#151: What Is A Cinematic Game?

Thomas Manuel

here we go again: grasping meaning from the maw of chaos

I. Dear Reader,

So let’s talk about the term “cinematic” when it comes to roleplaying games. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot and I’m not sure I’ve read someone actually explaining what they mean by that. So I’m going to try and explain what I think the term cinematic should mean when it comes to TTRPGs.

Now this isn’t something I normally do. Normally, I am a kind of descriptivist – I just try to describe what other people mean when they use a word. But in this situation, I’m going to be more of a prescriptivist and propose what I think this word should mean.

The first thing to note is that the meaning cannot actually be too specific. Cinema isn’t one thing. So when we say “cinematic”, we usually mean a specific type of cinema – which you might have to deduce from context. Someone can describe their game as cinematic and mean “Hollywood action movies in the 2000s” and someone else could describe their game as cinematic and mean “like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings”.

Okay, to me, when I describe a game as cinematic, I mean that:

  1. the shared imaginary space (the thing we are all imagining in our heads) looks and operates like a movie of appropriate genre

  2. the speed of the game can be compared to the speed of those same events in movies

So by point one, I mean that cinematic games are ones that lean on the look and feel of movies as you play them. Players might frame and imagine the game as a movie – describing camera angles and so on. (“The camera cuts away to reveal…”) They might also expect the game to feel like a movie in terms of logic. Like in a cinematic action game, we might expect action movie logic, i.e., the hero can only get flesh wounds from no-name bad guys. Or hey, maybe, in this game, you can leap a car off a building into another building. Or smash a helicopter with a car. Or take a car into space?!

A still image from the Fast and Furious movies where two cars are falling through the air

And by point two, I mean that cinematic games are also talking about how fast they play. A game that promises cinematic fights should be judged by how long those fights take, compared to fights in movies. In that sense, we could compare D&D 5e to the recent D&D: Honour among Thieves movie and say that the game doesn’t have particularly cinematic combat because of the obvious difference in time taken. If you’re making a martial arts game inspired by the movies of Bruce Lee, well, most Bruce Lee fight scenes are around the 5 minute mark. SoI think if a game says it’s cinematic in that sense, it better at least try to get close to that number!

Like all definitions, I expect this can be torn to pieces. So let me know what you think! Have games like Feng Shui got a better definition that I missed? Let me know!

Yours, slowly zooming into a tight close-up,

Thomas

II. Media of the Week

On the RPG Design Panelcast, a fun panel called The Many Meanings of Diceless that talks about lots of different ways a game can be diceless – some that retain randomizers or uncertainty, others that don’t.

  • Please consider joining 50+ other patrons in support the newsletter over at patreon and help keep me going.

  • If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

III. Links of the Week

News

  • Paizo release a final version of the ORC license

  • Kickstarter has more or less backed out of any serious blockchain or crypto plans.

  • Adventure Time is getting an official RPG in English. I believe there was an Italian or Spanish one already.

Articles and Essays

  • On the Deeper In The Game blog, a solid post about relationship mechanics as flags that players wave when they’re opting in. After some chatter about romance in games, this is a solid counter to some of the claims thrown about it.

  • Indie Game Reading Club reviews a handful of games, all connected by being wildly creative and weird. This includes far future fever dream Stillfleet, green apocalypse Wildsea, and minotaur gender explorer The Clay That Woke.

  • I found this post really interesting: Lowell Francis tries to break down why he chooses certain games over others. It’s trying to explicitly state criteria that for most of us is kind of vague and amorphous (“I want games with a randomizer and a GM”, etc). But it’s also something I think about a lot so I’m glad to see someone trying to articulate it.

  • On Githyanki Diaspora, Judd has something neat for Traveler fans. What if the hodge podge of currency systems across the galaxy could be represented through one stat, Largesse?

  • POCGamer describes his experience as a diver in a new series about aquatic RPGs

  • There’s a TTRPG For That has a post about games where you’re a weird bug alien

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

  • Explore an infinite library with your familiar, discovering places, patrons, and secrets along the way. The Librarian’s Apprentice – an all-ages solo journaling RPG – is available now on Crowdfundr.

  • Join a Wyld Coven in Witches of Midnight, a hopeful horror Forged in the Dark TTRPG & tarot deck! Choose from 22 magical playbooks & 9 immortal bloodlines including Medusae, Satyr & Lilitu. Unleash your inner witch!

  • Border Ridings is a collaborative history-building game, played by drawing evolving town maps on scraps of paper. Rules printed on a massive fold out map! Coming to Kickstarter July 1st through to July 21st.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

9 responses to “#151: What Is A Cinematic Game?”

  1. Omer hoffmann Avatar
    Omer hoffmann

    At our table, the idea “cinematic” is used by players & facilitators descriptions. For example, we have a player who enjoys emphasizing how the camera works and frames the picture ( ” and as we see the doors close behind him, we fade to black”). So I suggest we use it a tool, a language that helps to conjure specific images – and therefore, a story – to our collective experience.

    Like

    Reply
    1. Thomas M Avatar
      Thomas M

      Agreed! That makes sense!

      Like

      Reply
  2. Victor J Merino Avatar
    Victor J Merino

    The other Adventure Time official RPG was Spanish, published by Nosolorol!
    They did a pretty neat work with it.

    Like

    Reply
    1. Thomas M Avatar
      Thomas M

      Thank you! I saw some article about it and it sounded really cool. Wished I read Spanish!

      Like

      Reply
  3. Sam Dunnewold Avatar
    Sam Dunnewold

    I like the first half of your cinematic definition – that’s the one use I for myself. But the second half feels off to me.

    In my mind, it’s never going to be the case that a play group can move at the speed of Bruce Lee action scene. Those scenes are so fast! I think RPGs can still emulate them, maybe even taking 5 minutes of mechanics to map onto a 5 minute sequence, but the experience is going to be so radically different. The movie will move at the speed of a fist flying through the air while the game is going to move no faster than the speed of a conversation, and probably a conversation that involves remembering how the rules work.

    RPGs feel so often about taking some conversation and mechanics and maybe a little randomization and smooshing it all together until we’ve all agreed on a piece of fiction that plays like a cinematic sequence in our collective heads. By the time I’m done with a Blades in the Dark score, I can replay the thing in my mind in a way that feels so much like a movie. But the process of getting there, including the speed, feels super different.

    Then again, I’m sort of arguing that RPGs move at the speed of bullet time, a uniquely cinematic invention. 🙂

    Like

    Reply
    1. Thomas M Avatar
      Thomas M

      Thanks for the post! I’m not sure we disagree. I’m not saying a cinematic RPG should take exactly the same time as a movie. I’m saying it should try to – and we can judge it’s success by how close it gets (in terms of speed and fidelity). If a game takes 15-20 minutes to play out a 5 minute Bruce Lee fight, that’s pretty cinematic to me. If it takes 30-40 minutes, it’s less so, and so on. Again, that old adage of “it’s not a binary, it’s a spectrum”.

      Like

      Reply
      1. Sam Dunnewold Avatar
        Sam Dunnewold

        Hm! Yeah I think we’re on the same page here, but maybe with a different idea of the importance of that pacing ingredient.

        Like I can think of a session of Agon I played once where we spent like 2 hours on a single character decision that would’ve taken 3-4 minutes if it lived in a movie. The moment in question is very cinematic in my memory because we spent so much time talking about the space we were in and the character’s hesitation and all that good stuff. But maybe there is still a pacing parallel there, because that moment would’ve taken a whole episode of TV to emotionally build up, and that’s basically what we did at the table, even if we didn’t get through as much plot or action.

        I still think it’s more important for me how the memory of the play experience ends up feeling than the route (including pacing) we took to get there, but you’re right: pacing is totally an element of how games can try to get there.

        Like

      2. Thomas M Avatar
        Thomas M

        That’s a really interesting point! I might have inadvertently narrowed the conversation to “pacing action/fights” but I guess it’s important to think about how other aspects are paced, including say romance or a climactic decision. I would be also interested in your opinion about whether Agon’s design created that situation – or to put it another way, was Agon designed for a climactic decision of that kind to play out that way?

        Like

      3. Sam Dunnewold Avatar
        Sam Dunnewold

        As I think about it, that question about Agon is really interesting.

        I think Agon is a game where the design, or at least the prewritten adventures, are very much about leading the players towards making climactic decisions. The adventures almost all follow a pattern of “you show up on an island and something messed up is going on -> you figure out what that messed up thing is -> you decide what to do about it -> you do a big action climax to enact your solution.” The action climax rules are inherently include a moment when players must decide whether dealing with unpleasant side effects (i.e. saving a schoolbus full of kids) or taking on their main villain/problem (i.e. capturing the Green Goblin – examples not applicable to Agon) is more important.

        But those moments of choice don’t always feel cinematic, and the mid-adventure moments of choice feel like they’re created because of the adventure writing more than the rules of Agon. I’m now thinking I should GM the game differently to try and make them feel more so, because I think it’d be pretty trivial to do and pretty effective.

        Meanwhile, I think the rules ARE super good at creating cinematic scenes, especially action sequences. I wasn’t thinking about this when I brought it up, but almost every resolution roll in Agon feels like an epic Fast and the Furious action sequence, and I think it’s interesting how they do it: everyone in the party participates in most contests and rolls once, then they go from worst result to best and narrate what happens to them. It means you have a bunch of sitting around while everyone builds a dice pool and rolls, but then you get tons of action narrated back-to-back-to-back with no mechanics getting in the way while people take turns saying what happens. It’s maybe the best example of your pacing idea I can think of.

        On top of that, I think the way in which the mechanics get out of the way at a certain point and tell people to just narrate whatever they think is cool is a huge part of what makes it end up feeling cinematic. Because engaging with rules doesn’t ever feel cinematic to me even when it’s going great, but people naturally know how to describe something that feels epic and actiony and cool and, you know, cinematic.

        Like

Leave a reply to Thomas M Cancel reply