Sultan's Musings

Enter the Matrix (by way of the OSR/NSR)

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I’m gonna be honest, when I first heard the term 'matrix game' (uttered by Tim B during an NSR camp hangout) I fully thought he was talking about TTRPGs based on the popular Matrix franchise, where you get to wear black leathers and dodge bullets in an all-consuming virtual reality run by a God-like AI. I was a little disappointed to find out what he actually meant, but quickly learned that it's actually way cooler than that (and it's hard to be cooler than Keanu in sunglasses).

Matrix games are social games that essentially boil down to a problem being presented and having a group of players inhabit roles of characters who will attempt to resolve that problem in a way that aligns with their goals within a set number of turns.

You might think this sounds a lot like an RPG. You are correct. There is a lot of overlap. Roleplay is a crucial pillar of matrix gaming. However, where RPGs aren’t usually set up to be competitive, players in matrix games often have conflicting agendas and will come into opposition with each other, like they would in a wargame - which is the common ancestor of both these genres.

For a great primer on what a matrix game is, check out this blog post from Chris McDowall.

Samuel James has this great Reddit post discussing the genre. Since then, his style of running them evolved into what he now calls Story Games, which you can learn more about on his substack.

For an in-depth look at what a matrix game actually is, this video does a great job covering how the games are actually run and applied.

I also love this post from Knight at the Opera, where Dwiz points out that model UN is fundamentally a matrix game (by being a FKR larp). Your school DND club never felt this important, did it?

I am not going to talk much further about what a matrix game is by definition, the blog posts above do a great job covering that, but I am more interested to see how it might intersect with OSR/NSR games (for the sake of my sanity I will not be defining those either).

Can OSR/NSR modules be adapted to matrix games? Not in the traditional sense. It’s not the same process as taking The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford and prepping it for Cairn. But you can take the scenario presented and run that as a matrix game.

So lets do that using Black Wyrm as our example:

Identify the core problem: Easy, the module already does that for us. A family of Dwarves found a stash of buried treasure in the mines near Brandonsford, and one of them got greedy and killed his brothers for said treasures, thus turning into a black dragon that presents a problem for the nearby area. Also, the Goblin King Hogboon wants to claim the forest near Brandonsford as his own, causing further trouble for the town.

Establish the known facts: Brandonsford was named after Brandon, an ancient hero who slayed a dragon with a magical sword granted to him by fairies. The town exists on the edge of wilderness and has little law enforcement, mostly by volunteers. Fairies have crept back into the woods. A dragon patrols the wilderness.

Establish the players: Using the NPC descriptions as guidelines, we can let players inhabit these roles. If we were playing Black Wyrm, we might have playable characters such as Bentley (owner of The Clumsy Fox Tavern), Quinn (owner of the Golden Egg Tavern), Eric (the town reeve), Father William, Hogboon the Goblin King, The Dragon, Vivian the Witch. Keep note of all the assets these players might have at their disposal. Do they own property? Do they lead factions? Do they hold influence?

Establish motivations: each player will have their own goals informed by the descriptions of their characters in the adventure. Of course, you could make up your own motivations. If you are playing the dragon, you are the problem, so your goal (as inferred by the text) is to eat and protect your gold. If you are playing Hogboon, you want to capture the Dragon, to aid you in taking over the forest. Other characters will need more fleshing out, but tying the motivation to the central problem is crucial for dynamic play.

With all these pieces set you are ready to play a matrix game based on the module. Remember, you aren’t playing a dungeon game anymore. You don’t play these objectives to progress your character, you play them to win but in a way that would make sense for that character. In the end, your performance as a player is assessed by how close you were to achieving your objectives.

In picking the right module to convert into a matrix game, you want situations that present a lot of complexity in terms of factional motivations and want problems that have no easy solutions. Playing the matrix game will run counter to the intended playstyle of the module. You aren’t going to resolve this by carefully crawling through a dungeon, basically.

But that’s ok, because you aren’t playing Black Wyrm as a matrix game because you want to run Black Wyrm, the introductory OSR adventure. Instead you picked it because you like the situation it presents and want to see it play out on a broader scale.

Let’s be honest though, most NSR/OSR modules (including Black Wyrm) aren’t going to provide that large scale, complex problem that will sustain a game where players inhabit the roles of competing factions/entities. Not without players doing the work to flesh out the factions and their competing agendas. But that doesn’t mean these two game types are incompatible off the bat.

Let’s take a look at the inverse of what I have just presented, which is using a matrix game as a launching off point for an OSR/NSR game (or any adventure game, really).

I think this presents the best case for a session 0 for this playstyle because you can feasibly play through an entire matrix game in the given time (2-3 hrs) and you are still setting the stage for the campaign to come.

A matrix game always starts with a problem, right?

So let’s use one to create a world/setting for our players, by letting them play out the prior events in the lore.

An easy one to model our game off of would be to re-enact the War of the Ring. BBEG is amassing power in BBEG land and all the other races of Pseudo-Medieval Europe must band together to stop them. Note that these aren't the characters the players will be embodying in the RPG campaign. Instead these matrix games characters are the forces that will shape the game to come. Think of it as a grand-narrative one-shot leading into your main game.

Player characters include:

Give each player motivations and assets as detailed in our Black Wyrm example above and let them play out the events of how this war went down. At the end of your session 0 you will have a background event and lore for your setting that the players actively shaped with their decisions. Maybe the BBEG won the matrix game and now the world lives under their rule. Next session we’ll be playing peasants who decided they had enough of this tyranny and took up arms against the forces of darkness!

We can even take this a step further. What if the matrix game doesn’t stop? Instead, every other week we resume the matrix game’s turns, and in between each turn we see how the events of the grander conflict are impacting the OSR/NSR campaign we are running in-parallel?

It’s ambitious, sure. But some people are crazy enough to do it. Just look at what happened with OVER/UNDER (biggest FOMO of my life), where Bosses are essentially playing a matrix game that unfolds in real time and Denizens play the RPG (albeit heavily stripped back). So there absolutely is a reality where you play both these games as part of a grander campaign. Hell, throw wargames in there to simulate grand battles or skirmishes. To me that sounds like the platonic ideal of ‘playing the world’. Why limit it to one style of game?

In the process of writing this I went from vaguely knowing what a matrix game was to having a much clearer idea so a big thank you to Florik for prompting this blog post as part of the NSR Cauldron’s Secret Santicorn. I no longer think matrix games have anything to do with the Wachowski sisters’ cyberpunk opus - unless of course you are running a matrix game set in the world of The Matrix. In which case you’d be running The Matrix Matrix Game. Cool!