that is hard to find, even in the most modern games.
Let’s Spend 4 Hours Buying Rations (said nobody, ever.)
No table wants to spend a whole session bookkeeping their supplies. In many games, especially those with a simulationist bent, your supplies, torches, rations, spell components, and tools are vital to the ethos of the game, but it is a mind numbing tedium that keeps players out of the important part of the game, where meaningful decision making takes place. As a result, most groups will handwave over this in one of many ways. They might remove the handling of rations entirely, or assume everyone had the chance to resupply their ammunition and spell components and did so without having to say anything.
I have always found this deeply unsatisfying. Either your game really cares about this, or it doesn’t. If it does, lean in. If it doesn’t, lean out. But so many games, especially those in the Old School circle, simply create their tables of prices and lets players and DMs figure out what they want to do. There’s merit to this, I suppose. Let the players decide, and all that. But when there’s no middle ground to ride upon, and your rules plant themselves firmly there, it just creates more work and friction at the table.
His Majesty The Worm gets this right yet again.
Players have slots in their inventory. They have stuff in their pack, stuff hanging from their belts, and stuff in their hands. One item takes a slot. Maybe two if it’s big. This part is intentionally as simple as it gets.
The elegant part is resupplying in the City phase. You have already decided to pay a sum of gold to determine your current lifestyle - destitute, impoverished, common, luxurious. Depending on which of those you choose to pay for, you simply… get all the stuff you want that’s available. If you are impoverished or destitute, you can’t get common goods. If you’re living a common lifestyle, you can get everything but luxurious goods. Fill up your pack to the brim, and then set out again.
It is revolutionary in its simplicity. [Note: So much of this game stands on the shoulders of the games that came before it, and the community that produces such thoughtful mechanics. If there is a predecessor to some of these mechanics, I’m not yet aware of it. I give credit to it all.] No more haggling about prices, no more questions about encumbrance, no more drawn out checklists.
This mechanic reinforces its own narrative - players want luxurious lifestyles to have access to all the goods - characters want luxurious lifestyles to live in luxury. The goal becomes the reward which becomes the goal. It’s a self reinforcing loop that makes sense in the fiction. It’s a good idea placed in just the right spot.
There are so many good ideas in His Majesty The Worm. I can (and likely will) write many more articles and many more pages extolling its virtues as I continue to digest, and eventually play, this superlative game. I look forward to giving the game my full-throated recommendation as soon as I’ve had the chance to lead my players within. Until then, I would love to hear your favorite examples of narrative/mechanical harmonization.
A very experienced GM and player of my acquaintance has a maxim when it comes to RPG mechanics - Don’t mechanise and mandate something that I want to do as a player or GM anyway. As applied to ‘reactions’ I’ve always misliked the ‘mechanising’ of social interactions through those ‘reaction tables’ because, as a GM and as a player, I’m going to want to play those interactions out and no amount of tables and modifiers can account for all of the variables that players and a GM can come up with. Provided that the GM and players have a shared handle on the fiction - how reactions play out when confronting a bugblatter beast under the Lost Temple of Bibble will be very different from a street encounter with a policeman in Edwardian London - then I don’t see any need for any explicitly social mechanic at all. Adhering to some very basic character stats and abilities and adjusting for circumstances in play is enough. But I do understand that, for some groups who are not so interested in RP, a mechanical table and ability check is a way to avoid what they find uninteresting and, from your description, the table(s) in this game are an improvement on the ‘roll X dice and compare result to derive a single emotional state’.