We follow a lot of rules that we really don’t have to follow.
In tabletop games, yes, and also those pesky things called laws. But I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about self-imposed rules, the ones we obey of our own accord with the expectation that they’ll lead to good things in our lives without any evidence that they actually do anything. I’m talking about superstition.
In this month’s newsletter, I’ll briefly break down superstition as a concept—where the urge comes from, why superstitious influence waxes and wanes—and I’ll explore how superstition can be interpreted through the lens of TTRPG design.1
But first, how was the past month at Foresight Studio? Tiring, to be honest with y’all. The day job is day jobbing, and I haven’t had time or energy to get as much done as I wanted to this past month-plus. But a few exciting things are on the horizon!
I’ve been working on visual identity for the two projects I’m aiming to publish by the end of the summer. Channeling new-age mystique with a touch of expensive-skincare-branding vibes for Hillbrook Glen: Follow your Bliss, and aiming for minimalism with a sprinkle of astrophysics for Ex Nihilo Ad Nihilum. Here’s a sneak peek:
Last Friday, Triangle Agency wrapped up an amazingly successful Kickstarter, which means Haunted Table will have me onboard not just as a Vault Mission writer but also as layout artist for both books! I can’t wait for you to see what’s in store. In the meantime, you can find a demo version and check out what the team is up to here—plus, it’s still available for preorder on BackerKit.
I have a bit of short fiction appearing in the first issue of Dead Horse, a new horror fiction/art/TTRPG magazine from Disaster Tourism!
Layout is coming along on The Silt Verses RPG, and in the meantime, I’ve been laying out some mysteries for Public Access and Brindlewood Bay, which you can get through The Gauntlet Patreon.
In the “things I recently acquired and think are cool” category, last week I got Curios: Albrecht Manor, a very fun work of epistolary fiction from Good Luck Press (and kiiiind of a solo TTRPG, depending on your definition of a “game”). I’ve only read through its contents once so far, but it definitely calls for deeper investigation. And I’m a sucker for any sort of “weird house” story.
I also got a new tarot deck (my second ever, and my first new one since I was like 12), and re-learning how to interpret tarot has been so much fun. There’s also a lot to learn about TTRPGs from reading cards, which comes up very briefly in today’s newsletter.
And on that note, it’s time to talk superstition. I’ve broken this down into three parts:
Magical thinking
There’s this sort-of-famous 1940s experiment by behaviorist B.F. Skinner involving birds in a box (no relation to that movie with Sandra Bullock). In the experiment, pigeons were given food at regularly spaced intervals over a long period of time. As the experiment went on, the birds began to develop patterns of behavior based on whatever they happened to be doing before food appeared—for one pigeon, it was walking in circles counterclockwise, for another, it was sticking its head in the corner of the box repeatedly. Every pigeon had a different ritual, but they were so committed to them that Skinner concluded they thought their behavior was causing the food to appear. He called it superstition.2
Like a lot of science, Skinner’s experiment was called into question and picked apart in the decades following, but something rang true about these superstitious pigeons. Even if Skinner was projecting his anthropocentric view of the world onto bird behavior, he recognized how humans commit to some pretty out-there patterns of behavior because we think it might make something good happen (or prevent something bad). I mean, I still instinctively avoid stepping on sidewalk cracks.
In the world of games, we’re no strangers to superstition. When one set of dice isn’t rolling well, I switch to a different set. I don’t put them in “dice jail” (what am I, some kind of cop??), but plenty of people do. And it makes sense that superstition and games go hand-in-hand. Where there’s randomness, there’s unpredictability, and where there’s unpredictability, there’s superstition.
Under control
There’s a theory of superstition out there that focuses on the “locus of control,” and I think there’s something to it. The concept is, superstitious behavior is a way of shifting the driving forces that influence our lives—the locus of control—from external to internal. In other words, when we’re faced with a world that’s moving wildly beyond our grasp, we use little rituals to feel like we have some say over it all.
This is borne out through research. In Germany between the first and second World Wars, economic instability directly correlated with levels of superstition (and an increase in cult activity, curiously).3 People have studied superstition in sports4 and more recently, in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic5; across the board, more uncertainty means more superstition.
I don’t know about you, but anecdotally, I feel this too. In times of significant stress, I find myself watching the clock for 11:11, checking horoscopes, and hunting for omens in everyday life—anything for some measure of reassurance.
When it comes to TTRPGs, though, most don’t plunge us deep into existential uncertainty (though maybe more should?). They do, however, provoke superstitious behavior. So how can we use that in design & play?
Cross your fingers
There’s a few ways we interact with superstition through TTRPGs. The clearest avenue is through randomness, with dice rolls, card draws, etc. injecting instability into our characters’ fictional lives. Aside from fiddling with the probability of success via difficulty ratings and ability modifiers, how else might we leverage superstitious behavior at the table? A few ideas that live at the intersection of player agency & superstition:
Before rolling a die, guess the number you’ll roll. If you’re right, you get some bonus, regardless of whether the roll was a success or failure.
Rather than a number to roll over or under, you have a “success range.” An easy roll in a D20 system might have a range of 18, and a difficult one, a range of 3. You set where in the 1-20 scale the success range falls (maybe 2-19 in the easy example, and 10-12 in the difficult one).
You have more than one set of dice. If you want to switch from using one set to another at any point during the game, there is a ritual you must complete, either in-fiction or IRL (inscribing a glyph on your character sheet, keeping the retired set of dice stacked in a tower on the table at all times, and so on).
At character creation, you select a set of positive and negative portents that are important to your PC, balanced so that they’re likely to only occasionally appear during play. If spotted, they confer a positive or negative modifier to an upcoming roll, potentially convincing you to pursue or abandon a course of action entirely.
The GM has a set of conditions that, if met by the PCs, will reduce the difficulty of rolls. The players may be aware that such conditions exist, but do not know what they are. The GM does not tell them when the conditions have been met, and only reduces the difficulty in secret.6
The other major way TTRPGs deal in superstition is what I’d call reading omens. Archetypes, characters, and features of the environment are introduced through play, and like reading tarot, we try to link this loosely connected web together into a narrative (whether as GM or player). Because of the nature of games, though, these emergent patterns can become a “real” part of the fictional world, manifesting into the characters’ lives in meaningful ways. Some games build emergent story into the mechanics, while others let it develop freeform.7
One way to push the omen-reading portion of TTRPGs even further is to coax it into the realm of everyday life. Drawing inspiration from alternate reality games and some of the pattern-recognition “puzzles” in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice8, I imagine a game in which players are encouraged to gather some real-world resource in between sessions, then make use of it in-game. For example, you might play as members of a paranormal investigation club, gathering “proof” of the supernatural—a photo of suspicious tracks, twigs that align to form a symbol, a scrap of newspaper, a strangely-shaped rock. You’d then present what you found at the start of the next session, explaining how it fits into the story to support your theories about a cryptid you’re tracking. Such a game would encourage players to look at the world around them differently, searching for patterns where they wouldn’t have found them before.
Superstition is already an intrinsic part of TTRPGs. As a player or designer, you have the unique opportunity to bring meaning to just about anything by making it impact the lives of your characters. Why not take advantage of the weird little rules we naturally latch onto?
Looking to the future,
Ben // Foresight Studio
It’s been a long month and I’m tired! So if I’ve been a bit inactive in the places you usually find me, don’t worry, I’m still around and always happy to chat. You can find me on twitter or mastodon or, most recently, cohost (tho I’m still getting set up over there). And you’re always welcome to come chat on the Foresight Studio discord server.
It’s also a kind of follow-up to my newsletter from a few months ago covering the power of belief.
He wrote about it in his 1948 paper, ‘Superstition’ in the pigeon.
Padgett & Jorgensen et al., 1982 - which maybe also explains the suspiciously high number of cults popping up in the fictional worlds of TTRPGs. These fantasy realms are not super stable, by and large.
Or, to go full pigeon experiment, every nth roll is reduced in difficulty without an obvious explanation. But as a player, I think that would just be annoying. Takes away a bit too much agency.
This is especially brought into game mechanics in mystery games, which depend on players putting clues together to land on a coherent, complete narrative. This Dicebreaker article breaks down a few different approaches in the genre.
This is a fascinating game, one I personally found beautiful and haunting. For a video game, it brings a surprisingly nuanced depiction of mental illness—but it is still a video game, and while experts (including people who live with psychosis) were consulted throughout its development, it does use its protagonist’s condition as a narrative device. I’d still recommend checking it out, but you may want to read through Dia Lacina’s thoughtful Polygon article on it first.