“Fantastic Characters in Mundane Situations or Mundane Characters in Fantastic Situations” — An Interview with Nathan D. Paoletta

Nathan D. Paoletta is an independent game designer, self-publisher, layout artist, and product-designer currently residing in Chicago, IL. His design for the World Wide Wrestling Role Playing Game has been called “a masterclass in how a roleplaying game can steer players into an experience that really feels like the pro-wrestling source material it is inspired by.”  Also interestingly, he coproduces the “Two Hundred a Day Podcast” about the 1970s TV show The Rockford Files (and its lessons for contemporary storytelling).

Do you have a professional wrestling story, a story that will explain how you came to be a person who devotes months of his life to designing a wrestling, role-playing game.

I’m a game designer first, and I almost backed into wrestling as like a focus for a project.  Independently of being a game designer. I was getting into watching wrestling.  (I actually did not watch wrestling as a kid. I didn’t grow up watching wrestling. I was born in the early eighties. and I actually got into wrestling in college because my roommate was into it, and we went to a couple of shows in Boston.

What made me interested was the drama, the pageantry, the characters.  What gets me invested in watching a show are those ongoing, unfolding narratives that never end right? The soap opera part.

I ended up moving to Chicago, going to grad school in Chicago, at the School of the Art Institute.  That was a stressful time, and the best way to have some downtime was to turn on wrestling.  I needed something where I can separate from the rest of my creative life, so I started watching wrestling again, as like, this is the thing I can do that is not school. I finish that program. I go off into that life.

I was doing creative design work for production companies, but I’d been designing games as a side hustle for years and years, and I was starting to get more recognition in my little corner of the game design world.

This framework from another game called Apocalypse World^[1] really maps onto wrestling, really well.

Apocalypse World (and Powered by the Apocalypse [PBTA] games) was a really important inflection point in the indie game space. It’s a very hackable game.  Now [other designers] have just taken it in all kinds of places. So there’s a whole lineage of, you know, PBTA games, in all kinds of different genres, that descend from that. I was playing Apocalypse World in my home game. I’m watching wrestling.  I’m thinking about a new project — all of these things are coming together.

In Apocalypse World, there’s these repeatable moves that are iconic things that your character does, and you can expect them to do regularly, and they’re going to have a big impact on the story.  Those are all like the wrestling trope (e.g., cutting your promo, hitting your finisher, etc.).  Part of the rhythm is watching these beats, you know, happen over and over.

I wondered what it would be like to do an Apocalypse World hack that’s for wrestling, you know. That’ll be fun.  And then getting into the design part, I’m like, Oh, there’s actually really a lot here.

The key, I think, insight that led to making it a bigger project, pushing it out into a full publication, etc., was the character separation in wrestling. You’re a professional playing a wrestling persona for the benefit of a viewing audience is the same as I’m at the table playing a character in this game for the benefit of me and my friends, who are the audience for that performance.  This is just like a one-to-one correspondence, like we’re doing the same activity. It’s just on a different stage for different purposes. I could run it for people, and it just made sense, even if you didn’t know wrestling, because role playing gamers are already familiar with that dynamic and just step right into it.

Role Playing Games like Dungeons and Dragons are beginning to pay attention to stereotyping and other diversity issues in character development and plot.  You addressed these issues early and well in World Wide Wrestling.  Would you talk about that process please?

Designers pay attention to how games fictionalize and instantiate real world issues, including minority representation, historical abuses.  The game scene that I was a part of was mindfully trying to talk about that in our games. I don’t feel that I am a pioneer in this respect. It’s more like I am doing the bare minimum.

If someone is interested in playing the wrestling roleplaying game, they want to play the wrestling they see on TV, or that they see when they go to an Indie show.  Given that this is a game that is meant to give you that feeling of “Oh, I can play out a wrestling character. I can play out wrestling storylines,” let’s make sure that the worst parts of wrestling are not given mechanical weight in this game. They’ll intrude, no matter what, because, you know, that’s some of the nature of just the world.

But one of the great things about wrestling is that it’s fake. It can be whatever, so your game does not need to adhere to (for example) the WWE gendered roster split. That is an artificial artifact of how that company has chosen to do business. There’s nothing about wrestling that means you have to do that kind of stuff.

Historically, you know, wrestling has been a very masculine pursuit with all the stuff that that engenders — but it doesn’t have to be.

Let’s look at what kept wrestling alive through the early 20th century:  women’s wrestling, because that was what people wanted were willing to pay money to see, maybe not for great reasons, but, Mildred Burke,^[2] headlining shows, is what like kept American wrestling alive until after World War II.

You don’t need to play with the assumptions you’ve brought to the table. If what is fun for you is being a kick ass, you know, non-gender-conforming, you know, performer who is a chameleon and can change and be whatever they want, there’s there’s a whole gimmick for that.  Or if you want to be the grizzled old veteran who doesn’t understand all these kids and all their flippy shit, you can play that, too, because, like that is another part of the world. But there’s no weight given to one of those being a more mechanically rewarded character than another.

Part of that was also trying to to make sure, that the material (the visual references, the artwork) has visibly male and female and non-gender-conforming characters, a diversity of body types, a diversity of visible ethnicities.

This is an industry with storytelling that’s rooted in good guys and bad guys. Bad guys can be really bad. And that means that your bad guys might be racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalist xenophobic, and that is okay, as long as that is part of the character.  There’s no reason not to have that in your game. But you need to know that that means you’re the bad guy — that’s that’s the assumption here. And if that’s not working for your table, there are some safety tools included in the in the text:  “Hey, we need to throw an X here.  Let’s take a break. Let’s rewind. Let’s do something else, because the table.

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Nathan Paoletta: the people at the table are more important than the than the fake people that you’re playing right. So like that was part
Nathan Paoletta: the state of safety tools had developed during those years as well. So I was able to adapt those into the book,

When you’re playing a video game, players want to be the Undertaker, right?  You are picking up the characters that the WWE has offered you and you play them in a video game. But in World Wide Wrestling, you’re really creating a world and creating your own character within the world.

My primary audience is people who are already into tabletop gaming.  Part of the fun of the game, and part of the fun of wrestling, is about asking “What is a wild character that I can just throw into the ring?”  So character generation is pretty quick. It’s pretty straightforward.  When I run a game at a convention, we do characters for a table of 6 people in like 25, or 30 min.

So hopefully, it’s accessible to someone who wants to play a character they see on TV. You can build that yourself, and it shouldn’t be hard.  I’m more interested in creating a platform for other people to get invested with their creativity, because my experience with role playing is, the other players always bring more interesting ideas than I had to any game. How do I give you a platform to bring your interesting ideas and then harness them? My ideas need to be the framework. But your ideas need to be like the cool things that you do when you actually play.

Talk to me about like the broader narrative of you as a creator and designer.

I’ve been working in theater, doing theatrical construction, and freelancing. I ended up with a staff position building sets for a while in Boston.  All the while, I’m also doing games and getting involved with online communities and finding like-minded people doing kind of similar things. So my game Carry,^[3] comes out of a game design competition.

I was in this kind of environment where, like people were doing all kinds of crazy things with games that I’d like never even thought of. So that game is very much a product of that environment.  At the same time, I was getting a little burned out in theater.

I wanted to do more creative work but still be making things. That’s how I ended up at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Designed Objects program.^[4].  It was a challenging program.  I did my thesis project as a series of board games.  That brought me back into into that space.

After that I ended up doing production work for more creative industries in Chicago.  My games started getting a little more recognition. I did a Kickstarter campaign for the 1st edition of World Wide Wrestling, and that went really well — that gave me the ability to transition out of the production industry and into being self-employed, doing games.  Since then, World Wide Wrestling has been the beating heart of my business. It’s the game that is popular, and that people come back to and recommend to their friends and play. And so

In the game industry, the way you pop sales is to do a second edition — that’s just the nature of the beast. And so the time enough time had passed.  Part of pulling the second edition together was also expanding the palette of characters. (In the game they’re called gimmicks, those are your character classes, for lack of a better term.  You pick one of those and then you customize it, and that’s how you make your character.

The original game had ten, I think. I did some mini supplements and digital supplements that added some new ones.  I did a second book. That was all about non-American wrestling, called International Incident.  It covered Lucha Libre and Japanese wrestling. I got really into New Japan, British style grappling, and European wrestling.

So I was able to wrap some of that material back into the main book with the second edition, so that was worthwhile.  I expanded the character set to 15 archetypes by combining some that were very close to each other, and bringing in the ones from the earlier supplements. So I was able to expand that palette.  I commissioned new artwork.

And I completed Warlock Pro, which is a supplement for World Wide Wrestling. It’s a spooky promotion, where you’re basically harnessing the belief of the crowd, the suspended disbelief in the kayfabe, as an actual arcane energy that you are using to summon some kind of occult creature to bind and take their power. (It might be a demon, or it might be a ghost or a time traveler.) The goal is to use these ideas in a lighthearted way. People seem to take it on those terms which is nice.

This lets me ask about the Gothic dimensions of your work. 

I’ve many interests. In my games, I tend to translate those interests by like looking at pre-existing narratives and then asking, “How do I turn this storytelling into the kind of storytelling you can do together at the table?”

I have a game called Annalise, which is a vampire horror game (in the style of Anne Rice gothic). That’s a GM-less game (a game where there is no game master). So each and every player is playing individual characters that you don’t know very much about at the start of the game, and then, as you play, you discover more about your characters, and you also discover the nature of the vampire, that that you are all in the shadow of essentially.

My other horror. Game is Imp of the Perverse, which is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s work, but is also a historically grounded game — a Jacksonian America horror game.  It’s set in the 1830s and 1840s and you’re playing people in the real world, as we would have historically understood them, except that, in this world, there are imps of the perverse. They come through the veil, they sit on your shoulder, they tempt you to do things. Those who give in to what they’re whispering turn into literal monsters.  The gameplay is to stop them — but are you willing to take the risk? That means listening to your imp, and taking some of the power they offer you, which may push you farther down the path towards becoming a monster yourself.

There’s something I learned — a pithy thing that I learned a long time ago, that I think has legs — “You either can have fantastic characters in mundane situations or mundane characters in fantastic situations. Both of those have juice.  Mundane characters and mundane situations is really hard and fantastic characters and fantastic situations is hard in different ways. One’s hard because it’s hard to build interest? And the other is hard, because it’s hard to feel relevant to anything.  I have stayed squarely in that middle space.