Love Letter to Generative Art
Generative art doesn’t get appreciated enough. To be clear, I’m not talking about the generative AI slop that has flooded the internet of late, nay! I speak of Mr. Darcy's Dance Challenge, of Minecraft, and Dwarf Fortress, and all roguelikes and RPGs which let you make your own character. Let me attempt to explain.
Traditional art is art (obviously). The Artist makes choices about how to best portray their subject, what colours to use, what instruments to use, how to frame the scene. Their final piece is a single concrete thing. This is good. I like traditional art, be it painting, song or 3D model, but I don't think art can doesn't have to be so defined.
Like traditional art, generative artists need to make decisions about how best to portray their subject, but they don't work with elements, but trends, with rules that define all possible ways their subject could be created. Take for example minecraft. As you are likely aware, worlds in minecraft are randomly generated, each new game takes place in a completely unique landscape. Despite this, the worlds have an order to them, the worlds have grass on the surface, then dirt, then stone. Iron is only found underground, diamonds only on the lowest levels of the world. Sand spawns in deserts and snow on mountains. There are defined rules about what can spawn where.
All generative projects work in a similar way, they don't create a singular thing, but define a spectrum of possibilities. Roguelikes make use of tile sets that can be shuffled into new dungeons each time. Character creators use morph shapes to pack unlimited possibilities into a single model. Even a well thought out picrew is something special, where the artist doesn't know the final product and can only make pieces they think will be useful.
Wherever it's found, I think generative is neat and we should make more of it.
TTRPG Ludonarratives
As of writing this, I am in a Burning Wheels game and I've been really enjoying this. Ofcourse, this is due in large part due to how well the group plays together, but part can be attributed to the system itself. Burning Wheels is built to facilitate the dramatic player driven stories I tend to enjoy. The system is overall very good. Definitions are consistent, it's easy to understand the basics, the book is well organized, and all the subsystems work well together. That being said, this is a hit piece against Burning Wheels.
Burning Wheels is built around a basic cycle. Players make bad decisions in character to get artha. Artha is spend to increase the likelihood of success when trying to not die from their bad decisions. Artha is specifically generated by their Beliefs (what the character wants to accomplish), their instincts (what they automatically do), and their traits. Traits are described by the following.
Beliefs and Instincts are personality and behavior priorities for characters. Traits are also a kind of priority. By choosing traits, a player is stating to the world, “This is what’s most important to me about my character; these are his most prominent aspects.”There are roughly three types of traits.
- Artha generators
- Mechanical advantages
- Funny quirks
Mechanical advantages are generally good traits and don't have much influence on the story. For example 'Fearless' reduces the effect of fear and pain, 'Sight of the bat' removes the penalty for darkness and 'Deadly Precision' can increase the damage of weapons by a significant amount. These are often physical descriptors like 'healthy' or 'sprinter'.
Funny quirks are traits that neither influence the plot nor offer mechanical advantages. 'Fear of Cheese', 'Comfortable Shoes', and 'Boxum' are unlikely to come up at all, in either a good or bad way.
The problem with this system is how you acquire traits. Characters acquire traits by the other players voting for that character to acquire a specific trait based on what they did since the last trait vote. For example, if a character got into a lot of fights, they might get the 'Querulous' trait or perhaps they got the 'Obstinate' for being particularly difficult.
Players will normally remember big dramatic events, both good and bad. If you want to earn 'Fear of Cheese', you will need to bring it up at every possible moment for it to even be nominated. Once nominated, there is another hurdle, players will normally vote on traits which will cause drama. 'Fear of Cheese' doesn't have nearly as much potential for drama as 'Proud' or 'pariah' so it's unlikely that it will get voted on. The same thing will also apply to the 'mechanical advantage' traits. Perhaps you are trying to have a character art where you go from a cowardly merchant to a fearless warrior, but it will be very difficult to convince the rest of the group to give you 'Fearless' and even harder to get 'Artful Dodger' or 'Tough'.
This system isn't all bad, as it will trend towards dramatic stories with flawed characters. In turn that will give the players lots of artha. That being said, it doesn't sit entirely right with me that only a third of the traits will ever see much play. I think the game would be better served if there was a more decisive split between mechanical and non-mechanical traits, so that the drama-focused traits don't entirely crowdout the less exciting mechanically focused traits. Tags: Burning Wheels, Hit Piece, TTRPGs Created: 2025-06-04, Last updated: 2025-06-04
TTRPG Ludonarratives
It's pretty easy to talk about books, movies and TV shows. If you want to make an argument that a story is a metaphor or that a character is one thing or another, you can do so by analyzing the text then making an argument based off specific scenes, sequences of events, pieces of dialog and the historical context of the work. The Great Gatsby is pretty much universally read as about the failure of the American Dream, citing how Gatsby dies unhappy after failing to win over his life long love, Daisy. The same basic method can be used to talk about how Holmes from BBC's Sherlock(2010) is gay or why you think Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Wererabbit is a fantastic movie. The text is the same for everyone so finding evidence to support your argument is simple. This is harder to do for games. In the best case the game is linear, only ever giving the player one or two choices on how the story plays out. Spec Ops: The Line only has one choice right at the end, everyone plays the exact same story and only get the choice in how to end it. For games like this they can be analyzed more like a book, specific levels or events can be talked about to build a thesis. This method starts to fall apart as the game opens up. What is the theme of Skyrim? Well, that depends on if you sided with the Stormcloaks or the Empirals. If you joined the Dark Brotherhood or the Thieves guild or both. if you played as a warrior or a mage. Most of the constant elements of the story are gone, but we can still talk about Skyrim. Individual story lines are linear, so we can treat them as independent units. We can also discuss the game world and the mechanics. Dark Souls barely has a story in the traditional sense, yet there are dozens of video essays talking about it's themes and philosophy. Table Top Role Playing Games (TTRPG) took what few consistent elements video games had, and got rid of them. Some TTRPGs have prewritten adventures which you can purchase, but how they play out can vary wildly between groups. Did your Dungeon Master do a good job making Strahd a scary, all powerful vampire or a snivelling loser? Did the party save the orphans or did they think it was more fun to burn the orphanage down themselves? Most TTRPGs come with their own world to play in, but it is incredibly common for groups to ditch the official setting and make their own. It is hard to talk about TTRPGs like you would a book. Sometimes people talk about the ludonarrative dissonance of a game when the mechanics don't align with the narrative of the game. When you are bad at playing Bayonetta, there is dissonance between your poor performance and the narrative where Bayonetta is undefeatable in combat. I haven't heard anyone talk about the ludonarrative, the narrative implied by the mechanics, on its own. Dungeons and Dragons 5e is a power fantasy. Characters in Dungeons and Dragons start out weak, only slightly about the average human but as they play they will level up, gradually becoming superhuman in strength. Characters will learn how to run on walls, to shrug off death and summon meteor storms. Unless your group twists and changes the mechanics so much that the game is unrecognizable, it will always be a power fantasy. We can go deeper even, we can talk about the world view of various TTRPGs. F.A.T.A.L (Fantasy Adventure to Adult Lechery) is sexist, and I can prove it. During character creation, your character's stats must be adjusted according to their sex. Men get a cumulative bonus of +26% and women get a bonus of -26%. Even if the world and campaign are completely egalitarian, Female characters will still be disadvantaged by the very nature of the game. By analyzing the mechanics of a game we can talk about the inherent themes. Games with a low base probability of success will be much grimmer than those with a higher success rate. Games where it is easy to die will inspire different stories than those where death is unlikely TTRPs aren't an infinite plane where every possible game is equally likely, there are highs and lows. Dungeons and Dragons doesn't want you to play as farmers struggling to fight off a handful of goblins, it wants you to be mighty adventures. Thirsty Sword Lesbian games are always about relationships, both good ones and bad. Burning Wheel doesn't care much about what the game is about but it demands that the games are full of drama, that the characters get themselves into trouble then claw their way back out. I don't really have some grand conclusion to bring this all together in a neat little package. This is just something that I think is neat to think about and I haven't heard anyone talk about it. If you want some type of grand message, it’s to play something besides Dungeons and Dragons 5e for god's sake. Why are you trying to force Dungeons and Dragons to be a cosmic horror game when you could just play Call of Cthulhu or Black Void or Eclipsephase or any one of the hundred of horror TTRPGs that exist.
Tags: TTRPGs, Unhinged Rant Created: 2025-04-16, Last updated: 2025-04-16