Celebrim
Legend
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what an RPG actually is, and I’m more convinced than ever that what we call a RPG isn’t actually a single game, but a group of interacting mini-games linked by a narrative structure. The number of mini-games you play, and the exact composition and proportion of time spent on those games are the primary determinates of the style of play your table has.
RPGs evolved by agglutinating these mini-games together in an ad-hoc way, the full details of which are documented in books like Playing at the World and far beyond the scope of this little tiny essay. But it’s well worth reading if you aren’t familiar with the detailed history. The central point I’m going to make here though is that the title, “Playing at the World” is very apropos because what RPGs set out to do is simulate pretty much life itself. There is generally no limit to what players may propose their characters doing. And since no one game can actually simulate the full breadth of human activity, the simplest and perhaps best approach has always been to glue a bunch of widely disparate games together that handle different sorts of tasks.
That a game would have within it several different mini-games is not unusual. Many games have different phases of play that involve different types of gameplay. Quite often a traditional game will begin with a preparatory game that sets the conditions under which the main game will start. Bridge family games begin with a bidding game where the player attempts to estimate his success in the main game. Settlers of Cataan, Stratego and Risk begin with a strategic deployment phase where the player arranges his initial resources. Milton-Bradley’s Life has a repeating mini-game where the players may gamble on a Wheel of Fortune. Monopoly takes a break from its normal game play to hold an auction whenever a property is passed over.
But there are often hidden mini-games within games used to resolve situations the rules don’t cover, and these mini-games and how well you play them often are as important as or more important than the game covered by the rules themselves. For example, both Settlers of Cataan and Monopoly have a trading phase which has almost no formal rules. Players are allowed to trade almost any game resource that they hold for almost any game resource held by another player through any agreement that the players are willing to make. This amounts to a mini-game of diplomacy and negotiation that is critical to success in these games. Likewise, in Settlers of Cataan or Risk and many other multiplayer games, there is an implicit game of diplomacy in the making of and breaking of alliances with other players, and in manipulating other players into seeing you as less of a threat than you are, and other players being greater threats than they are. Any skilled player will tell you that these mind games as every bit as important as the placement of your resources or the efficiency with you manage them.
But in comparison to the scope of their conception and granularity of an RPG, these board games are almost trivial – something in evidence by the disparity of the size of the rules published to play them. An RPG proposes not to simulate a particular aspect of a particular endeavor in a highly abstract way, but to simulate all of life in often a very concrete way where each game play action corresponds to some imaginable scene or experience. There is no way a single game can hope to achieve this, so the RPG never tries to be a single game. Any RPG that did, would feel incomplete and would – even if one couldn’t state clearly why – would not seem to many players of RPGs to be an RPG.
The RPG began by welding a very loose and informal strategic game of make believe with a highly structured and relatively formalized set of tactical rules appropriated from a wargame. But right from the start, it’s clear that the game that was actually being played had more than just the two mini-games being played without clear distinction between them. As soon as the wargame moved off of the abstract and simplified environment of a battlefield and into a dungeon, the wargame of moving pieces and engaging in combat was insufficient to handle all the propositions that the players could offer. Chainmail itself had no rules for opening doors, searching rooms, handling light sources, swimming, breaking objects or any of the almost unlimited things that a player could do to interact with a basically boundless environment. Initially probably everything that wasn’t combat was handled by the same fiat ad hoc judgments that had been borrowed from the ‘Bronstein’s games’. But gradually more and more subsystems were developed from these initially fiat judgments and glued on to the game as they became first standardized in play and later written down and published.
We normally think of D&D or any RPG as being a single game, but even as game systems become more ‘complete’ in the sense of having rules for more and more situations, RPGs continue to have very distinct phases of play that are each mini-games in their own right. Practically every D&D player knows intuitively that the words “Roll for initiative” are the signal that a new mini-game with very different rules is about to be contested. I think it is worth-while to list some of the mini-games that may been seen at tables.
Tactical Skirmish Wargame: This is a game usually played on a map divided into squares or hexagons. Occasionally a more simplified system is used with the space divided conceptually into distances between the combatants, or with a map loosely held in one or more participant’s collective imagination – what is often called “Theater of the Mind”. But whether the combat resolution system more resemble a traditional wargame, or something like Final Fantasy and its strategic selection of moves, most RPGs have some sort of individual scale combat system.
Theater Games: Quite often one of the most important games in an RPG is one that often has the least amount of rules devoted to it. This is the game of make believe played when players adopt personas and interact with other players who have likewise adopted personas. The game play seen here is almost identical to the sorts of improvisational theater games used to train actors in dramatic skills. There are usually no hard and firm rules, but there are often social contracts of various sorts governing how much the players are expected to invest in their characterization. Despite the lack of rules, the outcome of these mini-games often has at least as much impact on the direction of future play as more formalized mini-games such as the tactical skirmish wargame. Very often these theater games constitute the real diplomacy and negotiation phase of the game where in the disposition toward the PC’s of the NPC’s is determined or at least heavily influenced.
Riddles and Puzzles: Since fairly early in the game’s history, it’s been not uncommon to have with in the main game, a mini-game which consists of playing virtually any other sort of game or solving any other sort of puzzle which is tied to the acquisition of resources within the game. This could be a monster which only cooperates when a certain riddle is answered, a door that only opens when a puzzle of some sort is solved, a trap that can only be evaded when clues are successfully deciphered, a who-done-it mystery game of collecting clues, or resolving a game of chess or poker occurring in the imagined world via an actual game of chess or poker against the referee. What each of these games have in common is they depend primarily on the player’s cleverness.
Challenges and Contests: Just as a player’s mental abilities may be tested by a mini-game, RPGs have since the very beginning had situations where the invented character’s abilities are tested against the imagined environment. The possibilities here are almost limitless, and some of these particular mini- games rise to such importance and become so complex and standardized that it would be best to treat them in separate sections. In traditional fantasy RPGs like D&D, these challenges and contests take the form of various traps, hazards, special tricks and obstacles that the players could encounter in the course of exploring the environment. What’s particularly interesting about this is that at first, it is clear that D&D was making no attempt to unify all these various challenges under a single set of rules. Indeed, if you look at early modules – and S2 White Plume Mountain and C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan are exceptionally good places to start, though we could choose almost any early module and find some examples – what’s clear is that whenever these challenges are introduced, the standard approach was to invent on the spot a small mini-game to represent the challenge. Early designers weren’t particularly interested in answering the question, “What is the rule for swimming?”, but in “What are the rules governing this particular challenge?” With no unified rules and no way of knowing what the DM had written down, these games were often in practice avoided by use of spells and powers that had guaranteed player agency, or else had to be solved by dangerous exhausting searches of the game space (referred to in slang as ‘pixel bitching’), or else by negotiating with the DM in the metagame to convince the DM of the workability of your solution. Later rule sets have shown a tendency to standardize the mini-games around challenges to character skillfulness and observation, and to formalize rules for things which in early systems were handled purely by fiat.
Stealth: A subset of the challenges involve avoiding being observed. RPG rules systems often end up developing mini-games around the question of stealthy movement.
Evasion: Just as stealth often ends up with its own rules set, so too evasion often has its own particular set of rules that don’t necessarily resemble the gameplay of any other part of the game. Since the earliest days of RPGs, there has a been a tendency for RPGs to suspend the normal rules of action resolution and in particular the combat resolution game to determine the question of whether or not some group can get away or retreat from battle. This forms its own mini-game with varying degrees of elaborateness, up to and including very elaborate rules for generating protracted chase sequences. Again, what’s notable is that these chases generally use different sets of rules for describing motion than what is used when the scene is a skirmish engagement.
Travel: Although this could be thought of as a sort of challenge, it’s frequently separated from other sorts of challenges into its own category by the rules. Since the earliest days of RPGs, the rules for travel over tactical distances and the rules for long distance travel (equivalent to strategic movement in a wargame) have tended to diverge to simulate and highlight the things specific to those two types of action. Again, since the normal rules are suspended in order to determine what happens when a group proposes to travel a long distance, this is yet another mini-game within what we think of as the game system.
Role-Assignment and Story Direction: At times, the game makes a game of deciding what roles players are going to have within the scene or the story, or in what direction the game is going to take. Players will bid over control of the story, or negotiate over how a characters actions will properly be described or adjudicated. This sort of mini-game is more associated with modern games coming out of the Indy gaming movement, but you can find it going on in very old RPGs indeed – Amber Diceless for example comes to mind. And to a certain extent, every alignment debate that has ever occurred in D&D is a mini-game of this sort, albeit perhaps not a particularly functional or intended one.
Mass Combat: With its roots firmly in wargaming, it’s no surprise that many RPGs have featured stories where the scale of the combat increases well beyond the scope of a tactical skirmish between a small number of individuals, but included whole armies. The original D&D game evolved out of a game where such battles were routinely occurring, and D&D has at many junctures introduced mini-games with their own specific rules for determining the outcome of those battles and how they might influence the narrative and the other ongoing portions of the game. Probably the most famous and most successful of these was the tight integration of mass combat rules in to the epic Chronicles of the Dragonlance adventure path, but many tables found themselves resorting to Battle System or other mass combat resolution systems as their characters increased in level and influence over the setting.
Crafting, Research and Downtime: Many RPGs since the very early days of the game have had mini-games around what a character does and what resources they may collect when they aren’t actively doing something in some other portion of the game.
Character Creation and Advancement: The fact that character creation is in fact it’s own mini-game can be proven from the fact that this game is considered by many players to be so engrossing in its own right, that they often play it as a standalone game independent of all the rest, imagining theoretically characters that they may never play or never even want to play, purely for the satisfaction resulting from playing the ‘what if’ game implied by the character creation and advancement rules.
There are no doubt many other sorts of mini-games that I’ve either overlooked or never even encountered. The point is that pretty much every RPG is shifting implicitly back and forth between multiple systems of resolving play, often so often and so transparently that the players never really even think about the mental shifts they are making to accommodate those changes in perspective and proposition resolution. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that this is one of the defining aspects of what we think of as an RPG.
This conclusion is made much stronger when we observe all of the attempts to bring the experience of a PnP RPG to the realm of computers. The more fully an RPG on a computer comes to resemble the experience of PnP play the more different interfaces and subsystems we see have to be implement to handle all the different things a player of an RPG expects to be able to do. So we typically see an interface for non-combat movement, combat movement, long distance movement, conversation, character advancement, challenge resolution, and so forth. Think of all the distinct rules that govern different phases of the play of a game like Ultima, Fallout/Fallout II, Mass Effect/Mass Effect 2, and Skyrim. Each of these different systems has its own particular game play which, while it interacts with other systems to create the whole narrative, doesn’t necessarily depend on any other game system. The whole game could presumably exist with fewer and more limited interfaces, but would gradually cease to resemble an RPG if it did so. Modern computer RPGs are only now reaching the point where they can transition between these different mini-games as seamlessly as PnP’s normally strive to achieve, but the different games are still there just better concealed.
It’s been the contention of some RPG theories that each RPG could only satisfy a single agenda of play successfully, or that each player brought to the game only a single agenda of play. There are a lot of reasons why I think that is false, but to me one of the most persuasive is realizing that in a traditional RPG there isn’t a single game being played and that is by design. If you actually observe numerous players in play, what you find is that the same player not only can have multiple agendas, but can bring different agendas to different mini-games. The same player can play the tactical skirmish mini-game purely as a tactical challenge to be overcome, and then immediately shift in to a very story focused character driven sort of play when a theater game comes to fore. And over time, I’ve come to realize that this is entirely functional and even desirable in a game system. Because not only can a game system accommodate different player agendas by providing different mini-games for them to shine in, but almost no one is playing RPGs for a single clear cut reason. The fact that an RPG is normally a game composed of many different mini-games is precisely what makes them engrossing over such a long period.
RPGs evolved by agglutinating these mini-games together in an ad-hoc way, the full details of which are documented in books like Playing at the World and far beyond the scope of this little tiny essay. But it’s well worth reading if you aren’t familiar with the detailed history. The central point I’m going to make here though is that the title, “Playing at the World” is very apropos because what RPGs set out to do is simulate pretty much life itself. There is generally no limit to what players may propose their characters doing. And since no one game can actually simulate the full breadth of human activity, the simplest and perhaps best approach has always been to glue a bunch of widely disparate games together that handle different sorts of tasks.
That a game would have within it several different mini-games is not unusual. Many games have different phases of play that involve different types of gameplay. Quite often a traditional game will begin with a preparatory game that sets the conditions under which the main game will start. Bridge family games begin with a bidding game where the player attempts to estimate his success in the main game. Settlers of Cataan, Stratego and Risk begin with a strategic deployment phase where the player arranges his initial resources. Milton-Bradley’s Life has a repeating mini-game where the players may gamble on a Wheel of Fortune. Monopoly takes a break from its normal game play to hold an auction whenever a property is passed over.
But there are often hidden mini-games within games used to resolve situations the rules don’t cover, and these mini-games and how well you play them often are as important as or more important than the game covered by the rules themselves. For example, both Settlers of Cataan and Monopoly have a trading phase which has almost no formal rules. Players are allowed to trade almost any game resource that they hold for almost any game resource held by another player through any agreement that the players are willing to make. This amounts to a mini-game of diplomacy and negotiation that is critical to success in these games. Likewise, in Settlers of Cataan or Risk and many other multiplayer games, there is an implicit game of diplomacy in the making of and breaking of alliances with other players, and in manipulating other players into seeing you as less of a threat than you are, and other players being greater threats than they are. Any skilled player will tell you that these mind games as every bit as important as the placement of your resources or the efficiency with you manage them.
But in comparison to the scope of their conception and granularity of an RPG, these board games are almost trivial – something in evidence by the disparity of the size of the rules published to play them. An RPG proposes not to simulate a particular aspect of a particular endeavor in a highly abstract way, but to simulate all of life in often a very concrete way where each game play action corresponds to some imaginable scene or experience. There is no way a single game can hope to achieve this, so the RPG never tries to be a single game. Any RPG that did, would feel incomplete and would – even if one couldn’t state clearly why – would not seem to many players of RPGs to be an RPG.
The RPG began by welding a very loose and informal strategic game of make believe with a highly structured and relatively formalized set of tactical rules appropriated from a wargame. But right from the start, it’s clear that the game that was actually being played had more than just the two mini-games being played without clear distinction between them. As soon as the wargame moved off of the abstract and simplified environment of a battlefield and into a dungeon, the wargame of moving pieces and engaging in combat was insufficient to handle all the propositions that the players could offer. Chainmail itself had no rules for opening doors, searching rooms, handling light sources, swimming, breaking objects or any of the almost unlimited things that a player could do to interact with a basically boundless environment. Initially probably everything that wasn’t combat was handled by the same fiat ad hoc judgments that had been borrowed from the ‘Bronstein’s games’. But gradually more and more subsystems were developed from these initially fiat judgments and glued on to the game as they became first standardized in play and later written down and published.
We normally think of D&D or any RPG as being a single game, but even as game systems become more ‘complete’ in the sense of having rules for more and more situations, RPGs continue to have very distinct phases of play that are each mini-games in their own right. Practically every D&D player knows intuitively that the words “Roll for initiative” are the signal that a new mini-game with very different rules is about to be contested. I think it is worth-while to list some of the mini-games that may been seen at tables.
Tactical Skirmish Wargame: This is a game usually played on a map divided into squares or hexagons. Occasionally a more simplified system is used with the space divided conceptually into distances between the combatants, or with a map loosely held in one or more participant’s collective imagination – what is often called “Theater of the Mind”. But whether the combat resolution system more resemble a traditional wargame, or something like Final Fantasy and its strategic selection of moves, most RPGs have some sort of individual scale combat system.
Theater Games: Quite often one of the most important games in an RPG is one that often has the least amount of rules devoted to it. This is the game of make believe played when players adopt personas and interact with other players who have likewise adopted personas. The game play seen here is almost identical to the sorts of improvisational theater games used to train actors in dramatic skills. There are usually no hard and firm rules, but there are often social contracts of various sorts governing how much the players are expected to invest in their characterization. Despite the lack of rules, the outcome of these mini-games often has at least as much impact on the direction of future play as more formalized mini-games such as the tactical skirmish wargame. Very often these theater games constitute the real diplomacy and negotiation phase of the game where in the disposition toward the PC’s of the NPC’s is determined or at least heavily influenced.
Riddles and Puzzles: Since fairly early in the game’s history, it’s been not uncommon to have with in the main game, a mini-game which consists of playing virtually any other sort of game or solving any other sort of puzzle which is tied to the acquisition of resources within the game. This could be a monster which only cooperates when a certain riddle is answered, a door that only opens when a puzzle of some sort is solved, a trap that can only be evaded when clues are successfully deciphered, a who-done-it mystery game of collecting clues, or resolving a game of chess or poker occurring in the imagined world via an actual game of chess or poker against the referee. What each of these games have in common is they depend primarily on the player’s cleverness.
Challenges and Contests: Just as a player’s mental abilities may be tested by a mini-game, RPGs have since the very beginning had situations where the invented character’s abilities are tested against the imagined environment. The possibilities here are almost limitless, and some of these particular mini- games rise to such importance and become so complex and standardized that it would be best to treat them in separate sections. In traditional fantasy RPGs like D&D, these challenges and contests take the form of various traps, hazards, special tricks and obstacles that the players could encounter in the course of exploring the environment. What’s particularly interesting about this is that at first, it is clear that D&D was making no attempt to unify all these various challenges under a single set of rules. Indeed, if you look at early modules – and S2 White Plume Mountain and C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan are exceptionally good places to start, though we could choose almost any early module and find some examples – what’s clear is that whenever these challenges are introduced, the standard approach was to invent on the spot a small mini-game to represent the challenge. Early designers weren’t particularly interested in answering the question, “What is the rule for swimming?”, but in “What are the rules governing this particular challenge?” With no unified rules and no way of knowing what the DM had written down, these games were often in practice avoided by use of spells and powers that had guaranteed player agency, or else had to be solved by dangerous exhausting searches of the game space (referred to in slang as ‘pixel bitching’), or else by negotiating with the DM in the metagame to convince the DM of the workability of your solution. Later rule sets have shown a tendency to standardize the mini-games around challenges to character skillfulness and observation, and to formalize rules for things which in early systems were handled purely by fiat.
Stealth: A subset of the challenges involve avoiding being observed. RPG rules systems often end up developing mini-games around the question of stealthy movement.
Evasion: Just as stealth often ends up with its own rules set, so too evasion often has its own particular set of rules that don’t necessarily resemble the gameplay of any other part of the game. Since the earliest days of RPGs, there has a been a tendency for RPGs to suspend the normal rules of action resolution and in particular the combat resolution game to determine the question of whether or not some group can get away or retreat from battle. This forms its own mini-game with varying degrees of elaborateness, up to and including very elaborate rules for generating protracted chase sequences. Again, what’s notable is that these chases generally use different sets of rules for describing motion than what is used when the scene is a skirmish engagement.
Travel: Although this could be thought of as a sort of challenge, it’s frequently separated from other sorts of challenges into its own category by the rules. Since the earliest days of RPGs, the rules for travel over tactical distances and the rules for long distance travel (equivalent to strategic movement in a wargame) have tended to diverge to simulate and highlight the things specific to those two types of action. Again, since the normal rules are suspended in order to determine what happens when a group proposes to travel a long distance, this is yet another mini-game within what we think of as the game system.
Role-Assignment and Story Direction: At times, the game makes a game of deciding what roles players are going to have within the scene or the story, or in what direction the game is going to take. Players will bid over control of the story, or negotiate over how a characters actions will properly be described or adjudicated. This sort of mini-game is more associated with modern games coming out of the Indy gaming movement, but you can find it going on in very old RPGs indeed – Amber Diceless for example comes to mind. And to a certain extent, every alignment debate that has ever occurred in D&D is a mini-game of this sort, albeit perhaps not a particularly functional or intended one.
Mass Combat: With its roots firmly in wargaming, it’s no surprise that many RPGs have featured stories where the scale of the combat increases well beyond the scope of a tactical skirmish between a small number of individuals, but included whole armies. The original D&D game evolved out of a game where such battles were routinely occurring, and D&D has at many junctures introduced mini-games with their own specific rules for determining the outcome of those battles and how they might influence the narrative and the other ongoing portions of the game. Probably the most famous and most successful of these was the tight integration of mass combat rules in to the epic Chronicles of the Dragonlance adventure path, but many tables found themselves resorting to Battle System or other mass combat resolution systems as their characters increased in level and influence over the setting.
Crafting, Research and Downtime: Many RPGs since the very early days of the game have had mini-games around what a character does and what resources they may collect when they aren’t actively doing something in some other portion of the game.
Character Creation and Advancement: The fact that character creation is in fact it’s own mini-game can be proven from the fact that this game is considered by many players to be so engrossing in its own right, that they often play it as a standalone game independent of all the rest, imagining theoretically characters that they may never play or never even want to play, purely for the satisfaction resulting from playing the ‘what if’ game implied by the character creation and advancement rules.
There are no doubt many other sorts of mini-games that I’ve either overlooked or never even encountered. The point is that pretty much every RPG is shifting implicitly back and forth between multiple systems of resolving play, often so often and so transparently that the players never really even think about the mental shifts they are making to accommodate those changes in perspective and proposition resolution. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that this is one of the defining aspects of what we think of as an RPG.
This conclusion is made much stronger when we observe all of the attempts to bring the experience of a PnP RPG to the realm of computers. The more fully an RPG on a computer comes to resemble the experience of PnP play the more different interfaces and subsystems we see have to be implement to handle all the different things a player of an RPG expects to be able to do. So we typically see an interface for non-combat movement, combat movement, long distance movement, conversation, character advancement, challenge resolution, and so forth. Think of all the distinct rules that govern different phases of the play of a game like Ultima, Fallout/Fallout II, Mass Effect/Mass Effect 2, and Skyrim. Each of these different systems has its own particular game play which, while it interacts with other systems to create the whole narrative, doesn’t necessarily depend on any other game system. The whole game could presumably exist with fewer and more limited interfaces, but would gradually cease to resemble an RPG if it did so. Modern computer RPGs are only now reaching the point where they can transition between these different mini-games as seamlessly as PnP’s normally strive to achieve, but the different games are still there just better concealed.
It’s been the contention of some RPG theories that each RPG could only satisfy a single agenda of play successfully, or that each player brought to the game only a single agenda of play. There are a lot of reasons why I think that is false, but to me one of the most persuasive is realizing that in a traditional RPG there isn’t a single game being played and that is by design. If you actually observe numerous players in play, what you find is that the same player not only can have multiple agendas, but can bring different agendas to different mini-games. The same player can play the tactical skirmish mini-game purely as a tactical challenge to be overcome, and then immediately shift in to a very story focused character driven sort of play when a theater game comes to fore. And over time, I’ve come to realize that this is entirely functional and even desirable in a game system. Because not only can a game system accommodate different player agendas by providing different mini-games for them to shine in, but almost no one is playing RPGs for a single clear cut reason. The fact that an RPG is normally a game composed of many different mini-games is precisely what makes them engrossing over such a long period.
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