Weaving on the Loom: Navigating Tug-of-War

Gamers, I have a confession I need to make. The Loom SRD is not a brand-new game system that I came up with overnight and then posted to Itch.io on a whim. Unlike everyone else on social media, I lied to you. I led you to believe something that wasn't true.

The reality is, I've been playing with the Loom system for years. It started as a tool I used in horror games—a way to make sure that even once player characters died, the players could keep participating in the game. At the beginning of the game, I would write out a series of short playbooks to represent the various monstrous and supernatural forces in the story. When a player character was killed off (or otherwise rendered unplayable), that player would then get to pick up the playbook representing whatever killed their character... and suddenly, they were playing that entity. Over the course of play, the games would naturally shift from player characters vs. the GM to player characters vs. players and the GM.

I should say: I am not one to encourage adversarial relationships between GMs and players. This probably speaks more to my personal taste than it does to any particular objective stance on table dynamics, but the framing of a GM (or, more aptly, a DM) as an opponent of the player party is as unhelpful for me as it is unfun. Positioning the GM as an enemy is a deeply one-note dynamic, and it encourages modes of play that I personally really dislike. The GM is encouraged to come up with new and brutal ways to one-up, trick, punish, and outdo the players. The players are encouraged to surprise, outwit, and outplay the GM. Any information the players provide to the GM comes with the implicit or explicit expectation that it will later be used against players in unexpected ways. Any information the GM provides to the players comes with the expectation that the players use it to progress the GM's game plan and path.

The main problem I have with this dynamic is that it does not encourage the table to approach the story in a meaningfully goal-oriented manner. The goal is always the same: beat your opponents. Without necessarily meaning to, the table railroads themselves into an ongoing tug-of-war with no perceptible path out. Unless everyone puts down the rope, everyone has to keep playing. I call this dynamic the tug-of-war dynamic.

That being said.

In a horror game where the expectation is that the player characters will almost all bite it, that dynamic tectonically shifts. In the face of ensured loss, players are no longer restricted to the same tug of war—instead, players can put their characters at a disadvantage without worrying about sacrificing their own agency over the narrative.

In the tug-of-war dynamic, losing a conflict means losing agency over the story you're telling. If the GM wins, they get to assert truth over the party. If the players win, they get to influence the story. Losing means handing over your ability to impact the story. Defeat is not only an in-game consequence, but an act of ceding control to your opponent across the table.

In a game you're playing to lose, the defeat of your character is not a loss of your agency as a player. And in a game where the loss of your character is merely a change in game-state for your playstyle, defeat is doubly encouraged.

The idea behind the Loom was to make a system that could be integrated into any story I was telling, no matter what game system I was using to tell it. Because the Loom doesn't use any dice or tokens, its moves can function entirely outside of the ordinary resolution mechanics seen in whatever game you're playing in. Because the language of Loom moves is absolute, it's easy to use them to embody unstoppable monsters. If the monster can always rend you limb from limb, there's no die roll you can make or spell you can cast to stop that from happening, regardless of what the rules of your game otherwise tell you. There is no question of which side wins the tug-of-war. The only question is how long it takes.

This post is part of a series of articles I'm writing about the Loom system, a diceless, GM-less game system I designed. If you want to tune in and get the posts straight to your inbox, you can subscribe to the Clawhammer Courant for free!