Suggestions for a "what are RPGs"/"how to play RPGs" resources

[Committed Hero]

"In this game you take the role of Xs who do Y. Look at media Z for examples."

I think if you are not writing for newcomers, there's no need to explain what an rpg is.

 

[Piperken]

I am writing an RPG. Like I suppose a lot of people have attempted over the years. One thing I am dreading writing is the "what is an RPG?" and "how do you play an RPG?" section. You know, the sort of thing that (almost) every RPG has and (almost) no one reads.

I had a thought that if there is a short guide to this already out, I'd talk to the authors about licensing in and simply refer my readers there. Any thoughts? I've thought this was a good idea for a long time since the people who'd look at my game are most likely going to not be new to RPGs but also I want to offer something to those folks that are. So any thoughts or suggestions?

I concur with payn, role playing games have vastly expanded what they are and potentially include, and if you are vibing to rp your Fabio-cover-romance-story-action-flick-with-80s-motifs RPG, one likely exists!

Define what your RPG is, and what its peculiar aims and designs are.

Also, I would strongly consider demonstration examples of in-game situations in the text. When clearly written, these are a godsend.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Has one ever wondered why boardgames don't go out of their way to explain what boardgames are in every rulebook? Thats a rhetorical question, as they don't because people understand that common knowledge.

Hence the general advice that this kind of page space is better spent defining the object of your specific game.

Yeah, though I would observe that boards themselves do a LOT of work there. I mean, also, your average board game is super simple, mechanically, compared to any RPG. More complex board games, lets say something similar in complexity of rules to D&D like maybe Avalon Hill's classic game "D-Day" which has roughly 20 pages of fairly small text rules, that game DOES spell out exactly what it is, in extremely specific and precise detail! It describes the nature and attributes of the board, how to move things around on the board, what the board represents (France in 1944 and a little bit of Germany and the Low Countries), etc. It describes the process of taking turns, who decides what, etc. You could read that text, with no prior experience of board games whatsoever, and play D-Day.

Now, that doesn't mean RPGs should be doing the same thing, I dunno. I think the market is probably the decider there more than anything.

 

[gorice]

Since this has turned into a general design advice thread: follow these dicta exactly.

(1) Ignore what randos on the internet tell you. 90% of advice is unhelpful (mine is in that other 10%, obviously).

(2) Get to a scrappy playable prototype as quickly as possible, and play it. Don't just write up some big document -- that way lies peril.

(3) Playtest and iterate, even if you're only playing by yourself.

 

[soviet]

If your game does not require a bespoke 'jesus h christ, how do I play this crazy thing?' explanation, it may be a sign that your game does not need to be published.

 

[SteveC]

If your game does not require a bespoke 'jesus h christ, how do I play this crazy thing?' explanation, it may be a sign that your game does not need to be published.

I have to say that's an interesting perspective. I've read a lot of great RPGs in the last few years. I don't think really any of them needed a "how do you play RPGs". And yet they all had them. And, masochist that I am, I read them. Some of them were interesting because they told me what the designers thought was important to point out to people out of the gate. Too many of them told me we were going to do "let's pretend with rules."

 

[pemerton]

Too many of them told me we were going to do "let's pretend with rules."

That's pretty useless!

You've probably already thought this through, but I'll post it anyway: I think the most important thing is to explain what the players are meant to do, and what the GM is meant to do. (I'm assuming your RPG has that mainstream sort of allocation of participant roles.) Avoid euphemism and contradiction. You'll then already be ahead of a lot of those "how to play this RPG" texts!

 

[SteveC]

You've probably already thought this through, but I'll post it anyway: I think the most important thing is to explain what the players are meant to do, and what the GM is meant to do. (I'm assuming your RPG has that mainstream sort of allocation of participant roles.) Avoid euphemism and contradiction. You'll then already be ahead of a lot of those "how to play this RPG" texts!

That's a really good point. I have a section that I model after the Bobs in Office Space (is that too ancient a reference, I wonder?). You talk about "What you do around here."

Session zero has you establish what the group actually starts doing. The game is actually about a crisis that occurs in the world and what you do about it, but things don't start off that way. So you might be family members, work at a business, be part of an acting troupe or something entirely else that the group comes up with together.

And as you're creating characters you rate them for the virtue or flaw that's important to them (think Ultima, an even older reference...) The crisis will be based in opposition to what the group's most common virtue or flaw is.

So you start the game deciding what you do. You know there's going to be a crisis of world shaking proportions, and you figure out what that is about by making it opposed to what you believe in the game.

And that introductory section lists the important principles that are a part of the world that I've worked really hard to make sure it actually works with in terms of rules.

 

[pemerton]

That's a really good point. I have a section that I model after the Bobs in Office Space (is that too ancient a reference, I wonder?). You talk about "What you do around here."

Do the rules/advice make it reasonably clear who has the job of framing scenes/situations, establishing what is at stake, determining how players' declared actions for their PCs are resolved and how that feeds into the next framing, etc?

I think this is something which is often missing, even in an otherwise good RPGs (eg Cthulhu Dark is great, but I had to bring in some principles and methods of my own to work out how to do the things I've just described).

 

[aramis erak]

Well, I think the dictionary comparison is weak given its explicit purpose as an educational tool, and RPGs in the 80s were only 7 years out from the genesis of the hobby as we know it.

Arneson's testimony in a deposition in Arneson v. TSR makes mention of Educational Roleplaying in 1962 (10th grade) and 5th grade (1957?)... and how TTRPG is in fact related but not the same.
Apparently, Gygax was trying to refute Arneson's credit by making RPGs as hobby a non-invention...
Gygax's lawyer definitely tried to draw that line... and Arneson distinctly and clearly explained the differences and changes between the use as a tool for teachers and a game...

Chances are, given the state of the hobby, unless you know your book is going to be available on a shelf at Walmart or Target, anybody picking it up already understands what RPGs are in the broad strokes.

But even then, its probably still wise to spend these pages contextualizing that explanation to the game rather than trying to speak broadly about the hobby before you introduce your game.

There's often a chance of a novice or even non-gamer finding and reading RPG books/PDFs ...

Plus, the Satanic Panic wouldn't have been prevented by the inclusion of these sections anyway because that assumes the people driving those panics could read. In 2024, over half of Americans are barely literate, and half of them are functionally illiterate.

I'm curious where you're getting those numbers; I know that almost every student I've had in grade 6 was literate, and all of them had parents who were literate - most of them in 2+ languages.
The few who weren't were all Self-Contained Classroom Special Education students... kids who will likely never live on their own, and several of whom barely speak... in a given school of 400-500 in 7 grades, the SCCSES are typically 3-12 students, of 6 of those 7 grades. (special ed preschool and kindergarden were centralized in my district, while K-6 was the standard for most elementaries; when I left, the district was migrating to a K-5 model, with 6th at middle-school.)
Now, the level of literacy varied ... from 4th grade level to college level in students of Grade 6...

I'd be surprised if this wasn't worse in the 80s despite a cultural memory otherwise.

1979 is the US historic low illiteracy rate: 0.6%. Yeah, that means 994 of 1000 were literate in at least one language, most often English or Spanish.
The 2019 report, which shows levels... but only for English. Functionally illiterate in English is below "literacy level 1" and is a mere 8.1%... considerably worse than 1979, but the 1979 data is language inspecific. I suspect a large portion of the 20% with low or no English literacy are literate in another language, often Spanish. In Alaska, the few functionally English illiterate folk I've met were almost always literate in another language... Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, or Tagalog.

Refs:

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf

National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - 120 Years of Literacy

Presents information from 1869-70-the date of the first Office of Education report-to the late 1970s on. The creation of the Federal Department of Education in 1867 highlighted the importance of education.

nces.ed.gov

https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/literacy_hc.pdf