Thinking Adventures Pondering
Luke Gearing's Thinking Adventure Principles really messed me up when I read them years ago. I felt a white hot shame for "playing wrong" when I first read them. I hadn't read anything that was so challenging to my assumptions about how to play as they were. I moved on and forgot about them for a few months until I read Against Incentive which had the opposite effect on me. I agreed with it to its very core. I saw ways in which I was already using the concepts in my games. So with that revelation I went back to the ten principles with a want to try and figure them out. A lot of people have an adverse reaction when they first read them. Shame, anger, disregarding it as outrage, or strawmanning it as useless polemics. But I think that those reactions are telling on themselves. The TA principles are not a rubric for how to play or create on their own. They require a relationship to be built up between them and the reader. That is why I think they are so effective in guiding people towards cultivating their own style. Instead of how most of the popular RPG advice prescribes and gives regimens on how to play or create the Principles encourage a referee to interrogate and negotiate what their relationship with the game is. I felt a more comprehensive understanding of what I wanted from games and how I run them. They're purposefully incomplete and written with a poetic vagueness. Those gaps are supposed to be filled with the results we come to after having grappled with them.
Most hobbies are compromised with this idea that there is a one right way to get started or to do something. Another hobby I have is film photography and there is not shortage of advice there that tells people to create a lot of very similar art that is disconnected from their own personal experience. I don't follow all 10 principles to a T. I primarily play with a system that doesn't fit nicely into TA style of play. Mythras is a huge, sprawling beast of a system with a combat system loaded with assumptions. But that doesn't mean I don't create worlds, adventures, or run sessions without that TA style of thought in my head. Maybe one day I will break down each point one by one: for today I wanna just talk a little about number 8 "Game content should be more meaningful than game systems. If it is not, the content is weak or the system domineering." Part of what I love so much about Mythras (and other d100/brp games) is how quickly they blend in to the background mechanically after you get a hang of them. You're not going around asking to make insight rolls and interpreting the failures from your playbook. In a good session you're using your understanding of your character to break apart the content the referee has prepared and twist the world however you can. So when I create adventures or settings for this system I don't have to worry about the widgets, moves, or other fussy bits that other systems have. I get to focus all my effort into the world and in turn my players get to do the same thing.
The TA principles are not a manual for play or creation. They should fire you up and get you to answer for yourself "What am I holding dear for this campaign? What am I letting go of?"