What Makes an RPG an RPG?
Introducing the Aesthetic Theory of Essentials
Last week I introduced the agency theory of fun here on Substack. Some of you had already encountered the theory in my book Arbiter of Worlds, or in lively conversation with me on Discord, but for many of you it was probably your first time. A few people kindly messaged me to say they finally “got” my games after reading that essay.
That was gratifying, because the agency theory of fun has been central to me, not just as a game master, but as a game designer. All of my games are built to empower GMs to create, and players to experience, living, breathing worlds-in-motion where the players have agency to make real choices.
Some People Hate Fun (Or My Theory Thereof, Anyway)
But of course the agency theory of fun is not without its critics. (What is, these days?) The criticisms I’ve heard usually take one the following two forms:
“The agency theory of fun is wrong because role-playing games can be enjoyed in many different ways. All of those ways of having fun are equally valid. There’s no wrong way to have fun.”
“The agency theory of fun is wrong because many role-playing games don’t offer agency but are still really enjoyable.”
Since the theory really is foundational to how I approach game design, it seems worthwhile to respond to those critiques. It’s worthwhile to me, anyway; but I’m weird enough that I wrote a book about this in the first place.
But Everybody Loves Dwarves!
Before I dive into philosophizing, I want to share the pre-launch page for my next Kickstarter project. The book is called BY THIS AXE: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization and it’s designed to inspire you to buy ACKS make dwarves a truly living, breathing culture in your game world.
The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization is a 160-page hardcover with rules for dwarven magic, dwarven relics, dwarven mining, dwarven mushroom farming, dwarven vaults, dwarven war-machines, and more. In addition to rules and content, it also includes a comprehensive primer on dwarves written by the Auran Empire’s leading dwarrologist, Sürcaneus of Cyfaraun. Sürcaneus is a true font of knowledge…
On the Dwarven Physique: Every dwarf learns from childhood that his body is like an heirloom handed down by his ancestors. As a valuable heirloom, the body must be cleaned, groomed, and maintained in a form and state befitting the dwarves from whom he inherited it. A dwarf who allows his body to grow frail and thin, who leaves his beard patchy and unkempt, who dresses with slovenly negligence, brings shame not just onto himself, but on the great dwarves of his ancient lineage whose blood he carries. Because of the great care they take with their bodies, dwarves are proud to be the best-looking and best-dressed race in the known world. No other creature is endowed with such substantial noses, lush beards, broad shoulders, and stout bellies. Such comeliness is another burden they carry.
On the Dwarven Alphabet: Dwarven is written with an alphabet of 35 characters. The Old Dwarven script had both uppercase and lowercase characters, but the contemporary Dwarven alphabet has retained only the uppercase. Lady Dara explained that in Old Dwarven, uppercase characters were used to emphasize matters of importance. Since no dwarf would waste his time writing or reading unimportant matters, the lowercase characters simply fell into disuse. Having learned Old Dwarven before Dwarven, I cannot escape the sense that modern Dwarven writers are ANGRILY YELLING ALL THE TIME. For the ease of my readers, I have chosen to represent Dwarven language with Common Auran characters, casing, and punctuation.
Look for BY THIS AXE: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization to launch on June 21st. You can sign up for pre-launch notifications at Kickstarter.
Now, back to the philosophizing!
The Essential Foundation of the Theory
The agency theory of fun is grounded on an underlying aesthetic theory of essentialism in art. The concept of essentialism originated with Plato and was formulated into a comprehensive theory by Aristotle. Essentialism claims that every thing has an essence, where an essence is the attribute or set of attributes that makes a thing be the kind of thing that it fundamentally is.
How does one come to know the essence of a thing? According to Aristotle, we must first acquaint ourselves with instances of its kind through empirical study until we have sufficient knowledge to list the thing’s necessary attribute, the attributes that all things of that kind necessarily have.
Having done so, we now find the thing’s essence from among its necessary attributes. While all essences are necessary attributes, not all necessary attributes are essences. What differentiates a thing’s essence from its (merely) necessary attributes is that its essence explains why it has the other properties the thing is known to have. Essence is the formal cause of why something is what it is.
This sounds really complex but that’s only because Aristotle hadn’t played enough Dungeons & Dragons to know that the explanation to every philosophical problem is contained therein. We know better.
So just imagine you’re looking at a D&D character sheet that’s been completely filled out in every section except for character class. Could you figure out what class the character is, just from knowing its ability scores, attack bonus, saving throws, powers, and equipment? Of course you could. That’s because a character’s class is the essence that explains all its other features.
Because essence is the formal cause of a thing, any given thing can be evaluated as good or bad relative to the essence of things of its kind. Aristotle himself deploys this approach to evaluate what makes a good human being.
For instance, imagine you have the character sheets for two D&D fighters. The two sheets are identical, except that sheet #1’s character has Strength 18 and Intelligence 9, while sheet #2’s fighter has Strength 9 and Intelligence 18. Which of these characters is a better fighter? Obviously character #1. Character #2 is a smarter character, he might even be more fun to play, but relative to what makes fighters fighters, character #1 is good and character #2 is not.
As applied to art, essentialism implies that any particular medium of art has an essence that makes it that type of art. For instance, an aesthetic essentialist might say that the essence of TV drama is long-term character development, while the essence of movies is cinematic spectacle. An aesthetic essentialist evaluates the merits of a TV drama differently than he evaluates the merits of a movie. A good TV drama would make a bad movie; a good movie would make a bad TV drama.
Now that we know how to identify something’s essence, let’s see if we can do it for tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs).
The Essence of Tabletop Role-Playing Games
Following Aristotle, we must start by acquainting ourselves with examples of tabletop role-playing games. We then use our empirical knowledge of these examples to compile a list of necessary attributes.
Here we run into a problem, though. Not for any lack of acquaintance with TTRPGs — I have more TTRPGs on my bookshelf than friends on my Facebook page — but because the label “tabletop role-playing game” is now applied to, well, everything. But is that the case? Aristotle warns us that the very act of definition (that is, defining a word or concept) will end up defining the essence of that thing. A definition that is so broad that it encompasses both Gloomhaven and Fiasco will encompass virtually anything.
At this point, a nominalist (a wicked sort of creature, bred on the 420th plane of the Abyss and frequently sent by demon lords to torment Aristotelians) might say “the necessity for a thing to be defined before its essence can be identified proves that essences are merely epistemological concepts without metaphysical grounding,” or something like that. Fortunately, they’d say it in Abyssal, and I don’t speak Abyssal, so we can move on.
Here is what I would list as the necessary attribute of a TTRPG:
It is a social pastime played by a group of participants around a real or virtual tabletop.
One participant takes on the role of a gamemaster who is empowered to create and sustain an imaginary world within which the game takes place.
The other participants take on the role of characters in the imaginary world and are each empowered to choose what their character does in that world.
The choices available to the player characters are limited by the imaginary world, not by the game rules.
The resolution of the choices made by the players for their characters is determined by the game rules or, when rules are ambiguous or lacking, by the gamemaster.
The outcome of the choices made are applied objectively to the characters and the imaginary world without regard to factors outside the imaginary world.
The players experience the agency of making real choices that actually affect the other players’ characters and the imaginary world within which they exist.
From this list, Point 7 is the essence of TTRPGs as I define them, because it’s the attribute that explains why all the other attributes have to be there. It’s the basis for the agency theory of fun.
Each of these points could be attacked, and space precludes a rigorous defense of each, but let me briefly address the likely criticisms.
Point 1 could be criticized for excluding solitaire play. I think solo play, while entertaining, relates to actual play much like shooting hoops by yourself relates to playing basketball. It might be fun, it might be good practice, but it’s not the same thing.
A critic of Point 2 would ask why I’ve exclude games without GMs or games where everyone shares “GM privilege.” This is deliberate; I don’t think those games are the same kind of game as ACKS, D&D, Call of Cthulhu, or Rifts. They’re a separate genre, story games. I don’t say that to demean them; I play story games with friends. I just think they are a separate genre, as distinct from the TTRPG as a TTRPG is from a wargame.
Point 3 could be criticized because I’ve excluded games where other players can make choices for your character or where you make more choices about what happens to your character than choices about what your character does. This is, again, an exclusion by intent. Those are necessary attributes of story games, not TTRPGs.
For Point 4, the critic will assert I’ve excluded all role-playing board games such as Battlestations and Gloomhaven. Again, this is deliberate. Board games are great fun and I own many. But the absence of an empowered gamemaster who can create new rules to accommodate free choices makes them different in kind.
Point 5 seems uncontroversial but Point 6 is surely controversial. Here I am condemning all those games that (implicitly or explicitly) encourage the gamemaster to “fudge the dice” in order to “make sure everybody has fun.”
Point 7 of course is causal of all the prior points. Anyone who disagrees with me on 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 will end up disagreeing on 7.
This enables us to answer the critique from earlier: “The agency theory of fun is wrong because many role-playing games don’t offer agency but are still really enjoyable.” I would respond that “it is true that many games which don’t offer agency are still really enjoyable; but those games aren’t role-playing games.” Until I seize power as supreme suzerain of the ludocracy, we will have to agree to disagree.
What we have not yet answered is this critique: “The agency theory of fun is wrong because role-playing games can be enjoyed in many different ways. All of those ways of having fun are equally valid. There’s no wrong way to have fun.”
There Are Many Wrong Ways to Have Fun
The notion that there’s no wrong way to have fun is stupid. No one actually thinks that except on Twitter and only then for long enough to type 160 characters. If people really thought all fun is good fun, they’d applaud serial killers for living their best life, rather than lock them away on Death Row.
We all know there’s many, many, many wrong ways to have fun. For instance, each of these ways to have fun is wrong:
Dressing up as the Grim Reaper for the St Jude’s Halloween party
Putting blindfolds and earmuffs on seeing-eye dogs when no one is looking
Hacking into Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces to test fire some nuclear missiles
Oh, that’s not the sort of “wrong” you meant? Well, maybe there’s the issue. What do “right” and “wrong” even mean in this context?
If you’re an ethical relativist (a dreadful type of demon found on the 111th plane of the Abyss, also frequently sent by demon lords to torment Aristotelians) then you’ll say something like “expressions of right and wrong are just subjective statements of preference and I reject as fallacious your assertion that you can define them by any external standard.” If you say that, I’ll ignore you, because I don’t speak Abyssal.
Right and wrong for the essentialist are functional evaluations that derive from the essence of the thing being evaluated. “A hammer that is being used to forcibly insert nails into wood is being used rightly. A hammer that is being used to extract boogers from a nose is being used wrongly.” That doesn’t mean you can’t try to pick your nose with a hammer, but it does mean that if you try to return the hammer to Home Depot for inability to do so, you’re not going to get your money back.
In the context of entertainment and pastimes, the same reasoning would apply. If you’re invited to a chess match, and you just knock all the pieces down, you might be having fun, but you’re having fun the wrong way relative to the essence of chess. If you’re invited to play Risk, but refuse to roll dice and insist that every combat must be adjudicated by a Kriegspiel judge, you might be having fun the wrong way relative to the essence of Risk.
Outside of the tabletop RPG subculture, these assertions aren’t even controversial. If you go to a music concert and the band says that instead of playing songs they’re going to engage in a kung-fu cage match, no one would assert “there’s no wrong way to put on a concert!” Even if the band staged a great kung-fu cage match, they didn’t stage a good concert.
The theory of essentials, as I apply it to TTRPGs, says that the player’s experience of agency in an open world is the essence of the pastime. You can have fun in a pre-scripted railroad where all the outcomes are fudged and none of your choices matter, but you’re having fun the wrong way relative to the essence of TTRPGs.
Please Entertain Yourself With These Links
I’ll sign off with a list of links that might be of interest. I used to feel bad about including promotional links in every email, until a friend who has been getting my emails for years told me he’d just found out I had a Discord channel. Apparently, however much I promote whatever it is I am doing, I’m not doing it enough, or well enough, or something. If you’re a fan, be kind and spread the word!
ACKS Patreon with a new article from our Axioms ezine every month
Ascendant Patreon with a new character and story hook every month
Autarch Facebook page with news and updates about our projects
Autarch Twitter channel with brief comments and witty quirks
Ascendant Comics Facebook page with sneak previews of the upcoming comics
Ascendant Comics Instagram page with tons of art and cosplay
Ascendant Comics Twitter channel with short messages and quirky wit
In your "better fighter" example I'd contend that there are (at least) two essential features of a D&D character: class and level, and this is evident when one compares a classic D&D character to a current iteration D&D character. In your example Fighter #2 wouldn't be a "bad" classic D&D fighter as the levels increase, since the difference in Strength characteristics would be less of a factor in determining "distance from the essence" (or whatever the philosophical term is) of "classic D&D fighter". The opposite is true in the current iteration of D&D, where the six core attributes are significantly greater factors in the essence of a "D&D character" at low levels, and still significant at high levels (though less so than at low levels). And this difference in essence is why classic D&D (and its ilk, like ACKS) is objectively superior to current iteration D&D: as a player I have more agency in determining "fun fighter to play" in classic D&D (where a Str 9 fighter is still "playably fun") than the current iteration D&D (a Str 9 fighter is "playably unfun"). Or something like this. :-)
I find that people, especially more socially disaffected people, can't really grasp that saying something is different isn't a denigration of that thing. I like apples and oranges, I can evaluate both of them in very overlapping ways, but an apple and an orange are different and if I went to bite into my apple and I got peel and pith and citrus flavors, I'd be likely be unhappy even if it was a wonderful apple shaped orange.
Saying two things are fundamentally different, and saying that they have different optimal uses because of those differences, should be relatively normal and uncontroversial, but alas it is not.