In Praise of Trophy Gold

Every so often you encounter a piece of art that fundamentally changes how you view the artistic medium it's a part of. This is distinct from simply great art; I'm talking about the stuff that blows the doors off your inner conception of the form--works that make you jump out of your chair and say, "You can do THAT? This was possible all along?"

The first time I remember feeling this electric shock was hearing the Allemande from Caroline Shaw's Partita for Eight Voices (give it a listen) in undergrad music history class. The past three years of my life had been spent immersed in the canon of western music; I thought I understood pretty well the range of what existed. Or at least, the range of what I enjoyed. There's plenty of wacky ugly sound out there, if that revs your engine.

But this! Eight human voices, pushing to the edges of what human biology can phonate. Tidal waves of perfectly tuned chords interspersed by visceral dissonances, spoken words, snarls, and more. I nearly wept in my little bucket chair with its built-in writing desk. Six minutes in that dim lecture hall are a core memory.

Most of all, I remember thinking, "My god, new music can still be beautiful."

Anyway, I got a hard copy of Trophy Gold a few months ago. My god.

Trophy is an interesting beast. The design traces itself back to the fiction-first, almost story-game tradition, but generalized to break out of that narrative straightjacket and provide an engine for collaborative storytelling in any bespoke adventure. 

Of the two familial lines (Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold) I've only played or read Gold, the younger child. Dark is obligate play-to-lose; your treasure-hunters are not coming back. 

Trophy Gold, on the other hand, is something of a hybrid. Characters always skirt the edge of doom. There's no "advancement," per se; completing one adventure ("incursion") doesn't make you more likely to survive the next one (quite the opposite, usually). 

But you can work towards a goal: collecting 50 Gold and accomplishing your Drive. It's a tantalizing promise, like paying off your debt at the company store and finally being free to leave the mines.

I've never played a game anything like this before. The only story game I've ever touched is Nightling Bug's Wickedness; other than that, I'm a child of the dragon game and its many mutant cousins. Maybe that makes me a poor judge of a work so outside my wheelhouse.

But maybe not. The folks behind Trophy Gold describe it as a new-school engine to run old-school dungeon crawls. In that way, Gold bridges the gap between my experience and the wonderful world of collaborative, forge-the-narrative RPGs which until now have been a mystery to me. The "doors blown off" moment is a function of the one who experiences it, not just the work of art that triggers the revelation.

What is Trophy Gold, anyway? 

Let's answer a question with a question: what's the largest stand-alone unit of fiction in a traditional RPG? There are lots of answers you could give, but I think "the dungeon" is a good one. Dungeons are self-contained: you go in, you do stuff, you come out (or don't). At a higher level, a hexcrawl map mostly tracks where adventure locations are. The central example of an adventure location? The dungeon.

Dungeons, in turn are broken into rooms. This is a diegetic division; that is, the in-fiction characters are experiencing the same hierarchical breakdown as the players. The doorway boundary between physical dungeon rooms corresponds to the textual boundary between area descriptions.

Trophy does it differently. A Trophy Gold incursion is divided into "Sets," each of which might be as small as a dungeon room or as large as an entire forest. This is a thematic rather than physical division; the incursion is the dungeon-equivalent and the set is the room-equivalent, but bounded by conceptual breaks rather than physical walls.

Actually, this kind of slicing shouldn't be unfamiliar to dungeon-crawl GMs. Many dungeons have their rooms grouped into "the ones with bugbears," "the ones with orcs," "the ones with undead," etc. Trophy just takes that kind of higher-level association, and makes it the canonical subunit in the text.

Crucially, Trophy also makes the players aware that this shift in viewpoint has occurred. Player/character knowledge separation is fairly key in Trophy, and it's another step away from the old-school worldview. Each Set has an explicit goal, and the players are informed of it as soon as they enter. How often have I agonized over the party overlooking the (seemingly) obvious interaction hook in a room? I could have just been telling them!

Set goals can get crazy explicit in practice. A band of treasure-hunters might enter a field littered with corpses, and the GM tell them, "this set is called 'Magegrave.' The set goal is 'Break Kubnezzin's final spell.'" Immediately the players know a whole slew of things their characters don't:

• There's somebody named Kubnezzin
• He can cast spells
• Given the word 'final' and the set name, Kubnezzin's probably dead
• But one of his spells is still active

It could be fun, in traditional play, to figure all this out through exploration and interaction with the environment. But one of the major strengths of Trophy is that it boils down the necessary material to the bare essentials. If you wanted to convey the above bullets through pure setting description, you'd need to litter the area with clues, most of which the players would probably never interact with. Trophy jumps straight to the meat.

Actually, that gets at a deeper point. The traditional model is that physical facts about the fictional world inform the overarching concepts, themes, and truth of the setting. Trophy's incursions and Sets reverse that: overarching concepts, themes, and truth inform physical facts about the fictional world.

There's a stereotype that the rules in less traditional RPGs are somehow looser and weaker, that because the players shape the story more they're by necessity less bound by the system. This is the cause of a lot of the poo-pooing of newer games by the longbeards of the scene, as if some players aren't tough enough to handle a strict and unforgiving ruleset.

I think this view is completely backwards. At least in the case of Trophy Gold, the rules are often far less flexible than in your average dungeon crawler. If a roll of the dice says that you take consequences, there's no arguing for a way out. The fiction bends to the rules. 

About those dice. There are only three kinds of roll in Trophy Gold, and each of them is genius. As with the breakdown of incursions into Sets, the game has sliced through dungeon-crawling play at the joints and carved out the three things that treasure-hunters are always up to:

1. Poking around and looking for interesting things (the Hunt roll)
2. Doing dangerous stuff to accomplish their goals (the Risk roll)
3. Fighting terrible foes (the Combat roll)

I mean, that's pretty much dungeon-crawling in a nutshell, right? Anything that has a success and failure state--that is, anything that would require a roll of the dice in a traditional game--can readily be plopped into one of those three buckets. I've occasionally seen inexperienced Trophy GMs make a roll outside the triptych, and the game is almost always the worse for it.

I won't belabor how the various rolls actually work. Buy the game! Suffice it to say, the mechanics ensure that players get meaningful choices by default, and when they suffer consequences it's always because of those choices. How many RPGs can say the same?

Making the leap from dragon game successors to Trophy is no mean feat. I credit my success to the excellent how-to videos by Trophy publisher Jason Cordova, whose Sixth Ring podcast is another great resource. It's undeniable that playing a game like this requires a new mindset. It's an entirely different frame around role-playing; a different angle from which to examine this hobby of ours.

My reaction: "You can do THAT? This was possible all along?"

-V