Unlocking TTRPG Supremacy
Exploiting TTRPG strengths for future games
TTRPGs have a special advantage compared to other mediums. Enterprising hobbyists are beginning to rediscover the concepts necessary to view the TTRPG as a distinct medium superior to other forms like video games.
Other mediums cannot match the levels of creative freedom that underscore the TTRPG’s unusual gameplay. From the standpoint of a designer, our focus should be on supporting and strengthening the innate qualities that make this possible.
But what are these special qualities, and why do efforts to capture them in other mediums fail? What is it that leaves TTRPGs with endless interesting content, and what techniques can designers use to tap the wellspring?
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Rules and Freedoms
On the surface, “freedoms” and “rules” in games are opposing forces. A rule restricts; it forms conceptual barriers and closes off possibilities.
But in a deeper sense, rules give meaning to freedoms. A rule that says “you can’t walk through walls or fall through the ground” creates possibilities that otherwise would not meaningfully exist.
A bank heist (in a game) only has meaning because:
Men cannot walk through walls or fall through floors.
Goods and services that men desire aren’t cost-free.
Law-abiding men will not commit theft.
For 1), a bank heist would be meaningless if we could reach our hands through the vault to grab the money. The existence of solid walls and floors allows for perimeter- and area-based security, the necessity of walking traversal, and so on. This is a rule about the deepest underlying behaviors in the gameworld, akin to physics or chemistry or mathematics.
For 2), no one would need money if goods and services could be achieved without effort. People protect and guard the fruits of their efforts—currency as a store of value serves this purpose. This is a rule about the intrinsic nature of actors in the gameworld, akin to philosophy or psychology or economics.
For 3), if we lived in a lawless land, the bank has no chance of successfully protecting currency regardless of their (pragmatic) efforts. We are relying on the fact that outlaws are few to contextualize our bank heist as a (meaningfully) criminal act. This is a rule about the array of perspectives that actors collectively hold in the gameworld, akin to politics or world-lore or setting.
In most contexts these kinds of rules are implicit, but they are nevertheless instructive. Rules like these create a tapestry of restrictions which give meaning to player decisions and provide a breeding grounds for creative interpretation and intervention.
Total Player Autonomy
The TTRPG is unique in the relationship it establishes between rules and freedoms.
“You can do anything that you can imagine,” is a false but common sentiment about the TTRPG. It turns out we can imagine quite a lot, including mutually contradictory outcomes. Thus, only a simplistic activity like Make-Believe could boast this ability.
Rather, the TTRPG lets the player do whatever they can imagine within the bounds of a highly organized rules hierarchy. But how is that different from other mediums?
In video games, for example, every conceivable outcome for player actions exists within a strict perimeter of concepts laid out at the initial stages of the design. If we shoot a box and it opens, it’s because developers explicitly intended that to happen and painstakingly went through the design, programming, art, and other hurdles to produce that end result. But if we shoot at a street lamp, it may be that nothing happens. It’s all dependent on what the designer explicitly imagined and placed into the game rules.
In TTRPGs, a player can attempt anything—whether the designer explicitly imagined it or not. This is where the referee comes in. Every TTRPG needs someone that can consult the design and intent embedded in the rulebook to provide clarity on questions not explicitly addressed.
Thus, in video games (and board games etc.) what’s possible is contained within the ruleset. The game is the sum of the rules. We start with zero freedoms and explicitly add them one by one.
But in TTRPGs, what’s possible cannot be contained within the rulebook. The rulebook marks out specific boundaries and restrictions—design by negation. The game is the sum of the rules and the negative spaces left unaddressed by those rules. We start with Make-Believe (absolute freedom) and carve giant chunks out of that with structured rules.
In this way the TTRPG is the last bastion of player freedom in well-structured games. Player freedom is not absolute, but it is complete in the sense that no other valid freedoms remain unallocated. This complete set of available freedoms is most succinctly described as total player autonomy—and it is this framework which is the key to the superiority of the medium.
Designing for Autonomy
By choosing the TTRPG over other mediums, we are accepting this task of designing a Make-Believe fine-tuned with restrictions. The importance of this point cannot be overstated. Some game designers have failed from the outset by choosing the wrong medium for their ideas (for example, trying to produce a tabletop game that spiritually should have been a video game). But if we insist that the TTRPG is our target medium, how do we approach the process?
To support total player autonomy, we must first give players the baseline expectations which restrict the gameworld. This part is design by negation—we’re deleting possibilities from Make-Believe.
Then we need rules that add structure to the imagination space that is left over. These contextualize actions that characters can take; they serve to make gameworld concepts concretely accessible for player reasoning. This part is design by addition—we’re fleshing out particular ideas to help players understand what shape the gameworld takes and what kind of objects and actions are in focus.
Though conceptually separable, these two tasks are pragmatically wound up with one another. Thus, crafting logically coherent rules will demand intensive thinking and problem-solving just to “keep everything straight.” When we are pointing out deep-seated principles that our gameworld obeys, we are doing so in consideration of the act of exploring the gameworld—and when we are outlining the explicit “hows” of various activities, we are doing so with respect to those embedded principles.
Designers need a tool that will make this task practical, but there is no logically necessary candidate. To conceptualize what this tool should look like and how it will help us, let’s see a counter-example—an obviously wrong anti-pattern will help motivate the right idea.
Video Game Logic
Consider a simplistic game about exploring catacombs and opening treasure chests. Our goal as players is to collect as much treasure as possible.
When we come upon a red chest, we need to crouch to open it. For a blue chest, we must hop on it twice to open it. For green chests, we need to shoot them with a shotgun to get at their contents. These interactions can be summarized:
Red → crouch
Blue → hop twice
Green → shotgun fire
Each element in the game is paired with an associated action. When a game’s rules consist of patterns like this strict context pairing, we often see it criticized as “video game logic” (VGL).
But what exactly do detractors mean? What is the pattern that characterizes something as VGL?
Divide and Stumble
Consider an archetypal JRPG, e.g. Final Fantasy VI, where gameplay involves navigating a party of characters in the “overworld” between points of interest on the map. We have a cast of player characters with a variety of interesting abilities—fire mages that can summon infernos or venom-belching frogmen that can cause foes to choke on their exhalations, and so on.
In these games, there is a clean-split divide between “in combat” and “out of combat” that is essential to the design and feel. This is our VGL focus because many behaviors in the game are dictated by whether we’re in combat.
Background dice rolls occasionally generate combat encounters while the party wanders the overworld. We are only in combat during these random encounters or during a narrative-driven “static” encounter.
We are out of combat while wandering the overworld, traveling through safe areas like towns or dwellings, or in mid-conversation with NPCs.
Thus, there are times when our frogman actually does not possess his choking gas ability (we can’t use or access it), nor our fire mage his ability to summon infernos. We can’t burn down a copse of trees blocking our path, nor can we decide to gas village denizens if they garner our suspicion.
In a TTRPG context, our frogman character could choose to attack a merchant with choking gas if negotiations go poorly. But in the JRPG context, these abilities can only be used “during combat” because of the design. This rule is easy to follow and has been clearly communicated to us, but it comes off as arbitrary and contradictory to our desire to immerse our thinking in the gameworld.
This arbitrary separation of behavior is the fundamental nature of VGL. Just like the red/green/blue box differences, the idea that our frogman can only emit choking gas in certain circumstances works to violate the expectations we naturally build by attempting to insert our thoughts into the gameworld’s flow.
The negative feelings we have towards VGL are an indication that some applications of rules are more dissonant than others. Fortunately for designers, there exists a guiding star to point us towards superior rules design.
Diegesis
If our gameworld has a setting where humans and aliens live in peace, then there is a default expectation that a human character will have peaceful relations with alien characters. If, however, humans and aliens are at war, then an observer would view peaceful relations with suspicion or even hostility.
These conclusions result from our attempt to insert ourselves into the gameworld. This act of adopting the gameworld perspective is an attempt to achieve diegesis1 or a diegetic gameworld—one in which all in-world entities reason as if nothing outside the gameworld existed.
Put simply, a diegetic gameworld is one with a coherent perspective that we could “take seriously.” The world behaves as if it only has itself for reference, and our characters can accomplish their goals by working entirely within the in-world perspective.
Support for In-World Thinking
How do we tell whether a game is compatible with diegetic gameworlds?
Even from basic brainstorming, we are forced to conclude that a diegetic gameworld can only naturally and stably exist in a game that runs on systems. Because “system” can be ambiguous, we mean something like “a consistently structured means of resolution for a class of question.”
If we turn to the Diplomacy and Negotiations section of the game rules and it says “The referee decides the NPC reactions to diplomatic offers,” then we have problems. This is not a system even though someone might call it one. It does not offer a consistent, structured way to answer these questions because the answers will change dramatically from person to person. This will not provide the conceptual anchors necessary to support in-world reasoning.
If we turn to the Diplomacy and Negotiations rules and it instead says, “Roll 2d6 and read the NPC reaction off the following table: …” then we are making the first steps towards diegesis. This table is an anchor for reasoning about expected outcomes. If in the Character Classes section of the book, the Negotiator class gets +1 to rolls on this table, we start to see the potential of multiple systems working together to model an underlying gameworld.
The Role of Simulationism
We are trying to design a TTRPG that can take full advantage of total player autonomy. We’ve established that a design supporting a diegetic gameworld systematically avoids the problem of VGL.
The question is: how do we achieve diegesis? There are two fundamentally different approaches that designers (and players) intuitively attempt.
Narrativism
One approach is narrativism. The motivating argument goes something like this: “if we keep to a particular narrative or story, it will guide us towards a more serious treatment of the world—a story will naturally demand a level of consistency to anchor player considerations.” But there is a foundational contradiction with this idea.
To (very) briefly summarize this problem, narrativist gameplay uses the “story” concept as a guiding star—narrative propositions are made and the table collectively discards some and goes forward with others. But building a narrative this way does not consistently reconstruct an underlying world! The world is subservient to the story in the game’s hierarchy2 and can subtly change in ways that eventually result in sprawling violations of diegesis as the story develops. The gameworld becomes an amorphous illusory concept, and it is relegated to being a backdrop or setting for the story rather than the Mother-Gaia-source for all stories that it could be.
When an imposed story and the gameworld collide, it is the gameworld that shifts in response. This is a loss of fundamental consistency; it is the most elemental violation of diegesis.
Simulationism
The other approach that players and designers try is simulationism in the sense put forth by Arbiter of Worlds3—if we competently construct a functional model of an imagined reality, then that reality will necessarily feel diegetic.
Upon reading “simulation,” some will imagine something severe like a physics or engineering example—lots of number crunching, mathematical calculations, high complexity—and they evaluate the payoff to be not worth the hassle. But in the realm of the TTRPG, a “simulation” is a matter of what variety of questions we ask about the world.
Consider the example of flying an airplane across a dangerous stretch of territory guarded by air elementals. If our plane comes under attack and we ask, “what would be an interesting outcome for the plane and its passengers?” then we are not simulating anything. If we instead ask, “what would the crew living in this strange world attempt when confronted with this situation?” we are neck-deep in the realm of simulation.
Simulationism, in this sense, is about considering how a situation would resolve given our knowledge of the gameworld and the circumstances. Such a consideration requires an anchor for world-logic, and that’s where simulationism and diegesis intercept—they are natural complements.
Core Gravity Design
If the essential value of a TTRPG is its offering of total player autonomy, the best designs will acknowledge and utilize this idea. When we attempt to organize rules that support player autonomy, we are drawn towards diegesis. If simulationism is a natural complement to diegesis, the next question is: how should we implement simulationism in a TTRPG?
“Simulate” Everything
Getting the wrong and bad answer out of the way, we can just create some approximation of physical phenomenon and encode those as rules into our game. This is the style of simulation that players find distasteful; designers get hung up on the act of simulating—machine complexity—and forget that satisfying outcomes are the goal.
But we can reject this answer on practical grounds. Designers don’t want to spend the time trying to build an impossibly ornate machine, and players don’t want to spend the time attempting to uncover what the machine is doing.
Model Everything
If our common gameplay objects and concepts have some abstract mechanical procedures that capture their behavior, then players can investigate the gameworld and systematically formulate answers to “how” questions. This is the stated goal and purpose of simulationism, after all.
But simply taking all game concepts and turning them into procedures can have mixed results.
At its best, it’s like building a house one brick at a time. Though it may lack the sophistication and subtle improvements of more advanced construction techniques, it will function just fine as a house.
However, in other cases it’s like painting a picture by applying 100,000 individual droplets. Unless the author is a genius, the resulting game will probably feel disconnected and busy.
Maintain the Whole
If we see the game as a singular whole, then conceptually carving it up into pieces will be antithetical to many basic assumptions. Rather than representing our machine as a collective of thousands of smaller machines, it is best to identify the real core of our game and build pathways that pull players towards that central idea. For short, we’ll call this a core gravity design.
Let’s demonstrate with an example. We are building a TTRPG where the characters are space pilots, and the themes and action center around racing tournaments.
What concepts are in focus in this game?
going fast
evading obstacles and attacks
crashes and collisions
marksmanship and targeting
With these elements in focus, our task is clear. The core of our game is full-throttle racing. Our characters are the pilots. We need to connect the characters to the racing core via our focus elements. Since we have the core and the focus elements, we can just run this machine backwards to get to the characters:
racing ← speed ← [engine attributes, timing/throttling ability, environment]
racing ← evading ← [reflexes, AI navigation, thruster control]
racing ← collisions ← [pilot death, hull/shield hardiness, sabotage]
racing ← marksmanship ← [hand-eye ability, targeting computers, weapon tuning]
Now we have a sizeable list of actions and activities that directly involve player characters and their supporting cast (mechanics, coaches, analysts etc.). After implementing these ideas into the game, we can see the advantages of a core gravity design—an aesthetically pleasing rule structure that was smooth to produce and is easy for players to grasp.
Whenever a player is considering any facet related to character decisions, their mind will be pulled by the design toward the core of the game.
Guarding the Hierarchy
Imagine several play-testers begin taking measures to ensure victory before their races even happened, essentially cheating a win. This ranges from sabotage to bribing mechanics to outright assassination! None of this violates the rulebook’s word, but we as designers need to decide whether these activities are aligned with the core of our game.
If we see the themes in our game being about mastery and excellence, then we would allow these things to happen but have arrest-by-police and licensure revocation as a kind of character death waiting to happen to dishonest characters. We could implement a karma system that essentially offers bad luck (dice penalties) for dishonorable actions, ensuring inevitable doom.
But if we see the theme in our game being more focused on winning by any means, then this cutthroat manner of gameplay fits perfectly. We could implement push-your-luck systems that could result in player death, enhancing the risk-taking feel of gameplay.
Whatever the case, players will not protect the hierarchy or orient themselves to line up with it—that’s our responsibility as designers. If players are spending a lot of time and activity deviating from the core of the game, the hierarchy is out of alignment.
Practice → Theory → Practice
Diegesis roots the aesthetic of imagined-world games like TTRPGs. Only the many exposures of players to VGL could truly cause a widespread push towards diegesis. It’s something we are seeing inklings of in video games and other media, but it is unknown whether the wider cultural pursuit will last.
Intuitively brilliant designers like Gygax understood diegesis on a gut level, having years of intensive experience in scenario exercises. We can see in AD&D the way seemingly independent systems produce flows that combine to create an impressive tapestry—the intrinsic setting that characterizes a gameworld filled with wonder. We have also seen efforts (by very talented designers) to capture his results fail with wooden gameworlds that don’t hold our imaginations and don’t excite our sense of gamesmanship.
Moving forward, it will be important to identify and use patterns like gravity core design. It supports players by supporting in-world thinking, and it supports designers by solving the communication and rules organization challenges inherent in creating something new. There’s no guarantee it will make our games good—that’s a matter of competence—but tools like this will indirectly help us find ways out of our current cultural rut.
Mass audiences will cling to hopes of savior MMOs, but we are equipped to see the revitalized TTRPG as their ultimate destination, superior in every respect. With available options like re-structurable chat programs, it’s very easy to imagine the TTRPG beginning to eat into the MMO space. But first, we have to make games worthy of the effort that will take.
Diegesis is a term the ancient Greeks used to separate the concept of a “narrator telling about what happened” from actors making a representative display of what happened (e.g. having a brawl on-stage). The narrator concept is heavily tied to the the perspective of someone that was “there” during the action, communicating it to us as a representative from that time and place.
The idea of a game’s hierarchy of elements is thoroughly explored in Hierarchy, Contrast, Alignment.
Alexander Macris outlines a positive take on “simulationism” with In Defense of Simulationism. He goes on to establish a depth of meaning and justifies his interpretations in The Philosophy of Simulationism.