Foreground Growth and Dialectical Growth

I’ve been catching up with posts on foreground growth at Bastionland.com. Foreground growth is an alternative take on character development put to work in RPGs such as Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland and Cairn. It’s a principle I'm finding dovetails nicely with a materialist approach to gaming, serving to ground character development within the gameworld.

Foreground growth seeks to subvert the abstract style of class advancement you get in D&D. Instead of a magical metamorphosis occurring in downtime, development of your character is based on events in-play. For any character ability, players should be able to relay a story from a game session that explains its origin.

There is a good illustration of this in Cairn’s FAQs, in an extended descriptive example of gameplay. An unexpected encounter with a patch of bioluminescent water leaves a character with a foot that glows in the dark. This somewhat dubious ability isn’t found in a shopping list at the back of Cairn’s rule book, but emerges in the context of an adventure.

Fear my glowing leg

Foreground growth compliments materialism because developments that occur in-game will always naturally involve the gameworld. With materialism, it is the gameworld that shapes the character rather than vice versa. It’s worth noting that in-game development doesn’t have to entail materialism. It can equally be employed in a story game, where the gameworld is often adapted to better fit with a character arc.

To me, foreground growth feels materialist, having emerged from a culture of Old School gaming that respects the objectivity of the gameworld. If a player wants their character to learn juggling, the GM isn’t going to conveniently change the dungeon to put a clown as prisoner in the next room. Characters become odd, as a reflection of the odd world they are exploring, often in contradiction to their pre-imagined life path.

Foreground Growth and Advancement Loops

Foreground growth is designed to make character development dependent on the “messy and unplanned” context of an adventure. This seems a deliberate break with the game loop model of advancement you get in D&D:

Adventuring gives you XP, which makes you better at adventuring

Foreground growth voids the above relationship because there is no path that reliably equates to improvement of your character. Sometimes adventuring can even make you worse at adventuring.

You can see this unpredictability at play where foreground growth operates in the context of unions. Unions are in-game institutions (not only worker unions), through which characters can develop outside the direct context of dungeon crawling. A union has a cause, which you must at least convince them you’re on board with. Doing so grants you access to their rituals, which sometimes furnish characters with new abilities.

An example Union are The Tin Soldiers, with the cause “Flesh is weak, Tin will protect Bastion at any cost”. Aligning with a union allows you to undertake their rituals, which can give your character a new ability:

Bastion's Wall: You learn this battle stance. When you take up the stance in a doorway or similar space, nothing can move you, but you take damage as normal.

A ritual can also result in an obligation, which can amount to a task you need to complete on behalf of the union:

Man-Hunting: You join a man-hunt for a known enemy of Bastion. They're open to suggestions.

There is some similarity here with the type of institution-based advancement I've talked about previously with the Knights of the Broken Sword, at the Throne of Salt blog. “Faction progression” here results in improved abilities for your character, but also obligations such as:

Will be called upon by higher-ranking knights to assist in the hunt of goldbloods

There is though, a key difference with foreground growth. Faction progression represents effectively an “in-game” advancement loop. It is one tied to the gameworld, through obligations to institutions, but still has a similar form to D&D advancement:

Taking on obligations gives you abilities, making you better at fulfilling obligations

Unions as described at Bastionland.com subverts this kind of game loop. The rituals you undertake with unions are effectively a roulette wheel. They will sometimes result in simply negative consequences, such as:

Flesh Shedding: Each participant sheds a part of your body and have it regrow in its natural form.

Unions seem to reflect the haphazardness of an odd world. The development of your character is unpredictable, in the same way the consequences of a dungeon crawl are unpredictable. You might just end up with a glowing foot.

Dialectical Development

Dialectical is a term that often gets conjoined with materialism. In its most common usage, it refers to small incremental factors building up to a bigger, noteworthy change. Character development in literature often happens this way. You get lots of small events in a story building up to a decisive change in the central character.

When combined with materialism, it is changes in the conditions of the world that build up to a change in the character. Foreground growth reflects the materialist part, as it is conditions in the world driving changes to characters. At the same time, the haphazardness of foreground growth can work against dialectics, where there is no process that consistently builds to a bigger change. The world shifts this way one moment, and another way the next.

Making growth dialectical helps set up a different kind of emergent narrative. That is, where a consistent process affects a swathe of the population in a similar way. The novel Roadside Picnic has a good example of this, where the physical world is driving the process of change. A zone of alien contamination takes an incremental toll on the “Stalkers” who enter it, building to a point their offspring are subject to strange mutations. There is a material process here leading to a qualitative change.

The above is very different to the story arc model of development you get in novels such as Lord of the Rings. In this type of hero’s journey, characters follow a path specific to themselves. In an RPG context, this inevitably involves railroading, to ensure experiences unfold in the requisite order. In Roadside Picnic by contrast, all those who enter the zone are subject to the same process. Regardless of the path taken, the process leads to a similar outcome.

Summary

Both foreground growth and the dialectical version involve exploration of an objective gameworld. The way the world affects your character is telling you something about this world. Into the Odd takes us to an odd world of unpredictability. Being concerned with the realm of the Weird, the workings of the gameworld remain maddeningly unknowable. But its principle of in-game development does seem applicable in different contexts. In other games, the world may be more of a knowable quantity, subject to dominant, widespread processes.


In my hack of ItO, Beggar’s Choice, I’m working on a framework for dialectical development. Getting ahead in Beggar’s Choice involves taking on Bonds. Bonds have dual significance, representing both a character ability and an obligation to the Empire. These obligations increase incrementally, encroaching on a player’s freedom over the choice of adventure they undertake. More than 4 Bonds is a tipping point, retiring them as a player-controlled character, as they become just a reflection of the material conditions of the game world.

You can see my draft of these rules here, which combine with those shared in my previous post.