Exchanging Nouns for Verbs

RPGs have generally organized things into nouns and verbs. This is the distinction Chris Crawford makes regarding computer games—and I’ve written about applying this framework to RPGs—but it is tacitly done already.

Mechanically, they are handled quite differently. Nouns have quantities or qualities attached to them. Your character has a “strength” score. This may change, but it is concrete as far as things go. Action, meanwhile, does not exist as a value, but as a process that the players go through, representing in-world change, resulting in a modification of the nouns’ qualities. Nouns have existence between moments, but verbs to not.

This mechanical division is not necessary; it has roots in how we tend to think about things in our culture, but alternatives are quite possible. As an experiment, what if we reversed the normal relationship? Let us have nouns that are are not pinned down, but only invoked momentarily to have brief, concrete relevance, but are otherwise ephemeral; and let us have verbs that are constant and well known. You may think, It is fine to say we make this reversal, but what would this mean for play? There are at least two ways we might experiment with the idea.

A mild experiment

Usually, characters are defined by traits and possessions, which are essentially nouns, while in the course of the game, players’ moment-to-moment decisions chiefly concern their characters actions, which are verbs. Because traits have constancy, but can still be changed, they become the focus: actions are primarily instances of traits, in use, and a means to acquire new traits. This is reflected in the mechanics, where nouns are carefully categorized, but actions are defined mostly with reference to the nouns.

One experimental option, then, is to retain the basic idea of a the character, and swap noun and verb roles within it. Characters will be defined by the actions they are undertaking regularly, for instance, “repelling raiders.” These would be somewhat long in time scale; perhaps the whole game would be. Conflicts arise when ordinary activities are interrupted, or someone wants to engage in a new one. The mechanics of its resolution will primarily deal with the temporary, physical, circumstances (nouns) that interact with taking action, e.g. a lack of weapons, or a fresh horse. These nouns are not written down, are in invented on the spot or drawn from the background generally, and are relevant mostly as they affect verbs.

A radical experiment

A more extreme experiment would involve abandoning traditional characters, which are fundamentally nouns themselves. Players would instead be in charge of actions, or events, or processes of certain kinds. And rather than having traits that are adjective, as usual, they would have adverbs.

This approach could lead to a highly abstract game, perhaps where the players are elemental forces of the world, gods of a kind, responsible for “walking,” “singing” and so on; perhaps with these words interpetted metaphorically at times. Alternately, the game could still involve one or more characters, but they are controlled jointly by the verbs each player commands.

Sep 07, 2009 | Filed in design | Tagged: