On theme, mechanics, and why story matters

 Hey folks! Like a few other newcomers in these parts, I have been invited to contribute to this mighty blog. My name is Liam, or Azahul if you happen to come across me in one of the corners of the internet where I run my mouth with some frequency. I am probably most well known for my love of Rats, Benny Wolcomb, and tangentially the Masters he can be taken with I guess, but for my first article I wanted to focus on something I have been ruminating from for quite some time.

Why do we play wargames? I imagine that question has a fair few responses. For myself, I like that I can express a certain amount of artistic creativity, nerdy overinvestment, and even competitive tactical nous, in a face-to-face social activity. That social aspect in particular is invaluable, both as adults who don't necessarily get easy ways to meet people and make new friends, and as someone whose interests don't tend to be entirely mainstream. But I didn't start there. I started playing wargames because I was an insular, bookish little kid who spent most of his time living in his own imagination and I was enraptured by the idea of crafting my own little army and playing out that army's story on the battlefield again and again. I hadn't discovered TTRPGs yet (that would change, don't worry) and to me it seemed like the perfect outlet for all this creative energy.

What I wanted was to tell stories.

Now, over the years, I've played wargames in both competitive and narrative environments. I am, on the whole, a decent competitive player and competitive tactics are usually what you can find me talking about should you happen to engage with me online. But what I love about Malifaux, what sets it above every other game system I have ever played, is its writing. Not the fiction found in the rulebooks or the Breachside Broadcast, but the fiction folded so very elegantly into its rules. If you have the time, I would love to take us on a journey through my love for this form of writing and how Malifaux has mastered the art.

Fair warning, the road ahead isn't smooth, but it does even out near the end.

Rules as narrative

Plenty of wargames will tell you that their narratives inform their rules, but too often this translates to "model X is particularly badass so he has a +1 to his hit-the-enemy-harder stat". Many games throw some special rules in as well, but how much narrative are you actually getting from a rule like "reroll 1s" or "extra damage on a critical"? The lore is there, and you can argue that the models have been written with their lore in mind, but the model's story isn't actually present on the tabletop.

Malifaux blew my mind when I came across it and began to understand its rules language, and how that language told its story. Misaki vanishing into the shadows, Parker Barrows robbing his opponents mid-battle, Cooper hunting his own Totems for sport, the way the same generic core rules can be used to represent Adrenaline or Disease, hiding places or terraforming wildlife, a stage magician's trick or a void monster breaking the rules of time and space. The rules in this game were brilliantly evocative. I had seen something similar to individual rules in other systems, but none had so consistently integrated story into their game mechanics. 

For an example of what I mean, consider Parker Barrows' card below. Assume you know nothing about this character beyond what is on the card. 

You can see that he is a Wild West-themed Bandit pretty quickly from his art, but you'd get there quickly even without it. Once you understand enough of the rules to know what a Soulstone is, you quickly realise that his 'Cashing Out' action sells the fantasy that he robs the opposing crew and makes off with the loot. Most of the rules on his card support this fantasy, so that you are always getting this sense of who you are personifying when you play him on the table. And it was this writing, this storytelling with game rules that didn't need to be anything more than functional, that made me fall in love with Malifaux.

Book Burning

As much as I would like to say it was the case, Malifaux 3rd Edition hasn't always stuck the landing. There is a certain amount of abstraction required when turning a piece of narrative into a game mechanic, but it is a fine line. Take that abstraction too far and you lose the narrative entirely. I first noticed this begin creeping in during the Malifaux Burns expansion, where many Titles saw an increase in rules complexity compared to the original versions but their narratives.

One example of this is Parker Barrows. We spoke about Parker, the original version, above. Let's take a quick look at his Title's card for a point of comparison.

Ooooh, so edgy

The main thing I want to focus on here are Parker2's "Perdition" and "Abandon All Hope" rules. Evocative titles, certainly. The problem with them is that the story being told is a bit unclear. What actually happens when a model drops a scheme marker and every enemy nearby takes damage from Perdition? Is Parker shooting them for having wealth? Is his nihilism turning their schemes against them with Abandon All Hope? It has been abstracted a few too many degrees from the actual story. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy actually playing Parker2 in a tactical sense. Those rules all work together to make a competitive and flexible Master on the tabletop. But the story? The story doesn't seem to come together the way it once did.

This wasn't the case with Burns entirely, however, and Burns still contained many models that were home runs on the narrative front. Watching Toni Ironsides transition from street brawler to a union president while still maintaining that adrenaline-fuelled, street brawler "feel" was a delight and genuinely made me wish I was an Arcanist player at times, for example.

The same, unfortunately, could not be said for the next expansion.

The Madness of Madness

The Madness of Malifaux copped a fair bit of flak. Many of the Keywords were accused of being overtuned, and even the crews that weren't still seemed overly complicated. There was a general sense that many of the crews were too well-rounded, with no weaknesses or need to hire out of Keyword. But for me, the biggest failing was in storytelling.

There were a few bright spots. The Configuration mechanic in Witness gave a fun puzzle vibe that suited their character. A couple of the Anglers felt very true to the idea of Bayou Gremlins gone fishin'. The Cavalier crew were just a bunch of bomb-happy soldiers, so it's hard to criticise them too much with such a simple premise. But there was a very strong sense to me that the rules writing had given up on reinforcing narrative and turned finicky, abstracted, and needlessly complex.

For my chosen example, look no further than Bygone. I was really pleased to find out that this alien crew with advanced technology was coming to Outcasts. Their weird visuals were going to be a fun addition to my hodgepodge mess of models, I felt. Unfortunately, their rules give no sense of who they are.

For those unfamiliar, the Bygone are a race of beings from Old Malifaux thought extinct. They were once a mighty, advanced civilsation, but the Tyrant Cherufe largely destroyed them and left the survivors with a terrible curse. Their bones slowly turn into embers, burning them from the inside out. The survivors of the war live a nomadic life, maintaining their slowly disintegrating technology, replacing their limbs with precious mechanical ones as the bones in those arms and legs turn to fire.

And... the word "Burning" doesn't appear on any single one of their cards.

Some curse this turned out to be, Cherufe

How is it that the rule, "Scars of Cherufe", has nothing to do with the Burning condition? Surely, at minimum, it should require you to gain +1 Burning every time you build in a suit? Where is this doom that hangs over the Bygone and supposedly informs virtually every facet of their modern day existence?

Even more strangely, this "Scars of Cherufe" rule exists on models like Constructs who shouldn't be suffering from the curse. It even appears on the model First Light, who is meant to represent the first Bygone born since the fall of their civilsation to seemingly lack the curse. How did that slip through?

Bygone are my example, but Madness of Malifaux was full of examples of this kind of mechanic. The Returned Keyword is a mess of highly abstracted overlapping interactions that make just resolving a Walk action take five minutes and don't really tell any specific kind of story. The Cavalier crew get to take extra actions near scheme markers, but where the Bandit Keyword had a fairly clear narrative in terms of what schemes mean to them (money) and why it makes them take more actions, for the Cavalier the rule is pretty far removed from any sense of story. And speaking of Story, the Story/Red Library Keyword is a bunch of models split across two Keywords, but nothing particularly differentiates the two Keywords from one another save for a handful of highly specific interactions. The Story models could be anything, nothing tells me that they have sprung to life from the pages of books, which is a particularly cruel irony.

Why is this important?

Ok, fair enough, I have a particular fixation with this kind of thing and probably care a lot more than most. I think this disregard for narrative hurts players who don't care about narratives in some oblique ways, however. Most notably, a strong story makes a model's rules stick really clearly in your head. Even if you don't remember the specifics of how Misaki's Bury and Unbury rules work, all you really need to know to play against her in a fairly informed way is to understand that the ninja vanishes and could appear from any of the shadowy hiding places her player has just dropped on the table. A strong narrative makes for an intuitive model.

Let's cycle back to Bygone for a moment. Most models have, somewhere on their card, a symbol denoting that an ability is Technology or Tradition. The crew has an upgrade card with Tradition on one side, Technology on the other. The side that is face up dictates which abilities and triggers the crew has access to. The problem is that there is no consistency across the crew as to what Technology or Tradition mean. A really simple idea would be to say that Technology is for fighting, and Tradition is for scheming. Unfortunately, basically every instance of a Technology/Tradition trigger or ability is unique, and none of them have that level of consistency. Sometimes a Technology rule means you do +1 damage, sometimes it means you steal Focus. Sometimes Tradition means your attacks can't be cheated against, sometimes it means you move further.

Without a core narrative, without anything for your mind to anchor to, the Technology/Tradition mechanic becomes a pure memory check. As the Bygone player you have to hold all such instances of rules in your head and choose to flip the upgrade at the correct moment to make sure you get the abilities you actually want. Or, more likely, you write a list where you never need to flip the card, because that is a crazy mental load to hold. As an opponent to the Bygone crew, presumably less familiar with the minutiae of the cards than the Bygone player, you face an almost impossible task of playing around a bevvy of rules that may not be in play at any point in time.

Once the narrative goes out the window, the reins keeping complexity in check begin to slip. We see this in a lot of the Titles from Burns, and almost all of the crews from Madness. Complexity isn't impossible with a good core narrative, I think of Tara as an example that is complicated to play while being intensely thematic, but if you aren't beholden to telling a story then there are fewer checks against you layering on ever more interactions and rules. The game gets messier, harder to understand on an intuitive level, and that makes it harder to get to the point where you can intuitively play competitively. So, even if the narrative is the last thing on your mind when you play a game of Malifaux, I would urge you to give it some weight. You'll be hurt if it goes.

From the Ashes

This article has tended towards the negative, and I don't like being negative. I love playing Malifaux, and the good news is that the game has given me fewer reasons to criticise it of late. At time of writing we are only a little ways into the Ashes of Malifaux release cycle, and this expansion has given me a lot of hope. This expansion seems to have been driven with a much greater focus on narrative than those that preceded it, reinforced perhaps by the design goal of releasing models in pairs with inherent links to one another. There were a couple of slips (why do Delirium and Delirious Thralls have absolutely nothing to do with one another mechanically? They practically share a name but virtually no other connections), but it has given us plenty of cool little narrative bites like the ever-bisecting Leftovers or this delightful married couple:

I have been extremely happy to see storytelling take centre-stage a bit more, and I hope it continues as Malifaux's core theme. I love to see models whose narrative I can understand without ever reading their lore entry. I'll never forget at looking at the stat cards for Stolen, then at Doc Mitchell, then at Earl Jones, and going, "How many kidnapped Totems do Outcasts have? Are... are we the baddies?" (The answer was yes, and I hadn't even reached the Waifs yet). 

Anyway, that is me signing off for now. If you kept up with me through all this, my sincerest thanks. I hope you found it interesting, and if you find yourself sharing a Discord channel or something with me and want to discuss it more just let me know. I am always happy to chat, and as you may be able to tell I have a lot to say on this subject. 

In the future I might, I dunno, do a more mechanically-minded analysis of a Keyword I like or something. We'll see if the inspiration strikes. But in the meantime have a lovely day, and have a great time telling stories!