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:
- players get to make character choices that are meaningful
- 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.
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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.
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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.
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