Fair lords, said Sir Ironside, I cannot tell you, for it is full hard to find him; for such young knights as he is one, when they be in their adventures be never abiding in no place.
Sir Thomas Malory, Morte D’Arthur
Life’s a forge! Yes, and hammer and anvil, too! You’ll be roasted, smelted, and pounded, and you’ll scarce know what’s happening to you. But stand boldly to it! Metal’s worthless till it’s shaped and tempered! More labor than luck. Face the pounding, don’t fear the proving; and you’ll stand well against any hammer and anvil.
Lloyd Alexander, Taran Wanderer
From time to time, she would wonder whether the shadows were fleeting because they were only shadows of reality, or if the world of reality itself were composed of nothing but shadows. If that world is never viewed directly, it is impossible to decide between shadows and reality.
Natsume Sōseki, Kairo-kō
“Now look, your grace,” said Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone."
"Obviously,” replied Don Quixote, “you don’t know much about adventures.”Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Not necessarily “old school” in the manner of the Old School Renaissance - but a kind of roleplaying framework that might be familiar to players of D&D and its ilk rather than something more avant-garde.
There is a GM
That is to say, a distinct player who has broad authority over moderating rules and authorial control over the environment and non-player characters.
There is a common guidance (especially in some roleplaying games) to Play to Find Out What Happens; i.e. to embrace the shared discovery of being surprised by the decisions of other players and the dice, and roll with it when this opens up different paths than expected (or even to not start out expecting any particular “paths”).
This is fine advice and something players of this game can do… but the nature of the Great Pendragon Campaign and the Arthurian canon in general means there are some paths and answers which are at least marginally more canonical than others and the world is meant to have some truths and mysteries that the GM knows and the other players discover, instead of a fully shared discovery process1.
Again, this is not to say that no techniques of shared discovery can apply or everything should be a railroad and the GM should be a tyrant - but it’s hard for the game to take radical steps (even mechanics that work great in other games) to enforce strict GM improvisation or shared worldbuilding without obviating much of the material2.
There are Player Characters
Perhaps more than usual as (non-GM) players through having the context of a broader family to manage3 and through being characters who may have some authority to order others around4 many be “playing” multiple characters at a time.
But the main way a player interacts with the world is through one or more individual characters - nothing particularly abstract. The individual character sheet is probably the most major prop the player has, and will have the most rules around it.
These players also form somewhat of an adventuring “party” as is common in roleplaying games. While there’s more flexibility in this game than, say, “Never Split the Party” D&D5, there’s a loose expectation that:
- These characters are at least on similar plot threads in a session and often have excuses to be in similar scenes.6
- A lot of the time, the characters are ostensibly cooperating or cooperative. Characters fighting and striving against each other is not entirely off the table7, but is not the primary way they interact.
They (hopefully) solve challenges
Not always to kill, but sometimes - and even when killing is off the table, these encounters still have some of the structure you might see across roleplaying games.
Characters get tasked with things to do in scenes, and go to other scenes where they meet various opposition and use their abilities and problem solving skills to try to resolve these in their favor. They often get rewarded for this8.
There’s Dice
Maybe some cards too. But there’s randomizers in some of the core systems in the game - mostly player facing, but not entirely.
There’s a mix of procedures & rulings
Some games lean heavily into procedures or rules - mechanics that define a specific flow for how some gameplay loop or storyline plays out, or precisely how to handle some common question. Other games lean heavily on rulings with a strong sense of “GM fiat” for judging how something should be resolved or even how it resolves based on the context specific to the situation.
There’s benefits to both approaches. This game doesn’t take a strong stance one way or another. There are some rhythms and situations where codified procedures and rules can work very well - especially for the elements that make up a pillar - but there’s a very wide range of kinds and pacings of adventure that make this much harder than a game with a very specific gameplay loop and theme. On the other hand this isn’t a full Free Kriegsspiel kind of game; it’s also hard to lean fully on this because the setting and themes will not always be intuitive to all players, and it’s harder to make rulings that can consistently serve those settings and themes while not being jarring to players who could not know what to expect.
The exact middle-of-the-road path is going to look fairly “traditional” as rpgs go. Not wildly far from the games Pendragon was a part of.
So What Does This Mean?
Most of the implications were covered in each section, but boiling it down - mechanics that drastically change the structure of the game need to be carefully handled to determine if they break the core gameplay loops and expectations of the Great Pendragon Campaign.
Footnotes
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Arguably this puts the GM at an even playing field in terms of discovering and revealing discoveries; there’s always things to discover in player decisions. ↩
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And some of the fun. The legend and the vaguely historical setting are both stories, and sometimes the joy is in exploring the narrative. ↩
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In some sense, arguably the “real” character they’re playing - with individuals in it just as appendages… but also arguably not. ↩
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And often will have wide permissions to adjudicate the decisions, feelings, etc. of such characters with others at the table. ↩
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Because the procedures that are core to D&D games expect a party that’s consistently grouped together roughly within common spell and weapon ranges and whose preparations and rests happen vaguely at the same time and not timezones apart. ↩
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This is easier with the societal rules of the setting, as long as characters are under similar liege authorities - and with players able to switch characters in the family (to pick ones that make sense together at the time). ↩
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Within the comfort of the players at the table. ↩
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Though not necessarily with experience points or similar. That may be a slight deviation from the traditional paths (even from Pendragon) with a lot of character change coming through aging rather than progress, or through somewhat more diegetic rewards (even if those do widen character options and powers in ways that can be similar to purely non-diegetic ones). ↩