COTTONMOUTH LAW, THE 400 BLOWS & KUNG FU CAPITALISM

this is maybe the longest post ive ever made and certainly the longest theory post and yet it also contains: invisible things to show your players, alternatives to "resolution" as a means for interacting with fiction, a kung fu fighting procedure, 1d6 ways to win d&d, and two whole entire games. so you'll just have to take a chance won't you.

how it feels to be beautiful and opinionated about imagination games 

I guess I've got to define Cottonmouth at some point. It's possible to have divined it already from stuff like this &  this, but I've been a little guilty of giving you two sticks and telling you to make fire. 
 
Cottonmouth is about rules. Are you shocked? will you kill me with hammers? I grew up on 3.5e bitch, my games are about rules. I'm not talking about mechanics, though. I'm talking about rules in the way that all games are about rules, the way that "this stick is a gun" is a rule, and that "going past that tree means you're in the underworld now" is a rule. 

Cottonmouth to say that the rules of your game are the natural laws of the game's fiction. and to that end it aims to turn rules into simple, streamlined natural language sentences that can be broadly and qualitatively, rather than quantitatively, mastered and applied. Cottonmouth is about the joy of system mastery, except that rather than mastering an abstraction of the game world, you're learning to master the game world itself. 

The peasant railgun is Cottonmouth. and thats fucking awesome. imagine a d&d setting where THE defining technology of the era is exploiting the fact that to hand something to someone is a gesture that takes no time. generosity faster than light... wars fought in a place where as long as an unbroken human chain is maintained, you can pass a gun and a map to someone on another continent... imagine the endless work hymns of the generous standing in fields of flowers, fanned with perfumed mists or sweating under shackles... can you see the telegraph lines of severed but animate hands?

it's Cottonmouth to play a game where killing creatures gives you a set amount of experience and decide you're going to start farming giant rats on an industrial scale... factory farmers are universally yolked... level 20 avatars of industrial death...

his dainty tusks... j'adore...

So why not just use the rules of those games? well one thing people who are really into playing 3.5e or Pathfinder don't usually wanna run worlds like that because the human mind contains the endless potential to disappoint me.

and also those games just kind of suck and they're a lot of work. there's a lot that gets difficult and frustrating when you try to apply the mechanics of a game, including the numeric metrics it uses to describe the fiction, to those used by the characters in the fiction themselves. 

these rules are meant to be abstractions. very few people try to keep some sort of constant ratio to model how many pounds their character can lift and there's a reason the people who do that and write games that do that get laughed out of town. simulationism is hugely Cottonmouth and it's also mostly for the birds. GURPS is pretty Cottonmouth and maybe GURPS is good i don't know. a few hot girls i know like it so. the jury's hung 😳

anyway thats how you hipster freaks in the OSR seduced me, because there's an emphasis on the primacy of internally coherent fiction, where as much as possible, you play with the rules of the world, not the rules of the game. 

in those games we all know "a guy who gets a tree dropped on him should be paste" is as much a rule as the 18 strength of the guy who dropped the tree. The first rule is Cottonmouth, because the characters in the fiction know about the "trees turn guys into paste" rule. The second rule isn't, because they don't know about the fact when a really strong guy is strong, he has 18 of something. 

 i've been calling  rules of the first kind "laws"  in order to differentiate them from the rules of the second type, which tend point to themselves in order to abstract and describe the fiction. 

Strength 18 points to the resolution mechanic of the game; it's relevant because there's a procedure that it's used for. Cottonmouth laws exist as statements in and of themselves. They straight up tell you how things work in the fiction. Rules (so defined for the purposes of this post), use abstraction to model the way things work in the fiction. 

a good barometer for determining if a rule is a Cottonmouth law is asking yourself if someone in the fiction of the game would be able to discuss the rule in the same way the players do at the table. if they could, it's a law. another good way to determine if something is a law is if a character could literally interact with it with their senses. A sword dealing 5 damage is a rule. "swords can kill you" is a law. another other good way to think about this is Cottonmouth laws should only ever exist 1 degree away from the fiction. So like. HP can be Cottonmouth if it represents something specific and tangible in the fiction, but a rule that gives you +3 HP without giving you something tangible in the fiction is NOT Cottonmouth.

this is happening to u and i BET you love it. I BET you do.

So what. so what!

well the thing is that Rules Elide. Yeah you can all groan. You knew it was coming and you're so smart yes you are. It's obvious, but they do! they elide early and often. if you want to see a thing done, have the action held resonant in your mind, it is not a rule that will do this seeing for you. and that's true. 

the rule will always be a gap in the vision. pinprick to canyon. its the moment between frames, man, the calculation that fascinates us because it is outside of ourselves. which, incidentally, is why im down on rules that involve calculation IF the character would not be doing that calculation in-fiction. rules like that force you to spend time and attention on the process itself, and leaves less of your brain to appreciate what that calculation is actually doing in the fiction.

that's not to say there's no space for dense systems; density and complexity of rules is pleasurable in and of itself but it's important to clock that the game is no longer about a fictional reality, which is elided entirely, but a rule-space or strategy space.

and of course, there ARE really good moments outside the fiction that are created by rules! moments of strategic indecision, moments of choice and uncertainty and debate that are deeply, deeply beloved by the game as a medium. it is pursuit of this love that leads people to broad, shallow games; what if every moment could be like this? what if every important moment in the game had an associated chart or picklist?

foolishness. you're not looking at anything! you've eclipsed the whole world! rules have no choice but to make the moment they arise about them, and little else. so Cottonmouth suggests another way. What if the the rules that generate those moments of strategic indecision were laws? that is, what if they were digetic? if everything took place in the fiction.

that's part of why that distinct strangeness of aesthetic, character, environment, and other setting elements is so common to the OSR scene: the complexities of the games rules, the stuff that requires actual calculation, is the same stuff that your characters are trying to calculate. How can we carry enough food for our hirelings. How many more hours of light do we have down here. that's Cottonmouth! elsewhere, the game has a light to nonexistent touch, so things can get dreamy and unreal. 

this is your brain on RULES >:(((

but if avoiding elision is what i'm after, why not that other acronym, FKR? that seems pretty much on the money, right? because it's all fiction, very few abstractions.

unfortunately, the FKR people are still mostly rocking with like just using the vernacular rules of liked our lived reality to describe their games. they're playing worlds, not rules, but the worlds are, mostly, defined by the same rules as our world, give or take. that's fine, but it's pretty limiting in scope. It misses the part of a game that uses artifice to help us understand a reality different from out own.

this also gives me the opportunity to talk about something i've been thinking with regard to the reluctance of ttrpgs to make use of sweepingly transformational laws in the way that video games do. not that video games should be aspirational for ttrpgs; i kinda think they're the devil. but like. why aren't we making games where all players have the ability to crawl inside of any object? actually, the Liquid Steel translation/ttrpg project is doing something like this; everything in the world, without fail, is alive and has a face, though it might be well hidden. More shit like this!

Cottonmouth is, again, ABOUT rules laws. Cottonmouth laws are the rules of the world, sure, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't shape that world in ways that are significantly different from our own to the same extent (or more!) that the rules of games with really specific visions of play shape the player experience.

We want laws! We want to get told that we can't do the thing normal, we have to do it weird! and, worst of all, we want to be told that about EVERYTHING, not just combat and camping and dungeons. sorry folks, Cottonmouth is into procedures for subjective emotional experiences. Cottonmouth is OSR and Cottonmouth is fucking storygame. 

u got me! and this artist is mostly nft cringe! what're u gonna do abt it!!!!!

now, it's true that there is something you want to bloom in your game, a rule will not grow it for you. this is one of the reasons why we are against incentives; if you want a game with true goodness in it, you cannot get goodness with a rule. being heartbroken because it gets you heartbreak points doesn't convince anyone.

the disdain that fiction-first philosophies hold for rules that define more abstract, emotional experiences is well founded. It's an entirely reasonable, well-argued idea that, since we have our own intuitive human understanding of what it means to love someone and what it means to lie to them, we should use that, and only resort to procedures for things that are harder to model mentally (like how hard it would be to kill a guy with a sword, which everyone is very worried about). 

rules, because they elide experience by virtue of their abstract, objective, mechanical quality, do seem like maybe they should only deal with things that have some objective, mechanical quality, like the functioning of your body and what happens to it when it gets hit by a sword. 

there's a fairly common sentiment in this scene that storygames, which are frequently more willing to apply procedures to emotional situations and relationships, rob those situations of their humanity and immediacy because they describe them with mechanical objectivity. in doing that, they also remove players from the drivers seat, because they abstract the experience of feeling the thing for a rule that tells you what it's like to feel the thing. you don't fall in love organically anymore, you fall in love mechanically. 

but, nevertheless, I want things like heartbreak in my games! because it fucking sucks to be heartbroken, and it's a real motivating factor that drives people to do make choices they otherwise wouldn't, in the same way that the fear of death by sword or starvation does. the bottom line for your character shouldn't be total obliteration!

falling in love, or getting angry, or whatever, is left ungoverned, entirely up to player discretion, since we've gotten beautiful surrealist landscapes blossoming from the other spaces in the game we've left unhindered by procedure, it makes sense to leave this well enough alone, and trust that people will make choices that make things interesting and unexpected and beautiful for everyone else at the table. 

its not like y'all are wrong, the stakes ARE high

BUT HERES THE THING: heartbreak (and get a grip, alright? heartbreak is an example) is a state that, unless you're exceptionally impressionable (in which case. Hi queen do u wanna let me mold ur brain) is not going be a real fear for you in the same way fear of your guy dying will. 

AND we're lying to ourselves a little bit! the originality and imagination that the light touch of the OSR allows to thrive is supported by a HUGE body of work!!! there's so many tools to help you generate interesting scenarios, people, landscapes, monsters, treasure, and that's setting aside literal modules!!!! there's just not that much to draw from when it comes to like. figuring out how to put your character in interesting emotional situations let alone make those choices seem believable.

and as a result, every game you play is going to have people behaving in social situations as you and your friends would behave. i'm not always interested in playing people who have the same values and experiences that i do, and i'm not convinced that i intuitively understand how those people would react or behave! i'm also just not so confident in my ability to freehand interesting and believable dramatic choices! it would be really nice to have some tools that help with that, since it's something I want in my games!

but then what. 
am I gonna play storygames?
fucking STORYGAMES???
am I gonna start using tokens?

that's all you btw ^^ i don't talk or use words like that anymore i've changed in the last few paragraphs.

if i'm being honest i think part of that issue people have with procedures that deal with subjective states of being has to do with that kind of like. elevating a kind of empirical objectivity as a "more true" version of reality when like. idk i find irl that it's true that like yeah there are physical laws that allow you to like trace cause and effect and stuff, but it's also true that like certain people are drama magnets, for instance. everyone has friends who end up in like situations that have a really similar pattern to them. 

and of course patterns are created by physical laws and chains of cause and effect. EVERYTHING has its roots in the material. But what I want to push back on the idea that subjective stuff, emotionality, etc. should only arise in game according to those same causal chains because that, to me, is foolish and kind of myopic. 

of course sometimes u do want to look really REALLY closely

games aren't real! you don't relate to an imaginary person your friend is describing in the same way you do to a human being! people's characters are NOT well realized enough to have those narrative patterns arise organically! games don't last lifetimes!

a character, most of the time, is about as fully realized in your mind as like. a friend of a good friend who you don't really know. like, you hear about them, and you know some of their qualities, but you're basically only privy to what actual events take place, not to the causes of those events

it's enough to know "oh so & so always runs into car trouble" or like "oh yeah she's always like realizing these guys that she dates do way more coke than she thought" or whatever.

but I can make these noises all I want, it doesn't change the fact that it rings false to a lot of people to be told that their guy cares about something that they don't care about. 

I'm here to say you're being a baby.  give you a new framework. 

of course being a baby does mean i want to take u in my arms

so to restate, a pretty common issue that fiction first people take with storygames (oh god i fell off the horse) is the way that what happens can be determined by narrative laws that exist outside of the fiction, as opposed to like. (imagined) physical ones of the fiction, right? Storygame mechanics tend to be WAY more like rules than laws. 

and accordingly, people tend to like. play these two types of games very differently. like having just run a distinctly storygame-y campaign for some people from the TA server and big purple and stuff, there was a real feeling for people of like "oh i need to really shift gears if i'm thinking about the fiction as a narrative space as opposed to a physical one"

the thing is like. i've never really felt like that was necessary? like i know it's a real phenomenon and i've witnessed it first hand. but i've always found it very easy to run storygames as essentially fiction first games with different sorts of procedures in the place of like. dungeon turns or encounter checks (and some where i've hybridized both!), and I haven't had much issue with placing those procedures in the fiction. as Katt Kirsch said to me, if you've ever criticized a story for not feeling realistic, you're doing both at once, right?

again from Katt, the things that happen off camera and in conversation with other characters need to be considered just as real as, like, a fist fight.

i just feel like it's a shame how more narrative forces in games are considered somehow damaging to understanding the world as a physical place, when in real life, you can't experience reality outside of your narrative-making mind. 

it's funny that there's this real resistance to rules that limit or influence a character's agency or emotional state, which seems to suggest the the idea that like. when you play an fiction-first game you should actually be playing a character who has some purely objective sense of the world, or at least, that all the subjective experiences of that character should arise from the player, who then makes the objective decision to include or exclude those experiences from the game.

really, one of the most common things in everyone's life is like. feeling some kind of way about something without having any control over feeling that way.  we constantly make decisions based on phenomena we can't precisely trace the cause and effect of, but demand we recognize it as an reliably recurring pattern. saying "ur guy has an X in 6 chance to get in a fight when he goes out" is not less realistic than saying there's an "X in 6 chance of wildebeest stampede on these here plains" because everyone has been in the situation of having to like. problem solve and consider the factor of your belligerent friend as a force as real and significant as like. gravity and alcohol tolerance.

look she just can't help it okay

so then maybe the answer is a different acronym. god that'd be nice. maybe its GLOG because those gay people are writing rules that play with stuff like true love and poetry and metaphor, all that subjective stuff that's usually left on the table. but, coming from the OSR, they do it with an eye towards concrete, physical experience. and what's interesting about doing this is that it basically leads you to write poetry. because it turns out that coming up with rules that accurately communicate subjective emotional experiences is basically learning to write well is all about. whoops I'm a modernist.  

here's where we go back to that idea that everything subjective and transcendent is ultimately born from material reality. it is! HOWEVER, what good writing lets you do is divine what effect different concrete images will have on your reader, to arrange your fiction in such a way that the one reading it (or, in our case, playing it) is lead to have an experience of the other, to feel a way they would not have felt themselves if left to their own devices. 

contemporary storygames seek to possess this poetic/literary quality but are for the most part poorly written, (particularly in comparison to their predecessors and their counterparts in the fiction-first spaces) attempting to come at things top down rather than bottom up. That is to say, they concern themselves with thematic and tonal considerations first and foremost, which anyone knows is like. the primary weakness of bad writing.  I'm going to make the claim that this is because the OSR scene that GLOG came out of trains people to be better writers by insisting on the primacy of imagery and concrete detail, which is the most fundamental thing to get good at if you want your writing to evoke anything abstract at all. 

If you want to know how to do this, go ahead and listen to Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound (that old fascist weeb)

Amy Lowell on Principles of Imagism

• To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word. 
• To create new rhythms—as the expression of new moods—and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. 
• We do not insist on “free-verse” as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea. 
• To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911. 
• To present an image (hence the name: “Imagist”). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of art. 
• To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite. 
• Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

Ezra Pound on Imagist Language 

• Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. 
• Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. 
• Go in fear of abstractions.
•  Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. 
• Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths. 
• What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow. 
• Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as an average piano teacher spends on the art of music. 
• Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. Don’t allow “influence” to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of “dove-grey” hills, or else it was “pearl-pale,” I can not remember. 
• Use either no ornament or good ornament.

 

now THAT is good ornament

the play-first and usability first sensibilities that the OSR communities (particularly the Thinking Adventures philosophy), espouse are really good for cultivating imagist writing because it demands a type of specific, expressive, descriptive thinking that is also demanded by writing imagery. and since good, clear, specific, language is by necessity expressive, it is also beautiful. which is why artists must draw figures and painters have to do color study artists have to write images. and then, when those clear, direct techniques are applied, the sureness and wholeness of the image is what allows for subtlety to be evoked. 

 the 400 blows is the first movie i remember that really made me consider the value of the image, of directly showing the thing. i am a being that trends towards artifice and the light fluttering behind a filter, but here was complex emotion communicated without metaphor, this complex cocktail of little boy shame and guilt mingling with the enchantment of being taken seriously as an adult even if only to face adult punishments, and the excited dancing of light on wet bricks, the whole thing teetering on the edge of a howling pool of dread and all of it communicated to you with facial expression, pure observation as the root of all empathy and connection. the actor convinces himself that he feels it, or he learns what it is like to feel it, and then he feels it for the camera, and the camera feels it for us.  

show the thing. show the thing show the thing show the thing.

is the thing happening externally? show it happening. is the thing some sort of internal process? show us what it looks like from the outside. as humans our conception of reality is so entirely tied to our senses and particularly, for most of us, our vision, and its foreign lover, the mind's eye. many, many artists (and for today, and all time if you wish it, designer, you are an artist) struggle to trust the power of simply giving the thing to the audience so that they can experience it. the images in the clip above aren't standing in for something else here; they carry their own emotional weight, rather than representing the emotional weight of something invisible

Rules elide. Laws reveal. Cottonmouth is about laws. It is about the power of the concrete image, of putting nothing in your game that the characters themselves cannot see or taste or touch. 

SHOW THE THING. if the thing is invisible SHOW IT ANYWAY. the laws are the CAMERA. show the THING.  and you should really only film the camera when you're charlie kaufmen or maya deren or william greaves or felini or mulvey or

there's so much and i want you to show me all of it

some invisible stuff to show your players:

• You Are Being Watched
• You Know Someone Here
• Someone Here Loves You
• Something is About to be Stolen
• You Remind Her of Her Childhood
• Someone Here is About to Die

oh no oh god oh fuck oh my immersion!!!!!!!!

YOU are that someone, straw man >:((((

You’ll cry storygame but I told you, we don’t talk like that here. Besides I derived this stuff from first principles: “always give players as much information as possible.” i learned from watching YOU! !! the very straw man i just killed!!!!!!!!!

the earlier points about elision collide with those kinds of direct statements is something i'm increasingly interested in when it comes to creating emotion, tone and mood: straightforward assertions about tone are almost always more successful than even really evocative and suggestive descriptions(im gnashing my teeth im so fucking mad about this). “you make her nostalgic,” will almost always help support that emotion more than even the most brilliant description. 

Although we're interested in showing concrete images, we're also playing in a medium totally limited by the minds eye. To some extent, while the principles of good game running mirror the principles of good writing (and in the case of writing adventures, are in fact the same thing exactly), when it comes to communicating the intangible, what’s good for literature is bad for games, and vice versa; everyone’s time and attention is extremely limited and there isn’t a text to store information for you or refer back to. 

This another point in favor of laws, rather than rules, when it comes to emotionality. Even the cleverest ellisionpilled designer is going to have a seriously difficult time pinpointing a specific emotional experience purely with the fruitful void circumscribed by the rules. trying to affect tone through rules isn’t a lost cause, but its an effort that's always going to be compromised by its medium, since rules (again, as defined in this piece, distinct from laws) inherently draw attention away from the fiction. 

Anyway the OSR scene is often really into the idea that the information provided to the player should be limited to their characters senses; torch radius, listening at doors, etc. the thing is, they’re also really into the character as a pawn that just serves as a avatar for the player to pursue the stuff in game that they’re interested in. That’s a play style rife with dramatic irony; yeah, my hardened tomb robber would know better than to lick the statue or whatever but I wanna see what happens so my guy’s gonna be an idiot. Anyway this isn’t a gotcha or anything, but I do still think you're all tremendous cowardly babies there’s space to lean into that dramatic irony more.

oh yuck ur drooling

GO MY PARENTHETICAL

 (the above is the bare minimum. for “fiction first” girlies who worship the fetish object “interaction” ya'll rlly don’t give a fuck giving the players tools to interact directly with the fiction itself.  yeah this is bad faith, but i listened to a lot of bad religion in high school so what do you expect. what goes in is what comes out.

 i'm not talking about some meta-writers-room approach here, either. Situate this stuff in the fiction itself ALWAYS. We always point at the moon. it's literally elfgames you can give people a fucking magic crystal to make this work. chill out. go watch symbiopsychotaxiplasm.
Different ways to let ur players interact with the fiction aside from resolving uncertainty:

• Amplify a certain element of the scene.
• Shift one element to another adjacent one.
• Riff on an existing element by creating two new ones drawn from it.
• Mix a new element by combining two existing ones
• Spotlight something else in the scene; that's the focus now. 
• Swap the target or direction of one element to something else
• Flip an element into its equal but opposite

turn a conversation into a dance. take a combat and turn it into a game about whether or not that single dandelion gets trampled.)

Okay. so all that said, it's cool to get all impassioned about the potential for complex emotion in games, but at the end of the day i like movies with karate. people jumping around and shit. 

in other words, we might be against incentives, but we still desire certain types of experiences from our games, and it would be nice to think that while our laws (or rules, if you PERSIST in DEFYING me) are just another player at the table, they could be a really imaginative and charming and original player with a lot of cool ideas about stuff that could happen. We are lead to believe effects have causes, and in reality, we are all weighed down by the greatest incentive of all; the mortal flesh.

lover you know i like it when you look mortal

so show that. show the thing show the thing show the thing ohhhhh my GOD.  

if what we're after is playing around with the same rules and pressures that inform our real actual lives in our games, then like. just do it lol. almost all of us live lives informed by capitalism and all of us except one very special girl (the one reading this, of course) live lives informed by death. and to be honest, it's death that gives capitalism power over us anyway so lets just think about death. 

your characters should (if you've been persuaded that my vision is righteous) have to worry about dying of old age!!!!!!!!  Even if the actual action of your game is measured in weeks or days or hours or minutes, downtime should be measured in years! 

even if you stay within the realm of fiction, there’s very few stories that maintain the minute to minute hour to hour day to day pace that most games are run at. and playing characters with no actual stake in a full life lived means that players have their characters behave like aliens a lot of the time.

 A year tends to be a LONG time in most games, even in ones that use months or seasons in downtime, and a person whose understanding of the world is that either they'll live forever or they'll die violently is never going to be someone whose interiority we can really understand, because that's an insane way to live. Even if you're in a place where you assume you'll die before you get old, that state is given its particular unique qualities by virtue of understanding that it isn't normal, that you're experiencing a version of life that's been violently altered. 

ESPECIALLY in games that want to engage with the grind of gig life and hand-to-mouth living (your bebop-likes and monster hunter mercenary sims and whatever) or in games that dangle the dream of wealth as the ultimate motivator (so like almost every single OSR thing), if you're after a game that includes a more human experience of emotion without resorting to hack sentimentality, the stakes should be like. "hey well. you've really only got like a limited amount of time to get yourself out of this life before your body breaks down and you have to confront the truth of life poorly lived." To return to the issue of true love, that only has meaning as a goal if "living happily with the person you're in love with" is something the game includes in its scope! 

this isn't anything so new; there was a real push in the OSR a while ago for people to include retirement as an option for characters, but I think where that approach falls short is by positioning retirement as an alternative to violent death, saying that your characters only get to experience the passing of years when you've decided you're setting them aside. I'm genuinely very curious why the standard model for location/module driven gaming doesn't assume that like. years pass between dungeons. Instead, we kind of save that for domain play, at which point you've already begun to step back from your character's individual experience in favor of thinking about things on a grand scale. 

in a maybe unintuitive way, I think something that could help here is to actually lean INTO the game of it all, to say like. Yes, actually, there is a way to win this game, and it's to die a good death after living a good life. like, what if when you make a character you just roll on this table

1. die young and leave a pretty corpse
2. die at home with your loved ones
3. die rich and famous
4. die for someone you love 

5. die having taught someone everything you know

6. die for a cause you believe in

 and now that's how you win the game. and if someone takes away your ability to do that, maybe you lose or maybe now you win if you die after killing the fuckers who took that from you.

alright though what about the fucking kung fu. 

like can we PLEASE get real for one fucking second

well again, we're just trying to pinpoint the real life laws that encourage people to do that sort of thing. which is mainly like. "well mainly its a discipline and wellness practice and it looks fucking sick" and fair point. 

but if we want games where it makes sense in-fiction that its better kill a guy by spin kicking his head off his shoulders than it is to just stab him regular style maybe we go back to the stinking mortal flesh, right? like I think mainly what drives people to embrace like. creatively expressive violence (heads on pikes, war dances, sacrifices, trophies of ears and fingers, swords with crazy fucking hooks and barbs) is like. that shit is SCARY, and your enemies fight way worse if they're scared of you.

I kind of did something with that already in my sloppy drippy combat post, where I wrap up morale and initiative into one package; the side that has more to fear from their opponent goes second. But I think we can go further with that. Fear and morale is another HUGE factor in Cottonmouths OSR roots, and points to the potential for fiction-first gaming to make rules that touch on subjective emotional experience (and now we can tell who finished reading this damn thing and who went right to the comments to complain about how I forgot about morale). I think we can go ahead and make it even more central though. Try this on for size: 

you have a terror die, ranked 1d4 to 1d12. the size of the die fluctuates turn to turn and takes into account your appearance, specific actions taken this turn, weapon, etc
you also have a morale die, d4 to d12. this die size remains consistent turn to turn and takes into account like. the number of people who love you, your advantage over your enemy, your faith in god, whatever. 
on a hit, roll terror vs morale. if your terror roll is higher than their morale roll, their morale die drops a die size. if it would drop below d4, they flee or surrender or freak the fuck out or whatever.
this procedure is symmetrical: if your morale die would drop below d4, you flee/surrender/fall to 0 HP/some equivalent. 

so now spin kicking a guy in the head while wearing a necklace made of his kids fingers gets you like a d10 terror die, (starting at d4, bumped to d6 for the spin kick, bumped to d8 for the fingers, bumped to d10 cause they're this sucker's kids). fuck, keep people creative by saying that doing a move you haven't done yet automatically bumps your terror die up a size. 

 this is a to-do list

okay well. we've taken care of true love and the fear of death and kung fu fighting and those are like most of the important things in life but maybe that's not enough for you. maybe you want me to put my money where my mouth is. maybe you wanna kiss me on the mouth where my money is. 

the Laws of a Stolen World that im linking again here is an example of a complete Cottonmouth game; those Laws are the only thing I've used to run my Stolen World home game, and those are what I'm gonna use when I run a Stolen World game for some of u dorks. That's a maximalist Cottonmouth approach, with a lot of those Laws being added over the course of play, but you don't even have to have anything so comprehensive. It's enough to give specific, evocative suggestions about the nature of the world, the ways in which it differs from our own, the things players can rely on and master in lieu of mechanics. 

guess, dummy

Hayao Miyazaki wrote a Cottonmouth game when he gave his creative team the guiding principles for working on Porco Rosso (real smokers movie by the way. there's a cig an average of every 2.81 minutes)

A town that people would like to visit. A sky through which people would like to fly. A secret hideaway we ourselves would want. And a worry-free, stirring, uplifting world. Once upon a time, earth was a beautiful place. Let us make a film like this. 

Here's two more games. The first has been played: I wrote and ran an All the Strangers campaign while ago (for the link averse, it's a paramilitary skirmish game about killing aliens XCOM style with mr. gearing's Violence and also GROW UP), and, while rough around the edges, it was really sick. 

type shit. also go shoot mike some cash he could use it

Things got a little bogged down and less immediate than I would have liked, since each player was controlling a squad of guys who each had their own actions and stuff to track. So then I got curious about if I would have been able to run the game better if I'd just used this instead of the rules I'd written:

brutal, grimy combat. claustrophobic unforgiving. if teetering into a tie, flip for it except vs aliens, who win ties. when in doubt things go wrong. people panic and they do stupid shit when they panic. decide how many enemies, where they are, and what guns they have before a fight begins. guns should have pros and cons; all of them should be lethal. smgs can be quieter than a rifle but have shorter range and less stopping power. That sort of thing. melee is frantic and desperate and painful and difficult. injuries are punishing and most likely take you out of the fight. use a map.

anyway the answer is YEAH I totally could and then I did! This was like. one of the most successful games I've run and it was much much easier to balance like a visceral sense of fear and desperation with tactics remaining meaningful due to the lethality of everything. the only outside play aides I needed were just like. sloppy drippy tables for gore and panic!

closest i'll get to steampunk so help me god

here's another game because i love you and i believe in the dryness of your mouth

Flying is bliss. the sky is beautiful, even falling to your death is beautiful . sometimes, rarely, you can survive such a fall and it's like a fairytale. planes are acrobatic and spectacular and so fragile. the ocean is wild and hungry and lethal unless fortune saves you. on the earth everything takes energy, makes you tired. you can only get so much done in a day and a lot of it has to making sure you can eat and drink. stars fall from the sky every night. they strike the earth and burn the cities and towns so people travel in tents now. nobody is where you left them, but you're always running into old friends. if you catch stars while they're falling they retain their speed and lightness, and that's what makes your plane work and your guns work. engines and bullets yearning to return to star-speed. huge war-blimps with buzzing flocks of star-snatcher warplanes. 

You know how to run these games. Don't lie. You figured it out while you were reading them. You're some kind of brain genius.  

Now go on!!! Git!!!!!!!!

afore i do this to ya