Sharp analysis.

Sharp analysis.

Originally shared by Emily Care Boss

What do you love about tabletop freeform games?

Chances are good that if you're in my feeds, you've played one. Whether it's Fiasco, The Quiet Year, Microscope, Misericord(e), Swords without Master, Firebrands or what have you, these are (in my opinion) tabletop role playing games where the resolution of dramatic questions and problems, or events where the outcome is in question--is done by a variety of techniques that do not involve stats and die rolls that refer to them.

*Say and it happens - quintessentially demonstrated by Polaris, this is a staple in MonkeyDome descended games (like Swords without Master, Vast & Starlit). Should we think of this as player fiat?
*Token prompts - Quiet Year and Dream Askew use these, with contempt tokens and hard & soft moves that give you currency to spend on fictional outcomes later on. This is an underlying mechanic in the Apocalypse World engine that is married with a fictionally focused traditional mechanic system (stats, modifiers, die rolls, resolution) which hides how much player fiat/fictional positioning comes in. Fiasco allocates scene resolution and gives players dice as tone prompts.
*Fiction prompts (often questions) - Cards, questions, procedures that get the players asking themselves and others things that invest themselves and each other in the events as they play out. Itras By, Swords without Master, Heart of Bronze, The Sundered Land, Misericord(e)--which lifts the question mechanic from 1001 Nights--for examples. Games like Fiasco may have a currency that matches character outcomes with fictional prompts at the end of the game. I do this a ton in the Romance Trilogy for Breaking the Ice and Shooting the Moon particularly--though those games I see as more traditional in terms of using dice to provide fallout and outcomes. Probably needs more thought there since the systems don't function on a task-by-task or even scene-based conflict resoltion basis. More like long-term conflict resolution that feeds into overall game-wide outcomes.
*Voting - the fall-back resolution system in Microscope, the scene-ending resolution in King Wen's Tower. I imagine this is more used than I realize, but those are the games that come to mind.

This is by no means exhaustive!

What do you like about these games? How do you see them functioning? What other games would you group with these?

For J. Walton.