Thank you Lex for your well considered comment. I won't say that I baited you but I did allow myself to be careless with my lack of knowledge in the hope of correction. It's good to read your thoughts on it, sweet and sour.

That the ritual method for summoning me involves laying down a circle of salt, placing a laptop in the center, lighting five human fat candles around the perimeter, inscribing the secret name of God in silver letters, slamming open the window and shouting, "someone is wrong on the Internet!" isn't exactly secret information.

Luckily for me, the binding rite is.

That's interesting about the distinction between the types of games. In my experience the styles as you describe them are combined in usual DnD play, with tabletop miniatures used for combat and pen and paper style for exploration and conversation. I have a little more clarity on them now.

Play styles have covered a wide swath of possibilities in the last 44 years since the game was introduced. That's part of why the edition wars for D&D have been so aggressive, by and large. Different players believe that their personal mix of play styles are the One True Way. That's why we have descriptive terms rather than proscriptive terms.

I'm glad to read there are other less collaborative styles of GMing and I'd love to hear more about that.

In this case, it generally depends what you mean by "collaborative." Are we talking about games which are more manifest through deliberate mechanics or games which are less manifest through deliberate mechanics? In a sense, all games depend on everyone coming to the table wanting much the same thing and thus requiring a certain level of collaboration.

Also as a side note I'd like to hear why you're no DnD fan, or perhaps you could direct me to your previous writings on it.

It's actually a surprisingly short explanation:

My introduction to gaming was in high school, which put it roughly in the 1987 to 1990 range. At the time, D&D was going through one of its really pyroclastic periods and had already established a historical reputation as a pillar of a form of entertainment I was interested in. Being a heavy user of USENET, I had already been exposed to the fan base.

Traditional fantasy just wasn't tickling my jimmies. I suppose it would be easiest to say that maybe I was a little bit more rebellious than my rebellious-yet-geeky compatriots. As a result, my RPG choices of the time were Call of Cthulhu and Robotech, which were the seed elements that eventually grew into a truly ridiculous collection.

These days if I really wanted to play something in the heroic fantasy vein, I have a billion choices, but for doing the things that D&D does I would much rather use Warrior Heroes: Legends and just start hacking on it in an old-school way. It's a much simpler toolset and thus much more consistent which makes it far more amenable to easy modification. Or just straight up play.

Arguably the pursuit of a voluntaryist community is fantastical, and it also makes for a good barb.

Or, more accurately, one does not exist. As it does not exist, it must be a fantasy. Moreover, stories about interacting with one likewise must be a fantasy. Ergo, fantastical, and as such should be thought of in game terms as seeking verisimilitude with types of stories and not as if one is building a model. That way lies more madness than usual.

It is not ahistorical, though it does diverge from the present as soon as play begins, by definition.

So -- inherently ahistorical. It literally cannot be a game designed to model so much as interpret.

Again I have to quibble with you about the requirement of realism. Only the most stubborn pedant would split hairs over verisimilitude vs realism.

Or someone who has spent more than 20 years in the role-playing game design industry, listing to what players say they want, looking at what designers say they want to do, and then paying very close attention to the way both of them fail – particularly when it comes to "realism." Because what people mean when they say "realism" is not "the state of being like reality." It's not even "the state of reacting as reality would." It ends up being "conveying this specific kind of narrative," where this is often to undefined to be useful but very much is verisimilitude and definitely not reality.

If you want to put together something that works effectively, either will not do to describe the aim. You want le mot juste. If you can't describe it effectively, you can't create it.

In any case with concern to the game, it is important that the difficulty of life be simulated, consequences of sickness and injury, well modelled learning of skills, availability of resources, and so on.

And here is why we differentiate "realism" and "verisimilitude." Because simulation of skill learning, availability of resources, and so on is impossible. Not unlikely, not quite hard, not quite a challenge – impossible. Worse, it's no fun at all. Simulation assumes that we know the process, the underlying real process, and all we need to do is create a sufficiently useful micro abstraction and it can be operated upon as if it were real. That just doesn't work, for the most part. It definitely doesn't work for issues which involve human interaction like learning or the consequences of sickness and injury in anything but the loosest of abstract terms.

I realize that the idea of fun is no longer as trendy as it was, but I think it really helps to keep people actually interested in and playing a game.

That said I see a lot of this potentially being "zoomed out" to a single dice roll if it's not the focus of play for a particular group. This is an area I'm very interested in exploring.

Then you definitely don't want realism. This is a straight up, without question, highly abstracted game interface. But it brings up another problem for the game as you envision it, you don't have a consistent theory of the level of operation or abstraction for the player.

You need an understanding of what it is that you want to achieve as the experience of playing the game, and you need to have the wisdom to look at the things that you want players to be able to do and recognize what is mechanically reasonable versus just an action that you want them to be able to take with some kind of repercussion.

The ironic connection between mechanism and "realism" is that everyone thinks that the more mechanics that you have, the more complex the rule set, the more "realistic," but the opposite is true. More rules constrain human choice. More rules conflict with each other. More rules constrain the scope of what you can imagine doing. The more rules that you have, the more likely that you are to induce a state which has no verisimilitude to what any given player expects their actions to be able to accomplish or might ultimately accomplish.

I know you're more one to comment than one to collaborate so I won't ask, but I would be very interested to continue to engage you as I develop things. In the interest of this I will empty my bag of ideas onto the table in the next post and won't draw that part out, you and other commenters could save me some time.

It's true. The demonic nature does not actually lend one to strong collaborative activity. However, I recently helped @greer184 work on his Totem game which I find to some degree fascinating. A set of mechanics and rules which are designed to be modified by the players every round hyper- dynamically and democratically. That's the sort of thing that I find more compelling to work on with other people, by and large.

Being "obsessed by realism" and simultaneously dazzled by mechanics, thinking that they create realism is a recipe for disaster and game design. Literal, complete disaster as you end up with something which is unplayable, overcomplicated, and unfortunately uninteresting. The design needs to have room for players to breathe if you want them to have real choice in action.

Once you've dug around sufficient to actually put eyes on the Freemarket rules, you'll want to look at a couple of rule sets that are minimalist, flexible in descriptors, and most importantly allow the players to set what is most interesting about themselves.

WaRP is one of my go-to games for prototyping and sometimes coring systems. It's free, not requiring any kind of system license to be given to Atlas Games. It describes characters using around three Traits which are free-form and selected by the players, keeping the complexity of possible interactions down into the area where humans can resolve "what this means." It has just enough crunch to keep people on the same page when it comes to direct conflicts. And it's had its rough edges knocked off for over 20 years. That it is traditionally architected with the GM and group of players – I try not to hold against it.

More in the economic theme of your game, Red Markets was a 2018 Best Game ENnie Award Nominee, which doesn't mean what use to in the field, but it's not nothing. While not specifically about volunteerist society, economic conflicts are at the heart of the player experience (when they aren't running away from zombies, which provide the fantastic element to cast the economic one into a much harsher light). A few tweaks here and there and it could be very much in the space you want it to be.

Then there is my heavy go to win traditional game architecture is definitely not what I want: Capes. Nothing about this design is intended to be realistic and the mechanics are absolutely orthogonal to any idea of mechanically enforced realism. The players interact through the architecture of setting Conflicts that they believe the other players at the table will be interested in and then having their characters interact through the medium of those Conflicts and the mechanical residue of previous Conflicts. Characters are composed of a list of Attributes which are not the same for everyone, and in fact can be completely free-form. He completely throws away the idea of GM-centric play, which is just a big bonus.

And then there's Follow. It's even more obscure than most of the things I tend to gesture at, but for a group which wants to engage with a series of conflicts architected to challenge them as people, Follow has an interesting potential for play. As written, it's intended to be a very loosely defined quest-story engine, and it does that very well. But if you were to take as your starting conditions being immersed in this setting that you want to create, but only descriptively, you could play as a set of explorations into the world, adding on a little bit as you go as these characters succeed, fail, or turn on each other.

You'll notice a common thread among these games: they're not boardgames. They are role-playing games. In them, players can inhabit various roles, make their own decisions, and in some sense create part of the world themselves. Distributing the least player authority is WaRP, while Capes delegates quite a lot of player authority (because it has no GM to assume that authority).

Listening to what you say you want, I have a strong suspicion that player autonomy is going to be a real problem. Maybe you don't want a role-playing game. Players are definitely going to challenge the status quo, they are going to seek out conflict and create it on a regular basis. They are going to thrust hard at the assumptive pillars which hold up the setting. That's what players do. I don't think that you are ready to deal with that part of role-playing; the obsession with "realism," the crypto-cultism – it doesn't feel like you want the players to help tell a story together but instead want them to be constrained within a setting-architecture which you don't want challenged.

That's a board game. If you want to design a board game, there is a vast and varied field of them, and multiple international conferences devoted to their creation and discussion. But you need to know that upfront, and you need to accept that it is a contextualized, compartmentalized set of rules to achieve one specific kind of play given a very limited palette of elements.

But maybe that's what you want.