In one of my rare excursions into gaming, I recently finished 'Thief: The Black Parade'; a full game of fan-made missions for the 199-something “immersive sim” (before we had that phrase) – ‘Thief: The Dark Project’.
I haven't played Thief but I have played a lot of the new Hitman games, which seem conceptually similar. Noting the differences -
Hitman takes place in the modern world, you are assassinating people instead of stealing from them. The ideal Silent Assassin run through a Hitman level is to kill only your targets, nobody else, and to have nobody notice any suspicious activity or find any bodies.
Shadows don't matter, sound is only mildly important. The central mechanic of the game is to knock people out and take their clothes. Once you're in disguise you're allowed access to new parts of the map (though some people can see through it.)
The ideal Hitman map is some complex social event in an exotic location, i.e. a fashion show in a mansion in Paris or a billionaire's birthday party at a winery in Argentina. It's divided into different contrasting spaces which can be accessed using different disguises. Like the winery has balconies, gardens, tasting rooms, staff corridors, vineyards, an industrial floor, a wine cellar w/ secret passage into the basement of a private house.
The idea being that you play through dozens of times and find different ways to kill your target each time. Also there's a mode which randomly selects new targets for you. So you come into a level and it seems vast and impenetrable, but over time you gradually learn all its secrets and it becomes easy to master.
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You probably wouldn't use the "groundhog day" time loop element in D&D. Also the bit about stealing people's clothes to impersonate them is a game abstraction and clearly wouldn't work in real life, or an imaginary universe which players have to find believable.
What I do find useful though is the idea that a complex built environment can be used to organise a social structure. If that makes sense.
So like - the PCs are invited to a fancy party. There's an outer layer of guests who are just randoms, there's an inner circle who are there to engage in the real business of the event (in Paris it's a secret crime auction on the mansion's top floor.) There's a whole set of people who are just there to make the fashion show work (the models, the stylists, the kitchen staff) and all hate each other in ways which can be used to your advantage.
The structure of the mansion physically organises these people into different spaces with different energies (the cellar where the staff work is dark and quiet, the catwalk room is bright and loud, the security guys have set up a base in an attic full of dusty antiques). You have to navigate a bunch of these different spaces, both socially and physically, to get closer to your target.
Hierarchy is very important here - there's always both a social and a physical hierarchy, an "inner space" which only certain people are allowed into. In one level you literally have to be initiated into a Freemasonic secret society and get their sacred robes.
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Setting it in the real world makes it very easy to get maps. I'm trying to write a Call of Cthulhu type game set in 1920s Blackpool at the moment. So looking at Blackpool on Google Maps - there's three piers, the sands (which would be occupied by visitors and hawkers), a huge brick theatre underneath an iron tower (with a menagerie in it), a boardwalk full of sideshow attractions, an amusement park.
Each of these can "belong" to a different set of people, and each one subdivides further into smaller spaces. Designing the game is mapping out the social dynamics, figuring out what the different characters want and how they're likely to come into conflict. Then investigating the mystery becomes mostly about exploring these social dynamics and deciding how you're going to intervene in them.
And this is one of the easiest things to describe in words. I probably gravitated towards running that type of game because it's very easy for PCs to model social dynamics - the sailor wants this, the doctor wants that, the constable wants the other thing. Might be worth making a list of things that are really easy to express in language, as well as things that are really hard.
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I think the part about the PCs having access to flawless (telepathic?) comms and using them to co-ordinate stealth missions is really solid. The idea that even in low-fantasy games it's worth having some reason to just allow them to do it, because it opens up all sorts of gameplay possibilities that you wouldn't get otherwise.
Requires very strong spatial imagination on the part of the DM probably - you have to describe and redescribe the same physical environment from multiple angles. Or possibly if they're constantly communicating with each other you take for granted that they would synthesise their viewpoints into a sort of bird's eye view which is just represented as the map.
Actually doing a 'groundhog day' stealth mission might be a really good idea. The PCs are unexpectedly trapped in the mission once they begin. If they are noticed, they are killed, if even one is killed, they reset to the start, the only way out is to complete the heist *perfectly*
This is basically how Hitman works, it's unforgiving of failure but then you just restart the mission. You end up with an unfair amount of knowledge about the world. From the perspective of the NPCs you're supposed to be a sort of omnipotent figure of death who can kill anyone anywhere, which is true but only because they don't "see" the countless times you ran straight through a crowded room waving around a katana and got instantly smoked.
One thing it lets you do is make the stealth mission incredibly difficult. As long as there's any way through at all, even walking through a crowded room at the exact moment everyone has their back turned or brute forcing a password by reading the dictionary, the PCs will have the opportunity to find it.
If you wanted to put a constraint on things you could give the PCs a set number of loops to solve the problem. I think in the show Russian Doll they do this - the world decays with every loop, you have to fix whatever's gone wrong before you run out. There could be a villain who's also stuck in the time loop with you and is accumulating knowledge at the same rate you are, you have to escape before he brute forces his way into whatever evil thing he's trying to do.
Of course you already did the "what does the Groundhog Day guy look like from the outside" thing with the Knights of Grief from Queen Mab. Which is a great idea. I feel like the trick with this stuff is to give the players as much information as possible. Let them know what the rules are. Since it's not a movie you don't need a third act twist, they can just win by making good rational decisions.
Ok what if it's the PCs get sent back in time to assassinate various historical figures and every time they fuck up the time stream resets and they go back to the starting point... or it's time smugglers selling lasers to the Vikings and you have to stop them...
I received Thief: Deadly Shadows as part of a GPU bundle around 20 years ago and it was so different to anything I had played before.
Instead of cheesing your way killing sentries like you might do in an Elder Scrolls title, Thief presented the player with puzzles that could not be solved by being a murder hobo. Well, except for the odd knockout here and there.
For the first time I had to listen for footsteps, observe patrol patterns and time a sneaky entrance to purloin loot.
And there were different arrow types to manipulate the environment like water arrows for extinguishing fires/lanterns.
Thief was such a good game, as was the Sequel the Metal Age. I liked that Deadly Shadows tried to complete the trilogy and some of the narrative parts were good, but allowing the 3rd person option and the open world really altered the game experience a lot.
The thing is I like your ideas for an OSR Thief adventure, but the reality is trying to run one would be very hard as one of the hallmarks of an OSR adventure is things going wrong! And as soon as things go wrong the player would be discovered!
Maybe run it in the Blades in the Dark system? Would that work?
Though the Ancient Dungeon / remote setting could work.
wrt the section An Equation on the Utility of Blunt Infinity and the discussion around language and TTRPGs:
I would argue that, much more important than language and the speed of information per se, is information density and working memory. You can use a lot of words to say very little, or say quite a bit in very few words, and the more you can compress the information into manageable chunks, the more of it can be stored in working memory, but also even if you present a lot of information quickly, it might not stick.
Even with a good GM with a large vocabulary, I often find my biggest problem as a Player is keeping it all in working memory. I can remember a few details at a time, but frequently need the information repeated or laid out, I can't keep it all in my head at once, let alone reason through the puzzle or problem and find the interconnections between them.
I actually used to do research on the cognitive neuroscience of language, and language certainly plays an important role in cognition, but I think people often conflate the effects of language per se with that of learning and memory, and working memory and executive function.
Some of what you describe especially in the subsequent section is more specific to language, but anyway it may be worth thinking more about the effects of working memory on TTRPGs from both a GM and Player perspective, or other ways in which what you're describing as language problems may be decomposable into other things.
I realize that was not the main point of this article, I also enjoyed the Thief review and the Thief-inspired Stealth Dungeon premise you lay out at the end.
They are so close to being One though, language and working memory, in real terms, in play, because language is the primary 'substance' or 'material' that the mind is dealing with.
Maybe discussions about things like 'the three clue rule' and especially the abstract number systems used to simulate actions, might provide alternate viewpoints which highlight the issue of working memory through less primarily verbal operations.
"If you have enough time and a big enough dictionary, you can describe almost anything. It we assume the total potential of words, and look for things they absolutely cannot describe, there is not much..."
I haven't played Thief but I have played a lot of the new Hitman games, which seem conceptually similar. Noting the differences -
Hitman takes place in the modern world, you are assassinating people instead of stealing from them. The ideal Silent Assassin run through a Hitman level is to kill only your targets, nobody else, and to have nobody notice any suspicious activity or find any bodies.
Shadows don't matter, sound is only mildly important. The central mechanic of the game is to knock people out and take their clothes. Once you're in disguise you're allowed access to new parts of the map (though some people can see through it.)
The ideal Hitman map is some complex social event in an exotic location, i.e. a fashion show in a mansion in Paris or a billionaire's birthday party at a winery in Argentina. It's divided into different contrasting spaces which can be accessed using different disguises. Like the winery has balconies, gardens, tasting rooms, staff corridors, vineyards, an industrial floor, a wine cellar w/ secret passage into the basement of a private house.
The idea being that you play through dozens of times and find different ways to kill your target each time. Also there's a mode which randomly selects new targets for you. So you come into a level and it seems vast and impenetrable, but over time you gradually learn all its secrets and it becomes easy to master.
-
You probably wouldn't use the "groundhog day" time loop element in D&D. Also the bit about stealing people's clothes to impersonate them is a game abstraction and clearly wouldn't work in real life, or an imaginary universe which players have to find believable.
What I do find useful though is the idea that a complex built environment can be used to organise a social structure. If that makes sense.
So like - the PCs are invited to a fancy party. There's an outer layer of guests who are just randoms, there's an inner circle who are there to engage in the real business of the event (in Paris it's a secret crime auction on the mansion's top floor.) There's a whole set of people who are just there to make the fashion show work (the models, the stylists, the kitchen staff) and all hate each other in ways which can be used to your advantage.
The structure of the mansion physically organises these people into different spaces with different energies (the cellar where the staff work is dark and quiet, the catwalk room is bright and loud, the security guys have set up a base in an attic full of dusty antiques). You have to navigate a bunch of these different spaces, both socially and physically, to get closer to your target.
Hierarchy is very important here - there's always both a social and a physical hierarchy, an "inner space" which only certain people are allowed into. In one level you literally have to be initiated into a Freemasonic secret society and get their sacred robes.
-
Setting it in the real world makes it very easy to get maps. I'm trying to write a Call of Cthulhu type game set in 1920s Blackpool at the moment. So looking at Blackpool on Google Maps - there's three piers, the sands (which would be occupied by visitors and hawkers), a huge brick theatre underneath an iron tower (with a menagerie in it), a boardwalk full of sideshow attractions, an amusement park.
Each of these can "belong" to a different set of people, and each one subdivides further into smaller spaces. Designing the game is mapping out the social dynamics, figuring out what the different characters want and how they're likely to come into conflict. Then investigating the mystery becomes mostly about exploring these social dynamics and deciding how you're going to intervene in them.
And this is one of the easiest things to describe in words. I probably gravitated towards running that type of game because it's very easy for PCs to model social dynamics - the sailor wants this, the doctor wants that, the constable wants the other thing. Might be worth making a list of things that are really easy to express in language, as well as things that are really hard.
-
I think the part about the PCs having access to flawless (telepathic?) comms and using them to co-ordinate stealth missions is really solid. The idea that even in low-fantasy games it's worth having some reason to just allow them to do it, because it opens up all sorts of gameplay possibilities that you wouldn't get otherwise.
Requires very strong spatial imagination on the part of the DM probably - you have to describe and redescribe the same physical environment from multiple angles. Or possibly if they're constantly communicating with each other you take for granted that they would synthesise their viewpoints into a sort of bird's eye view which is just represented as the map.
Just giving them the, (or *a*) map is also be a good idea.
Actually doing a 'groundhog day' stealth mission might be a really good idea. The PCs are unexpectedly trapped in the mission once they begin. If they are noticed, they are killed, if even one is killed, they reset to the start, the only way out is to complete the heist *perfectly*
This is basically how Hitman works, it's unforgiving of failure but then you just restart the mission. You end up with an unfair amount of knowledge about the world. From the perspective of the NPCs you're supposed to be a sort of omnipotent figure of death who can kill anyone anywhere, which is true but only because they don't "see" the countless times you ran straight through a crowded room waving around a katana and got instantly smoked.
One thing it lets you do is make the stealth mission incredibly difficult. As long as there's any way through at all, even walking through a crowded room at the exact moment everyone has their back turned or brute forcing a password by reading the dictionary, the PCs will have the opportunity to find it.
If you wanted to put a constraint on things you could give the PCs a set number of loops to solve the problem. I think in the show Russian Doll they do this - the world decays with every loop, you have to fix whatever's gone wrong before you run out. There could be a villain who's also stuck in the time loop with you and is accumulating knowledge at the same rate you are, you have to escape before he brute forces his way into whatever evil thing he's trying to do.
Of course you already did the "what does the Groundhog Day guy look like from the outside" thing with the Knights of Grief from Queen Mab. Which is a great idea. I feel like the trick with this stuff is to give the players as much information as possible. Let them know what the rules are. Since it's not a movie you don't need a third act twist, they can just win by making good rational decisions.
Ok what if it's the PCs get sent back in time to assassinate various historical figures and every time they fuck up the time stream resets and they go back to the starting point... or it's time smugglers selling lasers to the Vikings and you have to stop them...
I received Thief: Deadly Shadows as part of a GPU bundle around 20 years ago and it was so different to anything I had played before.
Instead of cheesing your way killing sentries like you might do in an Elder Scrolls title, Thief presented the player with puzzles that could not be solved by being a murder hobo. Well, except for the odd knockout here and there.
For the first time I had to listen for footsteps, observe patrol patterns and time a sneaky entrance to purloin loot.
And there were different arrow types to manipulate the environment like water arrows for extinguishing fires/lanterns.
Now that's a franchise I should revisit.
Thanks for the detailed report!
Thief was such a good game, as was the Sequel the Metal Age. I liked that Deadly Shadows tried to complete the trilogy and some of the narrative parts were good, but allowing the 3rd person option and the open world really altered the game experience a lot.
The thing is I like your ideas for an OSR Thief adventure, but the reality is trying to run one would be very hard as one of the hallmarks of an OSR adventure is things going wrong! And as soon as things go wrong the player would be discovered!
Maybe run it in the Blades in the Dark system? Would that work?
Though the Ancient Dungeon / remote setting could work.
It has turned out a lot like I'm just reverse-engineering Blades in the Dark hasn't it?
wrt the section An Equation on the Utility of Blunt Infinity and the discussion around language and TTRPGs:
I would argue that, much more important than language and the speed of information per se, is information density and working memory. You can use a lot of words to say very little, or say quite a bit in very few words, and the more you can compress the information into manageable chunks, the more of it can be stored in working memory, but also even if you present a lot of information quickly, it might not stick.
Even with a good GM with a large vocabulary, I often find my biggest problem as a Player is keeping it all in working memory. I can remember a few details at a time, but frequently need the information repeated or laid out, I can't keep it all in my head at once, let alone reason through the puzzle or problem and find the interconnections between them.
I actually used to do research on the cognitive neuroscience of language, and language certainly plays an important role in cognition, but I think people often conflate the effects of language per se with that of learning and memory, and working memory and executive function.
Some of what you describe especially in the subsequent section is more specific to language, but anyway it may be worth thinking more about the effects of working memory on TTRPGs from both a GM and Player perspective, or other ways in which what you're describing as language problems may be decomposable into other things.
I realize that was not the main point of this article, I also enjoyed the Thief review and the Thief-inspired Stealth Dungeon premise you lay out at the end.
They are so close to being One though, language and working memory, in real terms, in play, because language is the primary 'substance' or 'material' that the mind is dealing with.
Maybe discussions about things like 'the three clue rule' and especially the abstract number systems used to simulate actions, might provide alternate viewpoints which highlight the issue of working memory through less primarily verbal operations.
"If you have enough time and a big enough dictionary, you can describe almost anything. It we assume the total potential of words, and look for things they absolutely cannot describe, there is not much..."
That's just what words _want_ you to think.