The implied metaphysics of Daggerheart

Roleplaying games have implied settings. Daggerheart's is deliberately kept as sparse as possible, as it offers a plethora of game settings (“campaign frames”) and advice on using them or creating new ones to structure play. The pros and cons of the approach are obvious: maximal flexibility, minimal fallback.

That said, “Daggerheart has established ancestries, communities, classes, abilities, and spells – so some worldbuilding aspects will exist similarly across every campaign” (page 11). I'm setting my sights on what these imply about Daggerheart's metaphysics. What's stated? What can be inferred?

By metaphysics I mean cosmological, structural, and supernatural elements of the game world(s).

 

 

What can we learn?

I'm looking only at the Daggerheart core rulebook here. The “World Overview” in Chapter 1 is particularly informative. I'll give page references in other cases.

The Core Realms

The Mortal Realm is a plane, in the many-dimensions sense, and is where “the majority of material beings and objects” as well as the Faint Divinities are. Allegedly but not definitively, the Mortal Realm was created by the Forgotten Gods during the Earliest Age.

The Hallows Above is another core realm. It formerly belonged to the Forgotten Gods, and is now home to the New Gods.

The Circles Below are also called the “lower realms”. Many of the Forgotten Gods are banished there, becoming Fallen Gods. Allegedly but not definitively (a) “places of corruption, destruction, and violence”, and (b) the home to some of the most dangerous creatures in the core realms.

The Realms Beyond: The book is laid out as if these are the fourth of the core realms. However, the text implies that the Mortal Realm, Hallows Above, and Circles Below are the core realms, and that the Realms Beyond are some of the “many realms” of the overall cosmos.

The Realms Beyond include “the Elemental Lands, the Astral Realm, the Valley of Death, and countless others”. The “Chaos Realm” (page 250), an “otherworldly space where the laws of reality are unstable” is “alien to the Mortal Realm” and likely a Realm Beyond. It features impossible architecture and glimpses of other worlds. 

Gods and such

→ The Earliest Age was a time when immortals from the Hallows Above intermingled with mortals. Of nonspecific duration and distance other than “millennia” ago (pages 11, 235).

→ The Forgotten Gods were the first known gods. No mention of what they were called when they were in control – certainly not “Forgotten Gods”. They fought the New Gods and lost, and “many of” them were imprisoned either in the Mortal Realm or the Circles Below. Presumably the others were killed, but the ones “who fought most passionately” were the ones banished to the Circles Below, so there's room for interpretation that some of the losers were rehabilitated as New Gods.

→ The Fallen Gods are simply those of the Forgotten Gods banished to the Circles Below. Unlike in e.g. Christian mythology, nothing is implied to have changed about them in the process. Fallen Gods are designated (but are not objectively stated to be) “evil practitioners of tainted magic”, and their banished Faint Divinity allies (and their descendants) “demons”; Infernis descend in turn from demons. Temples to the Fallen Gods still exist (page 102), and it is possible to have a “direct channel” to them (page 106). Fallen Gods might also be encountered as an adversary (page 235); interestingly only at the same level of threat as “really muscular zombie” (page 239).

→ The New Gods turned up after the Forgotten Gods as a distinct set of entities, but it's unclear whether or not the war began immediately. They seized and colonised the Hallows Above. They still exist and can intervene in the world in set ways.

→ The Faint Divinities are “lesser deities created by both the Forgotten and the New Gods to oversee the Mortal Realm.” They have narrower spheres of influence but “can greatly influence the lives of mortals.” The main text does not actually say so, but many of the campaign frames place the Faint Divinities as being physically present in the Mortal Realm.

The gods' reach includes (page 44) the ability to “appoint” seraphs who are “imbued with sacred purpose” but whose ethos are only “traditionally” in alignment with their god's domain or goals. Some seraphs (page 236) are tasked with enforcing their god's will. Deities who appoint seraphs are those who exist “within the realms” [plural], which implies that seraphs can serve a Forgotten or Fallen God, or possibly even a Faint Divinity.

Interestingly, Daggerheart definitively has gods but does not seem to have an afterlife. The gods have specific observable qualities, and can be communicated with. There is no mention in the text of a heaven, hell, reincarnation, paradise, judgment, or such.

Aside: Resurrecting a dead character is merely “often” (i.e., not always) difficult and costly (page 106). Page 182 contradicts this, calling death “more permanent in Daggerheart than in other games of the same genre” and the Risk It All roll being “final unless you provide another means of resurrection in your story”; it also contradicts the wording of the Resurrection spell by claiming it can only be used once.

There's a definite impression that the Hallows Above and Circles Below are just places where gods happen to live, and not afterlives. Getting there takes specialist knowledge and an enormous investment while, crucially, being alive. The gods are more like super powerful alien beings than anything that maps well onto the belief patterns we have on Earth, but this is generally true for most fantasy TTRPGs.

Not much is set in stone about Daggerheart's gods, their powers, their domain, or the extent of the human-like qualities (agendas and personality traits) which the text hints at.

We do know that the gods are mortal – confusingly, given that they are several times called ‘immortal’ and juxtaposed to mortals. It is possible (page 250) to “breach the gates” of the Hallows Above or “break the barrier” between it and the Mortal Realm, slay one or more gods, and usurp their powers. The mortality of the gods is emphasised several times by the campaign frames (e.g., page 255).

Planar travel

Communication: The Hallows Above are “closely connected with most other realms” (page 11), and according to the text it's because of that cosmological feature (i.e., not because of some godly power or designed property) that “the gods residing here can see and speak with the creatures of the Mortal Realm without leaving their domain”. Communication with the gods may be obfuscated, although it's unclear if this is an interplanar limitation or a feature of the gods themselves.

Travel: There are specific methods by which the New Gods “can leave the Hallows Above to occupy other realms, but in the current age they must always sacrifice something of personal importance to do so.” According to rumour (not definitively), this was a deliberate choice to help protect the Hallows if the Forgotten Gods return.

There's an implied symmetry for entering the Hallows Above, and the requisite sacrifices have caused “some of the great calamities that have befallen the Mortal Realm in recent millennia.”

Accessing and traversing the Realms Beyond from the Mortal Realm “requires specialised knowledge and hard-learned skills”, possessed by some beings in the core realms.

Security: Other planes typically have “safeguards against Fallen [Gods?] who wish to cross from the Circles Below. Within the Mortal Realm, the use of arcane magic in acts of great evil is said to open a temporary rift between the two planes, allowing Fallen [Gods?] to pass through.”

 

Details of the magic system

Magic is “very powerful and incredibly dangerous” (page 12). It permeates the environment, and there is specifically a “magic of the wilderness” (page 30).

Magic can manifest within people (page 12). Some magic is innate and heritable (page 46). This kind of magic can be cultivated and there's a skill component to using it.

Magical power can be acquired and developed through learning, tool use, and taking supplements (page 50). Having knowledge of magic leads to, or correlates with, being able to use it. Secrets can be inherently powerful.

...Other than that, magic is largely left as a mystery. Daggerheart doesn't make commitments about its origin, ground rules, systematisation, relationship to divine powers, etc.

There's not much to glean from the domain cards. Many game powers labelled ‘ability’ rather than ‘spell’ seem nevertheless supernatural. Magic can be used to break the rules in all the classic ways (slow time, transmit information from the future, negate gravity, break space, directly change reality, create and destroy matter, etc). This ‘canonical’ collection of spells is constrained in various ways that would be visible in-world, e.g., in magnitude and locality, which is obviously a TTRPG design consideration.

Notes from the bestiary

Fantastical creatures, undead, and things like “waygates” and “incarnations of fate” exist without any specific metaphysical underpinnings. “Outer Realms” monsters are likely from Realms Beyond. There are also nature spirits that are mentioned repeatedly (pages 183, 230, 283, 338, 339).

Sapients

Where did people come from? According to “stories” the gods created the world (page 12), but that has little epistemic weight. It seems unlikely that people evolved biologically, given that there are eighteen subgroups of people that (a) have enormously varying physical biology (e.g. dragon breath, flight, drastically varying lifespan and size, being made of metal or fungus), (b) are all capable of having children together, and (c) have such similar brains that there is no variance between subgroups in mental characteristics or personality traits.

Aside: There is one exception to the latter. Humans specifically (page 65) “incorporate [sic] both magical and mechanical tools, accessories, and items that assist their daily life and tasks”, and “often dress to clearly display social status, wealth, personal faith, or aesthetics”. These traits are necessarily rare amongst the other seventeen kinds of people, otherwise they would not have been ascribed to humans in particular. Daggerheart separates culture and community from ancestry, so these are inborn traits of humans, not ones developed amongst insular human-dominated societies.

Daggerheart is otherwise very careful about this sort of thing (“individuals from all lineages possess unique characteristics and cultures, as well as personhood”) and notes that all people's minds work indistinguishably, i.e., in a fundamentally human way. I think we should therefore regard these notes on human ancestry as an outright error.

Either way, the ability of e.g. infernis, fungrils, and clanks to mix ancestries seems to preclude a model of biology similar to that of our reality. Of course, Daggerheart has deeply pervasive magic, so although the book doesn't state it, all such cases could be magically induced. This might anyway be a case of “game design considerations” rather than actual metaphysics of the setting.

Campaign frames

Chapter 5 doesn't really talk about modifying the metaphysics for a campaign frame (outside of mentioning unique setting distinctions and special mechanics).

Looking at the details of the cosmos mentioned in the book's campaign frames, we quickly find that (of those that get into it) they are built firmly on the implied metaphysics above, with little deviation.

The Age of Umbra (as laid out on pages 281, 284, 287, 288) and Colossus of the Drylands (as described as “myths” on pages 308–310) for example are each fundamentally compatible with Daggerheart's underlying metaphysics, but develop those basics in different directions.

The Witherwild

This frame reinforces the mortality of the gods, featuring a successful deicide (Shun’Aush) and giving a physicality to their powers (the bodily dust of a dead god gives rise to a plague; the god Nikta's two eyes are individually responsible for ripening and ruination; maiming a god changes their powers).

The Witherwild frame develops the Faint Divinities: “Gods in this land [...] wander the land as incarnate beings, residing in both the natural world as well as within homes and small villages. [...] Many communities, and some larger families, even have their own small god or tutelary spirit who watches over them. […] there is a constant push and pull between the goals of people and their deific neighbors. The gods must curry worship from mortals, often by performing small miracles [...]” Note that this is the only mention in the book of gods having any interest in being worshipped!

The Witherwild frame names six Faint Divinities (Fulg, Hyacynis, Ikla, Oove, Qui’Gar, Rohkin) and says there are hundreds or thousands more. Gods are person-like, with allies, alignments, and special interests. Interestingly, a god's domain is described not as a source of power or set of powers but somewhere that effort is required (Qui’Gar presides over deaths near brambles and the current magical verdancy has “made her job harder”).

 

Motherboard

This is the only canon campaign frame that arguably departs from the base metaphysics. In Motherboard, magic is ancient technology. There's a lot of reskinning necessary, with somewhat vague guidance: “Consider how these would manifest in a world where magic comes from technology, then adapt the flavour of each feature accordingly.”

Faint Divinities are ghosts in the machine. Regarding divine power, players “should determine why their character relates to technology on a spiritual level, rather than simply employing it. They should also consider if and how they offer their devotion to the Motherboard or Faint Divinities.”

The text falls short of saying that gods (and the Hallows Above, etc) don't literally exist in the Motherboard frame. But that's the more plausible and parsimonious reading: the Motherboard is a “master program” left behind by ancient technomancers, whose indistinguishable-from-magic advanced technology gives rise to all supernatural phenomena.

In conclusion

Daggerheart has magic, and lots of it. But it has no deep underlying rules for a GM to fall back on in rulings (or viewed the other way, no constraints that the GM has to work within). 

In Daggerheart, gods exist but at times seem curiously divorced from serving a religious purpose. There are only a few mentions of them being worshipped (e.g. page 313), and this isn't strictly required even for the chosen champions who channel their powers. There's no mention of an afterlife, moral judgment, or belief in gods other than the ones that literally exist. There's also no mention of god-oppositional philosophies, even though the Faint Divinities affect people's lives.

(As I wrote in “Put Flourishes, Fairy Tales, and Folk Beliefs in Your Fantasy World”, these are the kind of details you are definitely going to want to expand upon in your campaign frames.)

The four core realms are “the basis for the worldbuilding elements inherent to many of Daggerheart's mechanics” (page 12). The obvious question to ask now is: do Daggerheart's implied metaphysics constrain campaign frames?

Arguably. The book's frames are all built on those basics or agnostic to them. The game provides very little guidance for tinkering with the metaphysics, even as it weighs in on other analogous matters for creating your own world (in Chapters 3–4 and especially 5). On the other hand, there's lots of customise-it, revise-it, collaborate-on-it, reskin-it, make-it-work-for-your-group sentiment throughout Daggerheart, which could be extended to imply permission.

When player agency meets character compulsions

When you're playing a role, sometimes your character ought to act in some way.

• The goodly hero has a moral code regarding the treatment of prisoners
• The addicted wizard would do anything to get more purple poppy
• The impulsive barbarian wants to destroy doors, spines, and magic items
• The traditionalist dwarf can't rein in her hatred of goblins or desire for gold
• The life priest's role demands self-sacrifice if it comes down to it
• The emergency medic has a duty of care to her patients
• The brash brute can't keep his foot out of his mouth

These traits create roleplaying obligations. The obligation is on the player, constraining their choice down to how their character "should act".

It often happens that a character who acts on an obligation risks getting a negative outcome – perhaps even a catastrophic one. And this may be obvious to the player. So it's natural that players won't always want to have their character act as they "ought" to.

An aside: I'm talking about classic roleplaying games here, where character success amounts to player success. In storytelling games, or even in RPGs played as if they were storytelling games, players tend to be much more open to making deliberately "suboptimal" in-character choices.

At the game table, whose job is it to ensure that obligations are followed through? The rules? The GM? The social dynamics of the group?

The strength of an obligation – how much a player "should" follow it – varies depending on the character, player, group, and game system. For example, in a point buy system where a burdensome personality trait compensates you with extra points, there's a strong expectation that the trait's obligations will be followed. In these cases, there might be rules laid out to cover roleplaying obligations.

Compulsions versus obligations

Now compare in-world things that the characters might encounter like magical geases, mind control rays, charm spells, and brain parasites. These essentially do the same thing. The player character is compelled, rather than obliged, to act in some way.

Of course, modern games almost always structure these things in a meticulously rule-based way, with various "outs", and make them short term and/or weak.

That's because it's a truism of RPGs that it sucks to have your agency taken away.

(Your agency in particular; but your character stuff in general)

After character creation, a traditional TTRPG offers the player the ability to do exactly one thing: make in-world choices on their character's behalf. They can't choose the corresponding outcomes, or odds, or stakes, but they can choose what to try.

Undermining this one capability – even for the sake of in-world things, like established character compulsions or magical mind control – is generally a bad idea. It feels like an attack on autonomy and agency.

So we want to support situations where, through obligation or compulsion, players ought to have their characters act certain ways. But we don't want to take away their ability to decide.

 

How do we square these two things?

Player choice is pretty close to an unequivocal good, making constraint on player choice pretty unambiguously bad. My favourite approach just turns the bad thing into more of the good thing.

➡️ Let the player decide whether their character resists being obliged or compelled, at some in-world cost.

Let's say the player is confronted with some situation where their character is compelled or obliged to act some way. Now they decide whether the character is able to resist, suffering some consequence if they do.

"You resist the call of the purple poppy, at great personal cost. You'll have a morale penalty until you next imbibe it."

"Straining with every part of your soul, you overcome the suggestion spell. You feel a huge fatigue upon you."

"With muscles and tendons clenched, you give the goblin merchant a forced smile and polite nod as you pass. Something in your jaw clicks. Take 2 points of damage."

What is the in-world cost?

The consequence of managing to resist a compulsion/obligation should ideally

• be mechanically grounded (weighty and yet easy to apply)
• be player-facing (rules-based, or at least announced by the GM in advance)
• have an immediate impact (the consequence feels associated with the decision)

Obviously this is easiest in gritty detailed systems with character resources. Stress, Stamina, Focus, whatever it's called as long as it's measured in points that can be taken away.

What if my game doesn't have an appropriate stat?

You could improvise one. 

Or the character could suffer other in-world consequences.

• For an unmet abstract obligation like following a code of conduct, the character might well encounter social problems. Rumours spring up. Hirelings abandon the party. Opportunities dry up. The parent organisation sends a formal rebuke or starts an inquiry.
• For other obligatory traits, the character gets stressed/worried/grumpy/distracted when they don't follow their nature, and end up mislaying an object, getting a bad reaction roll, missing details when looking for clues, etc.
• When an external compulsion is resisted, the character might be disoriented and flub things for a while (rerolling successful rolls, etc).

A specific suggestion

I have long thought that the perfect RPG is one that rewards the PCs with a dice bonus/malus for getting a good/bad night's sleep. I wrote about this the other day. Use a general 'well-being' stat measuring a character's overall mental and physical condition, which the players can push to try to improve, and which modifies most if not all rolls and tests.

This is a perfect candidate for tying in to this choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion system. If you decide your character resists, that bonus is reduced (or malus increased).

Otherwise

You could flip this around and offer a player character experience points (etc) for giving in to their obligation. But this doesn't feel the same, for a couple of reasons.

• Offering a mechanical benefit to specifically "good roleplaying that goes against the characters' best interests" will rankle.
• Paying an in-world cost to overcome a compulsion, or choosing to let the character act on it, make it feel like a thing actually having an effect. Just declining a prize feels like nothing happens.
• Players tend to be risk-averse when it comes to stuff like this, so you'll end up with the character whose character quirk never actually gets them into trouble, and the villain's charm spell that never actually does anything.

Other benefits

Sort of buried the lede here, but the big advantage of doing choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion is that you can hang lots of stuff off a single mechanic. So there's obligatory character traits, but also...

Thing #1: Mind control. As mentioned, taking away agency is usually unfun, can disrupt a game, and can be too swingy in a tactical combat game (strictly worse than save-or-suck); modern games usually make control spells very weak and brief as a result. (Compare OD&D, where the level one Charm person spell could control someone indefinitely, and even the first supplement only reined it in to the point where a particularly lucky superintelligence might shrug it off after a few days)

Suppose instead that the subject of the magic really feels the compulsion deeply, and can resist at some steep cost. And they can be effected by the spell and decide the point where it wears off, as the 'price' to escape goes down over time.

Thing #2: Other magical effects that subvert character control. Illusion, fascination, terror, berserk rage, altered perception, foolishness, cursed objects that whisper dark thoughts. Games tend to have detailed subsystems for these and/or be pretty weak, because of what they do to characters. Using choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion means a simpler, unified system, potentially greater effects, and more player agency through the whole thing.

Thing #3: Social-fu systems that can be used to influence PC action. Games are understandably reluctant to make social skill rolls have actual impact by influencing, let alone determining or constraining, PC choices. Now we have a framework where players will have to decide the lesser of two evils: go along with social influence, or pay the cost (become emotionally run-down, sapped of energy, have low morale, etc).

Thing #4: The same choose-whether-to-pay kind of tradeoff, but introduced to other parts of a game. Possibly as a single unified mechanic.

I'm thinking in particular of things like saving throws and luck points, which aren't very nuanced and involve no in-world decision-making. What if instead you could reliably avoid disaster by suffering some other major long-term consequence? "You fling yourself desperately away but hurt a tendon and can no longer stand up until you receive healing." "You block the blow but are winded and can't succeed on strength rolls until you rest." "You catch a branch on the way past but a strap snaps and your satchel disappears down the mountainside."

Thing #5: In a crunchy character-building system, we now have new options for a character's (in)ability to resist various things. Appropriate traits like "stubborn" or "weak-willed" or "dedicated to the cause" can vary up the cost that a character pays to resist particular obligations or compulsions.

Where'd this idea come from?

I don't remember; I suspect I saw at least the kernel of it somewhere. 

➡️ Lots of games have meta-resources, and sometimes trade in them directly. In Numenera, a GM can suggest something bad may happen and an affected player can either gain XP and let it happen, or lose XP to deny it. Related but not my preferred approach, and not specific to obligations/compulsions.

➡️ In that vein, player-facing story-gaming mechanics may directly affect character actions and/or overall narrative.

➡️ There's this blog post which I found quite compelling. It has a somewhat similar approach to the problem of combat stunts: https://oddskullblog.wordpress.com/2021/11/15/combat-maneuvers-the-easy-way/

➡️ I vaguely remember seeing a GURPS house rule or hack where Disadvantages that compel action can be paid off with FP. I don't recall, but it would make sense to vary the FP cost depending on whether the compulsion was mandatory or resisted with a self-control roll, or more generally if it depended on the point value of the Disadvantage.

If there's a notable/obvious game that does this, let me know!

Trying not to be a Gell-Mann Amnesiac

I sometimes wonder how much Gell-Mann Amnesia people experience. Paraphrasing Crichton, when you're a domain expert, you'll sometimes read an article that gets every aspect of your field completely and absurdly wrong, have a little laugh about it... then keep on reading and trusting articles that are about other fields, even from the same publication or writer.

As if they're some pure spring of wisdom which only coughed out a lump of mud when it came to the thing you happen to know about.

It's just an idea from a novelist, not the kind of cognitive bias that's supported by real-world studies that I know of, but you have to admit that it has a kind of... truthiness to it.

Stack this up with Dunning-Kruger and it's easy to become cynical. You might decide that actually, all the loudest voices are talking complete nonsense, all of the time. That might be too far. But I do think it pays to put deliberate hard effort into distinguishing domain experts from overconfident bullshitting pundits.

Now, anyone with their ear to the ground and a weather eye out for Gell-Mann Amnesia should have arrived at the obvious conclusion about generative AI. To wit, that the current state of the technology is that it is an overconfident bullshitter.

On being a piece of software and being confidently wrong

The case studies are easy to find, and the ones from domain experts sound pretty different from the ones from the tech industry and the reporters too busy and/or demoralised to do more than repackage their press releases as articles.

➡️ I am not a historian. The historians I've read say genAI gets softball history questions mostly right and deep ones mostly wrong. Sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. It just makes things up when the evidence is scarce. It makes errors of commission and omission as well as having misplaced focus and drawing weird conclusions from premises.

➡️ I am not an artist. The artists I listen to say genAI art looks bland and awful and organic because it doesn't understand composition or anatomy or separate objects (because it doesn't 'understand' anything). It can't make an image that isn't well-represented in the training data, like a camel and a steampunk automaton jousting from the backs of sumo wrestlers. Same in other kinds of media: filmmakers say genAI can't do film because it can't take direction or keep track of characters or have a consistent shot.

➡️ I am not a Wikipedia editor (except incidentally). Earlier this year there was a wretched moment when the Wikipedia editors were going to have genAI article summaries foisted on them, although I think that's turned around now. The skilled editors pointed out that the LLM summaries generally ranged from 'bad' to 'worthless' by Wiki standards: they didn't meet the tone requirements, left out key details or included incidental ones, injected "information" that wasn't in the article, and so on.

➡️ I am not a manager. The managers say genAI can't even collate timesheets reliably.

➡️ I am not a novelist. The novelists say a genAI book reads like a statistical summary of all creative writing anyone has ever done, including all the embarrassing teenage fanfiction. It sucks at originality. And because it doesn't have an internal model or understanding of its outputs, it can't keep track of things and make a coherent satisfying story. Things are vague, tropey, or contradictory.

➡️ I am not a lawyer. The lawyers are, um, well, by the sound of it a lot of them are being sanctioned for using generative AI to cite completely nonexistent caselaw. (☉__☉”)

➡️ I am not a public policy wonk. The bureaucratic wonks note that genAI can't summarise text. It shortens it and fills in the gaps with median seems-plausible-to-me pablum. The kind you get when you average out everything anyone has ever written on the internet. If you try to have an LLM summarise or draw conclusions from a study, it will usually do a bad job, fabricating statements more along the lines of what an average person would guess if they'd only read the study's title.

➡️ I am not a software engineer. The software engineers seem to have mixed opinions. They say that genAI works as code autocomplete (something that has existed for fifty years, but this new kind has pretty sophisticated lookahead, neat). At least some are saying it can't do principled software engineering, it introduces security flaws, its performance drops off for obscure languages, it overconfidently generates bad code, it plagiarises from code repositories that it doesn't have the rights to...

I could go on.

I'm no longer a domain expert in anything, this many years after my stint in academia. I think I'm halfway to being an expert in a few different areas, though. I deliberately concocted some thoughtful questions at the intersection of those areas, just to see.

For example, I asked about the (obvious) mapping of choose-your-path text adventure books onto mathematical graph structures, which the LLM chatbot identified. I followed up with technical questions about the features of those graphs in context: what would the game be like if they weren't digraphs, would you expect cyclic vs acyclic, would a finite state machine be more appropriate and if so why, etc.

And lo, the generative AI output was absurdly, hopelessly, and confidently wrong when given questions that needed expertise.

A lot of people with a lot of money would like you to think that genAI chatbots are going to fundamentally change the world by being brilliant at everything. From the sidelines, it doesn't feel like that's going to work out.

Sometimes I read posts from experts along the lines of

"I've noticed it's almost worthless at [my field], but it sounds like it's pretty useful for [other thing]."

But less so lately, maybe?

So I'm left wondering: are people experiencing massive Gell-Mann Amnesia about these chatbots? Or does everybody know that the emperor has no clothes?

(But oh no, we've invested so, so, so very much money into the emperor's finery, and all the wealthiest people at the imperial court agree: pleeeease could you keep squinting to see this amazing new clothing?)

 

Pushing the envelope: Deconstructing RPGs

When you push the boundaries of a medium, you tend to reveal interesting things.

A wrong, but illuminating, TTRPG theorypost

In the case of role-playing games, I think there are two very important axioms:

1. players get to make character choices that are meaningful
2. players are deeply constrained as to how they otherwise affect the world

Axiom 1. Players get to make meaningful character choices

By this, I mean their choices must be

real (the outcomes are not faked or predetermined), and

impactful (the outcomes and/or act of deciding matter to the player/character/setting), and

associated (the choices are made as if by the character within the world, not just by the player within the rules), and

plausibly adjudicated (the choices have predictable or at least credible impacts on the imagined world).

Axiom 2. Players are deeply constrained regarding the world

Players impact the world by their character choices, but otherwise have few or no ways to impact the imagined world.

(Most TTRPGs, of course, let a player decide details about the world specifically during character creation, which their character could not possibly have chosen 'in-world'. This is a pretty accepted carve-out, and one of the reasons I say 'deeply constrained'.)

Pushing the TTRPG envelope

Now let's contort these established TTRPG boundaries and principles, to see if anything interesting falls out.

-

We already know what happens when you step back further from Axiom 2 (as part of game design or during play), giving players more options to intervene directly in the world.

You get experiences that are more like collaborative story-telling games, and postmodernish games where the point is to play around with the truth, and eventually you end up with free-form roleplay and expressive world-building.

-

What happens when you deliberately change Axiom 1, making character choices less meaningful?

There are some obvious examples, which tend to be unpleasant, especially in the context of contorting an existing traditionally-designed game.

• If character choices aren't real, you get railroads, which almost nobody likes.
• If character choices aren't impactful, the game (and fiction) has no stakes, which few people like.
• If character choices aren't associated, you're playing something more like a boardgame that has heavy fiction/fluff elements, which some people like, but can be dissonant.
• If character choices aren't plausibly adjudicated, there's little sense in which you're making a 'choice', so you might as well be rolling dice instead, since that's fun.

...But those are mostly the results of taking a role-playing game and 'playing it wrong'.

Designing an experimental game

Challenge: Can we go against the zeitgeist and design games which play with the formula of Axiom 1? Can we push the envelope to deliberately make character choices less meaningful, and still create something compelling?

I can see two things to try.

Less meaningful choice... in pursuit of themes

You could do this deliberately, in an artsy way, to explore certain themes.

Inevitability and the linear nature of time. Doom and futility. Fate and prophecy. Closed-loop time travel. Nihilism.

Less meaningful choice... but more meaning elsewhere

You could shift the focus of the game from meaningful choice to something else, so that there's still something challenging for the player to do.

One possibility is having the player grapple with emotion and feeling, something reactive and exploratory rather than goal-oriented and decision-guided. The obvious pathway for doing this is through journaling games, which often emphasise those aspects more than traditional RPGs (as well as often relaxing Axiom 2).

Combining these ideas into new experimental game designs

I'd like to see a game develop some of those specific themes in parallel with locking down player choice in favour of developing character emotions and feelings (while still being on this side of 'being a roleplaying game').

I'd like to see a choose-your-own-path game set in a world deliberately designed to teach the player that their character's choices fundamentally don't matter in this particular fictional context, and develop an exploration of what that entails (...while still on this side of 'being a game at all').

I'd like to see some hybrid of boardgame and roleplaying game that's not just 'boardgame mechanics under deep layers of fictive fluff', but some other unusual interpolation of the two mediums.

And if I can't find them, maybe I'll make them.

 

On becoming technologically competent

I was working out a computer problem and got to thinking about what I was doing.

Pretty much anybody who uses a computer on the regular would benefit from becoming more of a power user. Most people would like to work more efficiently to free up time for the things they want to do. Luckily, it's never too late to learn.

How, though?

You can just take it one step at a time, applying the miraculous human reasoning power of 'breaking a complex problem down into components which can be tackled'.

1. Identify a laborious part of your workflow.
2. Find a tool that will help.
3. Learn to use the new tool.
4. Add it to your workflow.

If a component task seems too onerous, you can break it down further.

For example, if 'learn to use the new tool' seems imposing, it is possible to:

• plan how to approach it
• learn to read documentation
• find a tutorial which works for you
• set time aside to read documentation and follow tutorials
• search for specific information in today's search-hostile web
• establish what the best forum is to ask questions in

Finding tools

Being a power user is not a binary thing. It's a gradient. When I first used a computer back in the dusty old yesteryears, I was not competent with it. Now I'm competent in many technological domains, and an expert in one or two. Some of that was acquired naturally and some through deliberate effort.

Right now, if I ever need to write a batch file or mess with the registry or write my own css, I have to re-familiarise myself, because I've let pieces of competence degrade. For some other tech questions, I still have no competence at all. Fortunately, it doesn't really come up, because...

Having a genuinely unique problem is vanishingly rare. 

You can be pretty sure that lots of clever technical people have already come up with solutions for whatever it is that you're doing. It's just a matter of finding their solution, learning to use it, and then actually using it.

There's tons of (free!) software which gives you batch processing or shortcuts or streamlining or other efficiency gains for all manner of otherwise-laborious tasks. It's a matter of identifying the need, discovering the tool, and learning its use.

Need to impose a complicated naming schema on a bunch of files? There's Bulk Rename Utility.

Need to strip audio tracks from videos? VLC does it.

Running out of disk space due to a regrettable history of erratic, poorly-labelled, manual backups made in arbitrary locations? SpaceSniffer + Duplicate Files Finder.

I could go on. I have bucketloads of discrete tools that I use either regularly, as part of my workflow, or intermittently, as part of problem-solving or error remediation or unusual tasks.

(We unfortunately live in the 'app era', the 'cloud era', the 'SAAS era'. People seem not to think of software programs as tools that you download and use to improve the ease, efficacy, or efficiency of specific things they do. I think they're missing out.)

Living means learning

If you put your mind to sliding yourself up the 'power user' scale, you'll almost certainly succeed, and you'll find that you can improve your workflow incrementally. As you learn and develop expertise with your tools, you will learn their best use cases, and find yourself getting judicious, and seeking more methods, more approaches, more tools.

A long time ago I set down the largely-worthless Windows file management tools, and picked up Everything and SyncBackFree. I learned mass image editing back in university using some tool I don't even remember the name of, then worked out how to do it in Gimp when that was my go-to image manipulation software, and have since found ImageMagick is better for many tasks.

I'll almost certainly find even better ways to do the tasks I currently do, using new and better tools. But that's a good thing, not a bad thing. I'm still in a better spot right now than I would be if I'd never heard of batch processing.

If there's a moral, it's this:

Don't avoid trying things because you don't think you're capable. Capability not only can be but is learned.

Out-of-character knowledge: A solvable problem

Note: This primarily applies to trad RPGs, played as trad RPGs. I doubt it has much relevance for story-telling games, or people running a trad TTRPG as a group story-telling exercise.

 

I often think about the player knowledge / character knowledge dichotomy, and in particular the problem of out-of-character or "meta-game" knowledge.

It boils down to this: in any game, within the world a character has capabilities (skills, powers, a viewpoint, certain possessions) that the player doesn't. But the player has information that the character doesn't.

Players, as they get experienced, inevitably end up having knowledge of X that their characters don't. Even if they learned something during the game, they'll eventually have a new, know-nothing character.

People are usually concerned about X being 'monsters' or 'enemy powers and vulnerabilities' or 'magic item properties' or the like. But it can include other, more meta-level, stuff:

• Players hear about what's happening to other player characters, even when they're not together.
• Over-arching information about the scenario, which the player has played or read a review of.
• The GM just said "oops, forget I mentioned that".
• Savviness to the genre of the universe being played in. Players know that pleasant tidy off-ramps in Call of Cthulhu won't be what they seem.
• We remember where our last characters bit the TPK, and the layout of the dungeon level.
  
• The GM brought a whole box of fire imp models to the game.
• The player has read a mathematical analysis of which spells/weapons/feats/etc are optimal.
  

 

Separating player knowledge and character knowledge

I think it's fairly obvious that at least in trad TTRPGs, it's desirable to reduce the impact of out-of-game knowledge on gameplay. Players ideally should have just the information their characters have, and make decisions accordingly.

Otherwise, why not just play with all the GM's stats and maps laid out on the table? Or better yet, given to the players to study before the game? Why not let the players roll to see whether they would succeed or fail at something before deciding whether to try it?

There are solutions, of course

I listed out all the solutions I could think of to "experienced players having knowledge about X that their characters don't". Then, as if I didn't have enough to do today, I rated and ranked them according to my

personal scoring rubric:

✅ Effective

✅ Low-effort

✅ Widely applicable

✅ Incorporates game mechanics

😠 Reduces immersion

😠 Requires doublethink

😠 Culture of play I dislike

😠 GM has to remember something

 

From best to worst, then:

👍 Players who know about X are required to put character points into character knowledge/skill relating to X.

Simple, effective, works with many but not all game engines. Aligns the character knowledge with the player knowledge neatly. Completely passive, but requires some honesty and introspection while setting up. Doesn't work with some kinds of meta-knowledge. Score: 5

👍 The GM uses mostly unique or procedurally generated new forms of X.

Unique monsters, custom-made scenarios, etc. This works well in most situations but is a lot of extra effort. Doesn't work with some kinds of meta-knowledge. Score: 4.5

👍 Any player knowledge of X is rumour, and rumours about X don't match the truth completely.

Very effective and fairly easy for grounded stuff like monsters and setting lore. Much more difficult (possible, but probably not worth doing) for other kinds of meta-knowledge. Risk of it feeling like bait-and-switch. GM has to stay on their toes. Score: 4

👍 Accept that X is well-known within the world.

Very easy, but only narrowly applicable (doesn't work with most kinds of meta-knowledge). Score: 3.5

🤏 Set things up so that knowledge of X has less impact on player decision-making. 

Difficult to do even in the best cases, but can pay off. For example, you can play with time and scene order so that players knowing what's happening with each others' characters at remote locations has less impact on play. Onerous for the GM and there are ways it can all go wrong, but impressive if it does work. Score: 3

🤏 The GM uses lots of deliberate misdirects about X, with in-world justifications.

A partial solution and one that eventually gets tiresome in practise. Technically works on a surprisingly broad set of meta-game knowledge, but doing that would take a ton of work and creativity on the GM's part. Score: 2.5

🤏 Treat the whole thing as not an issue.

I think this is pretty common, especially for sloppier/lower-stakes/beer-and-pretzels play. Players end up using doublethink or feeling vaguely guilty. As low-effort as it gets, but not great pay-off in terms of an actual solution. Score: 2

🤏 Shift the focus of gameplay into identifying that something is X.

Difficult to do, and only works on a narrow set of gameplay content; doesn't help with most meta-game knowledge. Generally requires the GM to be comfortable tinkering with the fundamentals of how the game works. Can be effective within its wheelhouse, but it's high-risk, low-reward. And what happens when players get player skill at identification and then start over at level 1? Score: 1.5

🤏 Players pretend that their characters don't know about X, but play as if they do.

Doublethink all the way. Thoroughly immersion-breaking. Leads to a narrative that seems plausible from the outside, but not from within, even done right. Is it worth it? I know some tables default to this all the time, but I'd rather keep it to just to the most necessary circumstances. Score: 1

👎 GM uses deliberate misdirects about X for no good in-world reason, so players learn they can't rely on any knowledge they have.

Yuck. Takes a lot of effort for pretty much no upside and a lot of downside. Don't do this. Score: 0.5

👎 Players have to commit to their characters not knowing about X, and therefore make deliberately bad decisions. Optional extra: Players get unrelated, perhaps even out-of-game, penalties for (seeming to) act on player knowledge of X.

The worst of all worlds. I've never seen this but I bet it happens. Score: 0

Putting it together

I recommend combining multiple 👍 solutions for best effects. I know that the 🤏 solutions work for some people/games/styles. Steer clear of 👎 solutions.

Did I miss any?

Random vs procedural generation for game content

Random generation and procedural generation (which is a little more than 'random generation with the crusts cut off') are powerful tools. As GMs and designers we use them to spark inspiration or to populate a game or setting with interesting content. But we use them, or ought to use them, in different ways.

Here's the difference, as I see it.

Random generation

Roll a dice, get an outcome. Or variants thereof.

Random generation is

👉 Extremely quick
👉 An opportunity to use big random tables, which everyone loves
👉 Useful for inspiration by hitting possibilities you wouldn't have thought of, even if you don't use the actual prescribed results 

But it may also result in content with major dissonances and peculiarities.

I think a little incongruence is good, but generating too much randomly can create a sort of silly homogeneity where everything is dissonant, nothing quite makes sense, and no world elements are linked or correlated except by accident. You get ooh-so-zany slop.

Over-reliance on randomness thus requires work to repair, which can itself be entertaining, but takes time and effort.

For example, suppose you roll a random encounter across multiple tables, and get: [roll] hundreds of ... [roll] skeletons ... dressed as ... [roll] jesters .... and they're [roll] hauling a cartload of ... [roll] scented soap ... through [roll] a desert in bloom.

It's something you wouldn't have thought of, sure. But it's too dissonant to be usable in most settings. You hear it and maybe an inkling of a consistent narrative jumps to mind, but the designer needs to plaster over the gaps, tweaking or adding things, to actually get there.

Zany. Too zany? Image by CDD20, via Pixabay.

Procedural generation

Technically a subtype of random generation, procedural generation uses a more complex function to go from inputs to results. It uses randomness, but has deliberate human design built in to create plausible outcomes.

This takes longer, both in the up-front design work and the use of it for creation.

Procedural generation...

👉 Both uses and creates interlinked/ordered/self-consistent information
👉 Combined human decisions and design with randomness to spark novelty but to constrain it in certain ways
👉 Results (ideally) in more plausible or verisimilitudinous outcomes

Examples include:

👉 Branching tables and subtables
👉 Little bits of pseudocode for dungeon room generation
👉 Features added to a consistent core, like a themed monster which gets appropriate thematic features generated via branching dice tables or if/thens

One Application

I'm currently working on a zine. Its premise is that wizards are powerful, crazed, unique, and have strange features which align with their individual theme. For me, that means procedural generation.

I'm exploring a process of taking a wiki article from, say, Wikipedia and pulling out a bunch of descriptive phrases. From these, you get semi-structured thematically-coherent content. Then you follow some guided rules to apply them to the underlying core, which is 'a creepy and erratic wizard'.

After enough customisation, you have generated yourself a wizard. The random element of procedural generation means your character has features you wouldn't have thought of yourself. The human-guided element means the wizard should be more plausible, or at least thematically consistent, than pure randomness generally achieves.

(More news on the zine as I progress with this idea!)

On edge cases and magic

There's an innate design tension which RPG magic systems must contend with.

Magic must be more powerful than enacting the equivalent effect by mundane means, otherwise it's not fun and not fantastic. But if it's powerful and its uses are limitless (or at least non-rate-limited), then you become committed to an exceptionally high-magic setting.

If it takes ten seconds to give yourself a magical boon which lasts for ten minutes, the default player behaviour and the reasonable in-world behaviour will be to cast the spell every ten minutes... Unless they have a specific reason not to. That's almost always 'resource management'. In almost ever fantasy TTRPG, magic (whether spells, items, rituals, innate powers, etc) will be powerful and limited, i.e., a valuable resource; something to be conserved for when it will matter. Therefore, players will want to know the exact effect of some magic they might use, so that they can make an informed choice.

And this creates a design tension. How predictable to players is the magic their characters are harnessing?

The predictability predicament

Assuming you want magic to be able to do a huge range of things (it's magic), to get breadth of coverage, you either end up with these huge, minutely-detailed lists of magic effects and parameters (almost certainly player-facing), or you have a fuzzy system where the GM instantiates vague wordings at runtime (possibly via what amounts to negotiation with the player). These game design choices have different costs in terms of usability and satisfaction.

Most big, popular fantasy TTRPGs like D&D go with the huge, minutely-detailed lists of magic effects option. This arguably results in greater player agency, in the sense of being able to make good and meaningful decisions about resource allocation, but it constrains magic to the big official list (and if it's not exceptionally well-designed, you end up with weird codified corner cases and interactions). You also need to know the system really well to be effective as a player or a GM. Finally, there's a risk that presenting in exhaustive detail what is possible strongly implies that anything else isn't possible. You get cases like D&D 5e, where many destructive spells officially don't damage objects because a small subset of them specify that they do.

The fuzzy system option is attractive because it makes magic more 'mysterious' and wild, and thus fantastical. But it can be hard for a GM, especially one who isn't already operating in a "rulings not rules" tradition. But it can also be hard for players to come to terms with, unless either (a) it's the case in-world that a mage never knows exactly what they're going to get when they do some magic (which is flavourful, but risks a poor play experience), or (b) the GM and player together determine what happens when the magic is used. The latter might sound good (an opportunity for collaborative buy-in) or bad ('Mother May I' gameplay). Some GMs are surprised to find that many players hate 'collaborative storytelling exercises' spilling over into their roleplaying games. Either way, it doesn't actually resolve the tension: it's still in the player's best interests to stop and discuss the possible magical effect before they can make an informed choice whether to use their magic.

Variants of the fuzzy system where e.g. the GM has to follow certain rules to come up with a power-level-appropriate instantiation of a spell at run-time are close to being the worst of both worlds: mechanically fiddly but without giving a player enough information to make decisions with, and you just end up building that minutely-detailed canonical list slowly over time.

Resolving the tension

I consider this an open problem. As I've suggested before, I think the best practises are to

• Pick a path and stick with it, rather than mixing up how rigid and predictable the magic system is in different use-cases within the same game; and
• Have an extremely strong, well-thought out metaphysics which either underpins the mechanical design for the minutely-detailed lists option or informs what 'should be the case' for the fuzzy system option.

Food for thought

Here are some questions your magic system must be robust enough to answer, consistently:

If you turn flour to silver dust and mix it into acid, changing it to silver nitrate and creating heat, what happens to the silver nitrate if the spell wears off? What happens to the heat? If the compound is left over, can you reduce it to get silver? Does the resulting silver still count as being magical?

If you turn a pile of stones into loaves of bread and spend a week eating them, what happens to your tissue, the partially-digested bread, and the waste, if the magic ends? Do you die instantly? Does the energy you got from eating disappear?

If you turn a stone into a cat, and that cat eats and sweats and breathes makes waste, then the magic is dispelled, what happens to the bits of world (food and air and water) that got incorporated into the cat's body? Are they in the stone? Do they turn to stone? Can they be turned back? What happens to the cat's sweat and waste and loose hairs and skin particles out in the world? Do they turn to stone? What if the cat was a kitten, and it grew much bigger and older before the spell ended?

Or if the original subject was a mouse rather than a stone, what happens to the cells that changed in its body? Was there a 'mapping' from one mouse cell to multiple cat cells, so that injuries and shed cells and replaced cells carry back over? Do microbial diseases carry back over? Does cancer?

Are all your answers consistent so far?

What happens if you turn someone into a statue and snap their arm off? What about if you turn someone into steel and then temper or anneal the metal? Or take a mould of their body, turn them into ice, melt them, and then refreeze the water in the mould?

What about if you turn a piece of metal into a piece of wood and burn it inside a big tank of air? Does the carbon dioxide turn into a metal oxide? In general, if you heat something up while it's magically transformed and then turn it back, is it still hot? What if you turned something really small into something really big and then it just got slightly warm by soaking up a million times more sunlight than the tiny thing would have?

If you expand a mouse to be the size of a horse and it eats a bucket of oats, what happens to the oats if it turns back? Does it matter whether they've been digested?

If you expand a mouse to be the size of a horse inside a mouse-sized terrarium that a mouse couldn't possibly break but a horse easily could, does the spell work? Does the answer change if the terrarium is nearly horse-sized? What about if you try it on a mouse that's inside a crack in solid rock? Is this meaningfully different from trapping a mouse under a piece of heavy cloth and then expanding it to the size of a horse?

If you cast a spell on a subject, then another one that seems to have the inverse effect (flesh to rock then rock to flesh), do you get back the exact original? If so, why? If not, what happens if only the first spell ends or is dispelled? What if you cast the first spell, then make some orthogonal change to the subject, then cast the second?

What in-universe mechanism decides whether an object counts as meeting the targeting requirements of a spell? Does a spell that works on chairs work on a one-legged stool if the caster doesn't think a one-legged stool is a chair?

Do any of the answers to these questions change depending on whether it's a temporary effect, a dispelled permanent effect, a magically reversed effect, an intrinsic ability of a magical creature, the effect of an item, etc?

How I think about story games

What follows isn't an attempt at a codification or taxonomy or definition. In fact, it deviates from some of the language people use to describe TTRPGs and story(-telling) games.

It's a way of looking at the design space that I've personally found useful, and a sketch of some of the ways people end up arguing at cross-purposes about story.

 

Story  ∈  TTRPG

First, the process of playing a tabletop role-playing game does inevitably create stories: whether you think that's the point of playing or not; whether you think the GM should try to steer it or plan it or not; whether you think there's story from start to finish or only after the fact.

Back in 1987, Gary Gygax advised that

When the principal characters in a story (the campaign) are free-willed and have a multitude of choices regarding how to proceed, it is counterproductive – and, in fact, impossible – to preordain just how the events in the campaign will unfold.

In 2009, the Alexandrian made the firm case most of us are familiar with: don't prep plots.

A plot is the sequence of events in a story.

And the problem with trying to prep a plot for an RPG is that you’re attempting to pre-determine events that have not yet happened. Your gaming session is not a story — it is a happening. It is something about which stories can be told, but in the genesis of the moment it is not a tale being told. It is a fact that is transpiring.

In 2021, the Angry GM noted that

the story—the narrative—is an emergent thing. Your game’s going to have a narrative when it’s done. Like it or not. And people are going to interpret it based on how they think stories work. Players won’t experience the game as it was. They’ll experience it based on their warped perception of it. [...]

Once your game’s done, it’s going to have had a plot. It’s going to have followed a single sequence of events. There’s going to have been a climax. People—even you—will remember that s$&%. You can either use what power you have to steer the game toward the best narrative possible. One that does the things that thirty millenniums of storytelling have taught us make for good stories. Or you can hope and pray that the emergent narrative is accidentally a good one. It’s your call.

And just recently in 2024, Tom van Winkle wrote a superb article about the nuances of all this. If you only have time to read one blog post today, go read that one instead of this.

The assumption seems to be that to create a story, you need a plot in advance. It's important for the entire entry here to understand that that is not true. [...]

What all the "anti-story" gamers have in common today is that they allowed other people to define the term "story" for them as "pre-designed plot," even though that's not what story means.

He analyses "anti-story" gamers, who

have, apparently unwittingly, accepted the false idea that RPGs would need plots designed in advance to have stories in a story-telling game. Their objections are therefore confusing for many people who are aware that they experience stories arising spontaneously in RPGs.

The underlying claim is: playing a tabletop role-playing game is intrinsically a process of telling a story. And yes, in a technical sense, this is absolutely true. In a TTRPG session, real-world people are making deliberate decisions that lead to the details of a fictional universe and events within it being filled in. Therefore, definitionally speaking, the players and GM have collaborated to tell a story.

Tom van Winkle in particular discusses the literature, and what scholars of story and narrative have agreed on, and how that applies.

The problem, though, is that in everyday, natural English for the layperson, the phrase "tell a story" comes with all sorts of baggage that doesn't necessarily apply to TTRPGs.

The phrase is laden with subtle implications in common English:

1. Telling a story means the storytellers are doing so with the primary goal of producing a 'good story', or at least are telling a story intentionally
2. Telling a story means the storytellers have equal parts, or at least similar amounts of creative control
3. Telling a story means the process is done selectively, without random elements
4. Telling a story means that core elements of the narrative are planned (at least a little in advance), not suddenly discovered
5. Telling a story means that people are making choices in order to further the narrative in a satisfying way, which might not be the 'optimal' or even plausible choices for a particular character
6. Telling a story is unregulated by formal mechanics, or at least largely so

None of these are true of TTRPGs in general. They're not even all true simultaneously for most story-telling games!

So telling a novice who's interested in entering the hobby that a TTRPG is necessarily 'about telling a story' is frankly just misleading that person, unless you stop and break down why 'telling a story' doesn't mean most of what they think it means. (And it may lead to further misunderstandings, like when they hear the term 'player agency' and think it means creative agency over the fictive world, and so on...)

...We still have this phrase, 'story game'.

Two axes

When I think about 'story games' and TTRPGs, I envisage two parallel tracks running left to right.

On the first axis, we have 'rules' to the left and 'freeform' to the right. This axis mostly has to do with the GM, if the game has one.

• A game can be towards the left, 'rules', with lots of rules and processes for decision-making. A game here encourages system mastery for both the GM and the players. It doesn't necessarily imply more control or omniscience for the GM: the game could be heavily reliant on random tables, for instance, or there could be lots of codified rules for how the players get to mess around with the game world directly rather than through their characters.
• A game can be towards the right, 'freeform', taking an open-ended and freeform approach to actual gameplay. In this case the GM is making up a lot as they go along, relying more on the characteristics of the world that have so far been determined than on rules and frameworks provided by the game.
• A game can be somewhere in the middle, with moderate rule support.

On the second axis, we have 'decisions' to the left and 'insertions' to the right. This axis has more to do with the players than the GM.

• A game can be towards the left, 'decisions', where players control their character's mind – the decisions they make – and nothing else. The GM determines what is in the world, controls events and NPCs, and adjudicates PC decision outcomes. (But even the most leftward TTRPGs usually have a carve-out here for character generation, where players get to pick things about their character which the character realistically couldn't have chosen within the world.)
• A game can be towards the right, 'insertions', where players have power over aspects of the game that isn't through their characters. In some situations characters can create, choose, affect, invent, or veto, but in games like this the players have an ability to create, choose, affect, invent, or veto.
• A game can be somewhere in the middle, mixing approaches.
  

The reason I picture the tracks as parallel is that many games, if you map them onto the axes, make a line that's close to vertical. That is,

• Most, though not all, 'traddish TTRPGs' (games with few to no overt player-available story-telling elements) are also mechanically rigorous. They are towards the left on both axes. In general, the GM has lots of power and mechanical support, and the players will know that most things they choose to do will be covered by rules. Whether those rules are good or bad, players may be uneasy with situations where the GM has to go with their gut over having an 'official' answer. It will be unusual (troubling, even) for a GM to invite a player to fill in gaps in the world or determine action outcomes.
• Most, though not all, 'collaborative story-telling games' (in which players are permitted to insert content directly into the world rather than being restricted to attempts to alter the world with their characters) have relatively few rules and processes. They are towards the right on both axes. In general, there isn't anywhere near as much of an authority disparity between the GM and the players, or there might not be a GM at all. The game rules tend to be 'softer' or 'fuzzier', the players are given more overt license to override or ignore them, and the mechanical framework is usually designed more towards 'crafting a satisfying narrative' than towards 'playing a skill-requiring game' or 'simulating a fictional world'.

I'm personally most interested in the leftward side of both scales. I've designed at least one little game that wanders around the middle of the axes, and have a few others sitting on the project pile, but as a designer and player I mostly lean left, towards 'traddish TTRPGs'.

But I'm also interested, from a design point of view, in the rare oddballs. The really open-ended, rules-light TTRPGs with high GM authority, perhaps like this idea. And the highly constrained, rules-heavy, almost formulaic, versions of story-telling games, with no referee.

 

Ways of playing

We can map the way people actually play games onto these two tracks, too. As opposed to how games were designed to be played.

The big example here is (as it often is) D&D 5e. The system is to the centre-left on the rules/freeform track: it's crunchy and extensive compared to a lot of indie games, but not as much as previous editions of the same game, or GURPS, or whatever). And it's quite far left on the decisions/insertions track: the official rules only contain (outside character generation) a few optional and tacked-on suggestions about direct player control over the world.

Interestingly, this isn't always borne out in play. It's possibly due to the rise of people entering the hobby via watching televised 'actual play' by actors, or possibly a trend that's always been there but is just more visible now. A lot of people these days play D&D as if it was further right on the decisions/insertions scale. Players in a lot of games end up with a certain amount of creative control over the world.

To put it in fuzzier terms, they inject elements of a collaborative story-telling exercise into a relatively traddish TTRPG when they play. And that's fine. I suspect they might be better served by playing an actual story-telling game with design elements supporting that, but ultimately, let people have their own fun.

To sum up

This is just how I think about things. It's not a formal system or a position on how things ought to be done.

I think it's fair to say that all TTRPG involves the creation of story – and again, go read van Winkle's article for a really well-considered take – and that some people have the creation of that story as a more primary concern than others. I think that the phrase 'telling a story' has misleading implications when it comes to TTRPGs, which is why I personally avoid saying that TTRPGs deeply involve it, even if (getting into the weeds) it's true. And I find it interesting that when it comes to story, we can try to pin games onto two axes which quite often correlate with one another.

The 'Four Humors' Theory of TTRPG Players

The Angry GM recently published an article about the distinct ways in which players play RPGs, with the specific example of D&D.

He mentioned in particular the rise, or increase, of an attitude towards the game as an intrinsically theatrical activity, adding that to the old GNS classification:

Some players see D&D as a Game. They think it’s about overcoming obstacles, winning adventures, accomplishing goals, and advancing characters.

Some players see D&D as a Narrative. They think it’s about telling a story of fantasy adventure and they want to share the most interesting story possible.

Some players see D&D as a Simulation. They think it’s about entering a world as a character and dealing with it as it is. Whatever happens happens.

And now, some players see D&D as a Performance. They think it’s about putting on a show. They have a role to play and they’ve got to play it to the hilt. In the most interesting and engaging way possible.

It's a good article, worth checking out. While reading, it occurred to me that we could treat GNS Theory as just a way to describe some of the emergent properties of a simple pair of dichotomies, along the lines of another well-respected and evidence-based organisational schema, that of the humoral theory of human health.

Take all of this very seriously please.

A simple pair of dichotomies

Somebody is playing a tabletop role-playing game. They are engaging with an activity, making decisions, thinking about what they are doing. The act of play is, ultimately, a realisation of the act of thought. What is the player spending most of their brainpower thinking about?

There are two dichotomies here.

1. Is the player thinking mostly about their real world environment (the people they are playing with, the game rules, the miniatures, the side conversations)? Or are they thinking mostly about the fictive setting? Or something in between?
2. Is the player thinking mostly in an inward-looking away, about themself and what is theirs or squarely within their purview? Or are they thinking mostly in an outward-looking way, about things around them and outside of their control? Or something in between?

We can put this on a pair of axes, as in this professionally-drawn image.

And now a picture emerges, of what GNS+P is describing, but defined in terms of these innate characteristics of human thought: wet, dry, hot, and cold fictive, reality, inward-looking, and outward-looking.

 

These of course are what modern medicine ludology teaches us are the fundamental building blocks of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile different ways to engage with a role-playing game.

GNS+P Theory doesn't map precisely to the four resulting quadrants, of course. There's some interplay and outliers. We have debatable blobs, not square pigeonholes.

Let's break this exciting new bit of science down.

Yellow bile 'TTRPG as Game'

Temperament: choleric (ambitious, driven, aggressive)

What is a Gamist player thinking about?

Their thoughts tend to be INWARD-LOOKING: upon their own (and usually necessarily, the group's) ability to win; to this end they channel attention into their own player skill, their own knowledge of the rules, and making decisions about their own character's capabilities.

Their thoughts typically tend towards REALITY: the nature of the game and how to win it, the rules and mechanics, win and lose conditions, and how to get other players to go along with their plans. But they do still focus some of their attention on parts of the fictive environment: the obstacles to winning that their character encounters, and the mechanical ways they can get advantages with their character (in particular, advancement). The yellow blob in the diagram therefore stretches away towards the left.

To put it another way, Gamists have an excess of yellow bile.

Black bile 'TTRPG as Narrative'

Temperament: melancholic (sad, delusional, deep in fantasy)

What is a Narrativist player thinking about?

Their thoughts tend to be OUTWARD-LOOKING: towards the group having a satisfying play experience and how the game's play will become a story after the fact. At times, they may care more about their own enjoyment of the game-as-story, thus leaning towards the inwards-looking position.

Their thoughts tend towards REALITY: making decisions for the good of the players' play experience, the emergent story, and what will be 'interesting'. If they care about the game rules, it is in case those become an impediment to higher-order goals. (The Narrativist's thoughts may also drive towards a story with verisimilitude and/or immersion, creeping towards engagement with the fictive environment.)

To put it terms we can all understand, Narrativists may have an excess of black bile.

Phlegm 'TTRPG as Simulation'

Temperament: phlegmatic (calm, reserved, analytical)

What is a Simulationist player thinking about?

Their thoughts tend to be OUTWARD-LOOKING: at the world around their character, and at things they don't already know. They want to discover things about the fictive world and see how they mesh together, and inwards things like their knowledge of the rules and their character are mostly ancillary to that. But the act of engagement still requires making plausible decisions about the character, and the Simulationist does typically spend some attention on their character's place within the world (thus, the blue blob on the chart reaches upward).

The Simulationist's thoughts are almost strictly FICTIVE: They care most about the world they are playing in. The game's rules are meant to simulate a world, the GM is the arbiter of those rules, and the outcome of those rules is to be accepted and examined, never challenged or overruled for the sake of higher-order player/GM goals.

So of course, Simulationists have an excess of phlegm.

Blood 'TTRPG as Performance'

Temperament: sanguine (passionate, mirthful, self-indulgent)

The Angry GM suggested 'Performance' as a new and increasingly popular playstyle category, characterised by (amongst other things) creating

characters with clearly defined motivations, personalities, beliefs, goals, and fears right from the get-go. Their character’s character doesn’t emerge from gameplay and it doesn’t change as the game plays out.

What is a Performer player thinking about?

 

Their thoughts are ultimately INWARD-LOOKING: Most of all, they care about their own character, deciding its intrinsic properties, and then getting across those preselected properties.

Their thoughts are largely on the FICTIVE: How to affect the fictive world by determining a tiny part of it; looking for opportunities in the world to accomplish their secondary goal of expression. External things like 'the game rules' and 'the other players' don't impact this very much for trad RPGs.

Or as we normal, modern people would definitely say in normal, modern terms, "Performers have an excess of blood".

I put something weird on that chart, though.

 Entertainer island

I think there's a little outcrop of the Performative playstyle occupying the diametrically opposite position.

A player can start with a solid foundation of hot, wet inward, fictive humors. That is, they have a firmly imagined static character with predetermined characteristics and sometimes even an intention to pursue a 'character arc', whatever on earth that means when you're (a) playing a game that (b) involves, at its most fundamental level, making decisions about situations that you have no foreknowledge of.

But with those humors as a firm foundation, most of the player's attention is freed up to focus on the actual performative act, which is ultimately outward-looking in reality (given that it is a process of interaction with an audience). With this inversion of the expression of their bodily gameplay humors, the Performer is now thinking primarily about the theatrical entertainment of the other players / the GM / their Twitch audience / passersby in the real world. When taken to excess, to the game's detriment.

Balancing the humors

So it seems likely that people can have a predisposition towards certain humors, and we might or might not regard this as an imbalance of humors.

What are the implications? Let's sketch just a few, presupposing (naturally) that two thousand years of high-quality humoral medicine can be extended to the modern environment of the game table.

• A player who is desirous of a more neutral or 'balanced' playstyle may examine the degrees to which they are inward- or outward-looking, in the fictive world or reality, and deliberately change their behaviours accordingly.
• If the players and the GM at a table all have a similar humoral temperament, then we would expect their games to run well if they indulge in that temperament, although players of a different style would scarcely recognise the game they were playing!
• In rare circumstances where the group dynamics are just right, players of completely opposite humoral temperaments may 'cancel out' at the table due to the ways they use and express those temperaments, resulting in (against the odds) a harmonious, near-maximally-enjoyable game.
• Obviously, players may be able to select the right foods and drinks to modulate any excess of humors. By careful review of TTRPG play I have discerned some of the modern-day nostrums: pizza (hot + dry); coffee (hot + wet); soda (cold + wet); chips (cold + dry).

Science marches ever onwards.