The Nurture Game

After my article last week, I was extremely grateful to only receive two kinds of comment:  What was I so worried about when I posted it, and what did I mean when I said L5R had the promise, or the potential, of having a non-Domination oriented game, even if it did not fully deliver.  I will venture to answer, potentially, the first question next week, but I'll tackle the second question this week and try to share what a nurture-oriented game might be, and how L5R does and does not live up to creating that game.

First, I'll talk about what a nurture-oriented game is.

In order for something to be a good game of just about any kind, there needs to be an element of risk, an element of decision-making, an element of randomness, and an element of reward.   The risk adds tension, the decision-making makes the player able to input into the game, the randomness makes each game play out differently, and the reward makes completing the game feel like a success. 

In most classic board and card games, there is also an element of competition: a requirement for a opponent to achieve victory over.  But this is not necessary.  Solitaire is a game without an opponent.  There are also coming out new kinds of board games that are cooperative, not competitive, such as Pandemic. These have the elements of a game, but the end condition does not require dominating other players. Instead, the goal is to create sufficient cooperation between the players and achieve a strong enough board position that you can accomplish your goals, thus achieving victory, and the reward.  For the world of Board Games, then, you can think of something like Monopoly or Poker as being Domination games, with the intent to dominate the other players, and something like Pandemic being a Nurture game, with the intent to work with the other players to set up the optimal board position and win.

Role Playing games are a little different.  In traditional RPGs, the players are cooperating with each other against NPCs that are run by the GM.  So how do these translate into Dominate vs. Nurture games?   

Dominate games require active opposition. In a traditional Dominate RPG, the GM creates a scenario where the PC's are 'the good guys'...(not necessarily in alignment or action, though. )  The NPCs come in three categories:  'the bad guys', 'information sources', and 'sympathy pools'.  'The bad guys' are defined as opponents who must be defeated to reach the goal.  'Information sources' are NPCs who provide clues or steps along the way to help you defeat 'The bad guys'.  'Sympathy pools' are sympathetic NPCs who provide rewards for success and risk for failures'.  Those NPCS who oppose the PCs are dominated in sequence until the 'boss' NPC is defeated and the scenario is won.  The domination can be physical, social, or intellectual.  But the scenario is won by defeating the opponents. 

In a nurture game, you still have a risk and a reward, but the method of 'winning' the game is not the same. Opposing NPCs are not necessarily 'Bad Guys'.  They are, instead, competitors.   They have interests that are not aligned with your own, but your goal is not to compel them to do as you wish.  Your path to victory is not through defeating opponents.  Your path to victory is to set up the best board position possible for you and the community you are acting on behalf of.

In short:
In a domination game, victory is achieved by defeating the opponents of your community.
In a nurture game,  victory is achieved by improving your community's board state.

Every game can have nurture game aspects.  It can be argued that character advancement in D&D is a sort of nurture game - it is about self-improvement, after all.  But in the editions of D&D out at the time, the only way to advance was through defeating opponents, which grant XP, which let you advance. 
Other games have very, very light mechanics that allow a creative GM to add community-building elements to the game, generally with skill rolls.  But skill rolls tend to be straight binaries, Pass/Fail. They don't have all the elements of a game. In general, they tend to be used in the same fashion combat skills are used: as a way to defeat a puzzle/room/environmental challenge.  But GMs can take these light skill mechanics and use them to create nurture aspects to games.  The games just aren't built for it.

Since domination-oriented games require an opponent who must lose, every situation by default ends in a zero-sum game.  One person wins, the other person loses.  Compromise is not really an option.  Even in games that were 'close' to co-op at the time L5R came out, like Diplomacy, the cooperative portion was a short-term affair as we join forces to take down a larger rival...eventually we would turn on each  each other. There was no other way to win.

Nurture-oriented games foster different solutions.  Since we are rivals, or competitors, rather than opponents,  we can look for solutions where we both get what we want.  Maybe the dragon really doesn't like the taste of villagers,  and would rather eat fish from the river, but the new dam the villagers have put in has stopped all the fish from reaching the dragon's lands. 
There was a classroom exercise that used to be done where three people were given the roles of negotiators on behalf of three towns needing peaches and the fourth was given the role of a peach farmer.  The farmer had one crop of peaches, and each town needed all the peaches in order to survive.  In a domination-oriented game, whichever negotiator gave the farmer the best price or convinced the farmer to reject the other negotiators 'won', and the others lost.  But in a nurture-oriented game, the three negotiators and the farmer can talk to each other and find out that each town needed different parts of the peach...one needed peach skin, one needed peach pits, and one needed peach juice.  All three could win.  And, of course, the farmer wins most of all. 
This negotiation can be as tense and as full of conflict, etc, as one ending up without the exclusive win.  There's as much 'story' there.   It just uses different means to win. 

Now, obviously,  per my discussion of last week, men are just as capable of doing this community-development task as women.  And women are just as capable of defeating opponents as men. It is only a weird thing in our patriarchal society that makes it so negotiation and development is considered lesser, weak, or unrealistic, and associated with women, while a result in victory over an opponent is considered strong, assertive, direct, realistic, and associated with men.
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So what does L5R have that contributes to a nurture-oriented game, and what does it lack?  

I was a little too harsh when I said that L5R did not mechanically have a nurture game.  It is more a case where its potential falls short of creating it.  But mechanically, first of all, L5R had honor, glory, and the roll and keep system.  Honor and glory are both stakes that can be risked and rewards that can be gained, without requiring a competitor lose an equal amount of honor or glory based on your win.  If you gain money in a game, you have to get it from someone else in some fashion, causing them to lose it.  But if you gain glory or honor in a game,  you aren't taking that honor or glory from another.  So that covers two aspects of gamifying a nurture scenario.  The roll and keep mechanic adds the element of risk, randomness, and decision-making to every single roll...including unopposed rolls.  Do you make a raise?  Will you hit the TN if you do?  How much can a raise do for you?  This turns a 'perform on your musical  instrument for the lord of the manor' roll into a little poker game, where you are weighing your odds of success vs your ability to make further impressions above and beyond the default success.  Roll and keep + raises gamifies every skill roll,  which means it can gamify nurture also.

L5R 5th Edition has given up this mechanic.  Although it still has roll and keep, the opportunities are going to be based on what comes out randomly on the dice.  TNs are generally known ahead of time, and the chances of getting certain opportunity scenarios are not something that can be calculated ahead of time.  Instead of it being a gamble you make to to try to 'succeed better', you roll the dice and, if opportunities come up, you use them to help you. You have to make your decisions after the roll.  Now, 5E can be used for a nurture-oriented game, too; its mechanics just aren't as well tuned for gamifying that aspect.  

5E does have shuji, and 1-4E did have courtier-focused schools, giving schools and techniques that focus on politics and negotiations.  These do make nurture scenarios more satisfying, letting some characters be particularly good at optimizing in a way that will work in a fashion that does not require direct opposition.  And 5E has strife, which can put pressure on a non-violent scenario, but strife is more useful as a tool of political/social domination rater than as an enhancement to negotiation and finding win/win scenarios.  

And as I said in my last article, L5R has a world that seems primed to create a balance between a nurture-oriented and domination-oriented game.  There are enemies, including enemies in other clans, that can and should be defeated completely, both in the court or on the battlefield.  But the clans aren't necessarily 'the bad guys'.  Each clan performs a role and function in the Empire, and the lore for the clans is deep enough that it is clear that the clans are going to have competing points of view for many things. How to resolve hazards or defeat threats, for example, how to compete for resources, even for what constitutes a threat.  Three clans might need the same peach crop for three different reasons.  You can persuade the farmer to give your clan the crop and ignore the others...but you can maybe find out why the other clans need the peach crop and see if there are compromises where you all can accomplish your goals...and win allies in doing so.  And in L5R, you have this overarching hierarchy and sense of required civil order that drives you to negotiate for peaches rather than just taking the peaches in the first place.

However, L5R does fall short of this potential.  The problem is that, while L5R has the mechanics and the means to create a nurture game, it never has, in any edition, told you how to create and run one.  How do you, as a GM, set up a scenario where the players can advance their position without dominating opponents?  What kind of conflicts do you make, and how do you string them together into a campaign?  

We knew, from Dungeons and Dragons, how to manage a dungeon crawl as a kind of campaign.  In a dungeon crawl kind of campaign, the characters move as a group from scene to scene, usually physically from room to room or space to space, encountering an opponent or trap or puzzle in that room that must be defeated to move on to the next room.   Once you have moved through all the rooms to reach the final room, you must defeat the final boss monster or boss trap, at which point you win the treasure that is there and go home.

​Investigations are another kind of dungeon. Instead of physical rooms or areas, an investigation campaign strings together locations and NPCs, which you search or interrogate or defeat, and each victory unlocks the next part of the 'dungeon', just as solving puzzles and defeating enemies does in a traditional dungeon. Eventually, you locate the 'boss' and defeat them.  

But how do you advance in a nurture-style game?  How does a campaign center around accumulating virtue and improving your board position rather than moving step through step through a dungeon or an "investigation dungeon"?  L5R has the tools to run it, but doesn't ever really show us how to string such a campaign together. 

It could.  Pitting the players, AND the NPCs,  against the forces of red tape, limited resources, tradition, or too much change, Shadowlands threat, slow spreading corruption,  time, disease,  outside encroachment...the tools are all there.  GMs just need guidance to how to build that kind of campaign.  And L5R could have put that in...and never did. 


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