On Niche Protection
Why Every RPG Needs Niches and How to Design For That
When I evaluate whether a particular genre or intellectual property is suitable as the foundation for a role-playing game, the first thing I ask is “does this genre/IP immediately offer enough niches for every player to enjoy a different type of gameplay?” If the answer is no, the second question I ask is “can I modify or approach the genre/IP in a way that offers niches for every player?” If the answer is no again, I do not proceed with the game design. And you shouldn’t, either. Let’s talk about why.
The Importance of Niches
As I have written previously, tabletop role-playing games are virtually unique in their ability to offer players the agency to make impactful decisions. In order to make impactful decisions, the players must have characters who can potentially carry out their decisions successfully. But because TTRPGS are played in groups, each player tends to evaluate his character’s success in the context of his peer group.
And we humans have a very particular way of judging success. In the amazing book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success, Professor Albert-László Barabási explains that while performance is bounded, success is unlimited. A tiny difference in performance yields boundless differences in success. Who was the greatest fighter ace of World War I? The Red Baron. Who was the second-greatest? Nobody cares, even though whoever it was only shot down one fewer plane than Baron von Richthofen. Who is the fastest man alive? Usain Bolt. Who is the second fastest? Some guy who was only .2 seconds slower than Bolt’s and ran the third-fastest 100m ever run. Barabási’s book is filled with both anecdotes and data proving this painful point. (I highly recommend the book.)
Imagine we’re designing a tabletop role-playing game in which players take on the role of WWI fighter pilots. To a first approximation, every player wants to be the Red Baron and no player wants to be… whatever that guy’s name was who came in second like a loser.1 This of course poses a problem for us as would-be game designers, because not everyone can be the Red Baron.
Now imagine we’re designing a TTRPG in which players take on the roles of members of the American Olympic 4 x 100M track relay team. Again, every player wants to be Usain Bolt and nobody wants to be… well, whoever the other guys were on his team. And our problem recurs: Not everyone can be Usain Bolt.
If we attempt to allow everyone to be the Red Baron or Usain Bolt, then the result is that no one gets to be the Red Baron or Usain Bolt. If everyone’s performance is the same, no one feels successful. Success is not performance. It’s relative to the peer group.
But that means success is a zero-sum game. One player will experience it and the rest will not. Zero-sum games are many things, but the one thing they are not are conducive to cooperation. To the extent that we want the RPG experience to be a cooperative experience — and the vast majority of players do — zero-sum outcomes represent bad game design.
So what’s the solution? Imagine that instead of designing a TTRPG based on the Olympic 4 x 100M relay, we designed an RPG based on the Olympics as a whole. All the members of the party represent the United States, but each one competes in a different sport. Suddenly, the game works. Now Brian can try to be the world’s fastest sprinter, Chris can go for the gold in judo, Newton can aim to win weightlifting, and so on. Brian can’t compete in weightlifting, and Newton can’t compete in sprinting. 2But they’re all on the same team, and each one’s success becomes part of the group’s success as a whole.
That’s niche protection, and that’s the solution to the zero-sum problem of success. Each person gets to be the best in the group at his or her particular specialty, each person gets to succeed, and the group as a whole prospers from that success.
But different genres vary wildly in their ability to allow for every person in the group to have their own specialty. Some genres are like the 4 x 100M relay and some are like the Olympics as a whole.
A Desert of Design Options: RPGs in the Wild West
I actually discovered the true importance of niches in TTRPGs by attempting to create a realistic Western RPG. There was to be no magic, no miracles. There was to be not even pseudo-magic, no saloon keepers who could pour wine down the throat of an injured gunfighter to restore him to health after he’d been shot, no preachers who could inspire better marksmanship with a good quote from Revelations. No, this game was designed to be a true emulation of gritty Western action.
When the time came to playtest the game, Brian decided to play a tough gunslinger with a fast draw and sharp eye. Chris decided to play a rough but golden-hearted gunslinger with a fast draw and sharp eye. Newton decided to play a soft-spoken but loyal gunslinger with a fast draw and a sharp eye…
It’s hard to blame them. Pick any popular Western novel or movie and 99% of the time its protagonist will be a gunslinger with a fast draw and sharp eye, someone who is a skilled shooter, rider, tracker, and outdoorsman. As a rule of thumb, if the protagonist of every book in the genre has the exact same set of skills, that’s a genre that affords very little niche protection.
Because it has almost no niche protection whatsoever, the Western is, perhaps, the worst possible genre of escapist fiction to attempt to emulate with an RPG. It’s certainly one of the hardest for which to design a fun game. There’s a reason that almost nobody ever played Boot Hill.
For the same reason, almost nobody played Gangbusters, Top Secret, or a number of other nigh-forgotten RPGs that suffered for being almost entirely niche-free include. The biggest niche-free genres I’ve identified are:
Western story
Crimefighting thriller
Mystery story
Pirate adventure
Post-apocalyptic thriller
Spy thriller
Underworld drama
War movie
A storygamer suddenly enters the room. “There’s nothing wrong with the Western genre or any of these other genres,” he cries. “Your group just sucks! A group of real role-players can make any game fun!” “Characters don’t need niche protection if they have rich, detailed personalities,” the storygamer adds, hurling a signed first-edition copy of Burning Wheel at me.
The book misses me, for which I’m grateful, as I have low hp; and the storygamer misses the point. Consider: A badly-cooked dinner can still be part of a good meal if the conversation and ambience is good. Likewise, a badly-designed RPG can still be part of a good campaign if the players and GM are good. But the meal and the campaign would have been better if the dinner were well-cooked and the RPG well-designed.
A Savage Worlds fan now arrives. “Deadlands is the most successful RPG in the entire Savage Worlds franchise, and it’s a Western!” Indeed. And that leads to our next point…
Just Add Magic
If a genre doesn’t have enough viable niches, the easiest way to address the lack is to just add “magic” to the setting. I’m using “magic” broadly here, to include all forms of paranormal and supernatural phenomena, including psychic powers, superpowers, mutations, cybernetics, impossible tech, and so on. Examples include:
Deadlands: Western + magic
Ascendant, Champions: Crimefighting thriller + magic
Call of Cthulhu: Mystery story + magic
Gamma World, Rifts: Post-apocalyptic + magic
7th Sea: Pirate adventure + magic
Shadowrun: Spy thriller + magic3
Vampire: Underworld drama + magic4
Weird War II: War movie + magic
That games with “magic” in them are more popular than games without magic is commonly known among TTRPG game designers. But it’s not often explained why this is the case. There’s nothing magical about magic. It’s simply a versatile tool to create a lot of niches.
The problem with “magic” is that its inclusion changes the feel of the genre. At its best, it can lead to the development of a new subgenre, which develops its own tropes. More often, it descends into gonzo farce. At its worst, it can destroy the essence of what made us want to design for the original genre — the grit, the realism, the struggle.
And yet magic works. There are virtually no commercially successful western, mystery, crimefighting, post-apocalyptic, pirate, spy, or underworld RPGs without some form of magic. There are plenty of examples with magic.
Is that it, then? Are we doomed to include magic in every genre? Does every player’s need to be the special snowflake mean that we can never create a commercially successful Western RPG, or Pirate RPG, or any other RPG, without magic?
Well, maybe. There are some other tools we might use to create niches where none seem evident. We’ll talk about that in our next installment!
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I am aware that there is an endangered species of gamer called the “role player” that is perfectly content to play ineffective characters. Sadly these gamers do not breed in captivity or otherwise and are likely to be extinct soon, their ecological niche filled by more forceful breeds such as the “optimizer,” “minmaxer,” and dreaded “power gamer.” Those few who survive have already been forced into infertile badlands such as the Kalahari Desert and FATE system.
Names have not been changed to protect the innocent. My friends are guilty as charged.
Shadowrun is often considered to be Cyberpunk, but Cyberpunk itself was just spy thriller / noire with chrome on top to add more niches. “A highly-skilled hacker teams up with a deadly assassin to carry out secret mission” could be the plot of any Mission: Impossible movie, any Cyberpunk 2020 adventure, and any Shadowrun adventure.
If you imagine Vampire without the vampires, it reveals itself as a game about the members of murderous crime families who secretly rule cities behind-the-scenes and face constant competition for power and status from other families and constant danger from the forces of “good” hunting them. It’s just Godfather for goths.
Brian, thanks so much for dropping by to comment!
I think you are 100% correct about the fact that patron-style play that mixes gameplay at the table with online and PbP would enable the sort of "niches" that exist in Boot Hill and Gangbuster to have some playability. I used a similar technique in running Mekton, where each player had a mech pilot as well as an "HQ" character that was involved in mission planning, tech/repair, intel, etc. and it worked well. (It wasn't true patron-style play because they were still all "on the same team".) But that sort of gameplay is not common, and most RPGs don't provide any rules whatsoever for it. My game ACKS virtually stands alone in having robust backend/downtime rules.
Outside of such elevated styles of play, in "ordinary" tabletop games, the sort of niches you describe -- drover, rancher, cook, trapper, mayor -- seem to be rarely played and often the player(s) who do play them seem to end up unhappy. Most people seem to want to play, e.g., gunslingers, mobsters, and so on.
For instance, in Cyberpunk, there were a number of roles -- Solo, Media, Corporate, Fixer, Nomad, Netrunner -- similar to what you are describing with Westerns and Gangbusters. Yet despite the breadth of options, most players want to play bad-ass mercenaries and street samurais (Solos in game parlance) most of the time. Within the Cyberpunk community this was widely known as how the game was played in practice, most published adventures revolved around special operations missions, and most supplements that got released were primarily of use to cybered-up killers -- e.g. "Maximum Metal" "Blackhand's Firearms" "Chrome Berets" and so on.
There's probably a separate essay that I need to be write that explains why "high action" tends to be the default activity at every TTRPG table. You've already alluded to it, in that outside of "high action" people rarely sit at the same table at the same time doing similar stuff, and in traditional gameplay, having 6-8 players all doing different stuff in different locations tends to be slow, unwieldy, and unfavored. (Never Split the Party etc.)
Well, F/X systems aren't just for niche protection, in fact they're pretty much the reason people play TTRPG's: they like Fantasy & Sci-Fi of whatever variety, and like playing the game in their own worlds with those elements. They read those kinds of stories and want to play in those kinds of worlds.
So F/X are critical to their enjoyment of their games, because they don't want "realistic" Westerns, they want Weird Westerns, and so forth. You take that away and most—not all, but most—peoples' interest will crash.