Thinking About the Purpose of Mechanics from a Neo-Trad Perspective

[clearstream]

D&D (5e), in my experience, is built for tactical combat, and pretty much punts on everything else, including in terms of play time devoted to non-combat activities.

Wouldn't that mean, by the premises of this thread, that 5e is ideal for everything else?!

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Wouldn't that mean, by the premises of this thread, that 5e is ideal for everything else?!

Only if combat is the only thing that needs rules, a big part of my transition to PF2e, was how excited I was for more robust exploration and downtime stuff. One experience I had in my 4e days, and then continued into 5e (but with much worse combat, so it became egregious) was that our dungeons always felt anemic compared to the fantasy of these elaborate complexes with secrets and stuff-- the rules didn't do enough to simulate the feeling of engaging with the dungeon as an activity. But its also conceivable that there are games that overdesign dungeon crawling for my tastes, or games where the premise doesn't invite dungeon crawling (Lancer Battlegroup comes to mind, which is essentially just character drama and fleet battles, so combat + freeform roleplaying + simple out-of-combat resolution, is just fine.)

 

[Emberashh]

Reading through this topic, I feel compelled to say yet again, perhaps in a less abrasive way, that I simply don't find this sort of theory crafting, as in stuff like Six Cultures, particularly valuable from a design perspective.

It attempts to categorize and desseminate across players a bunch of emergent game states that have resulted out of games that are called RPGs, and thats fine, it really is, but the problem is that it then results in conversations like this one, where its all high concept jargon-laden cross-talk that doesn't result in much thats practical to design with.

RPGs in general, even on the lightest end, are more complex than a lot of games, but that doesn't mean developing them is necessarily complex, nor that it has to be. Theres value in simplifying things so we can examine them better.

Thats not to say that these ephemeral concepts that so much RPG theory focuses on isn't valuable at all, but more that there's something more fundamental thats, in my opinion, more than a little neglected in comparison.

People have disagreed for various reasons, but thats whats core to my noting that RPGs as we know them today (the earliest possible examples are debatable) are, fundamentally, a greatly elaborated hybrid of an improv game and at least one form of playstyle reinforcement game, usually two.

Now what do those terms mean?

Well improv game as I use it just refers to the collective mechanistic patterns that allow for Improvisational scene management as an interactive gameplay (aka feedback) loop. Players take "Actions" to add to a given scene, and other players respond in kind through different mechanisms like Yes, And, and collectively this produces a shared, imagined reality, which effectively is a gameworld.

In colloquial Improv, this gameworld is simplistic and only serves to contextualize the player's Actions temporarily, typically only for as long as a single "Scene".

But you can step the Improv game up in complexity; narrative improv provides for a much more complex and persistent gameworld, and naturally the conclusion of that is full blown Roleplay, where the shared gameworld is incredibly complex and persists even across entire Sessions of gameplay rather than just a group of Scenes.

The gameworld itself, meanwhile, comprises of all introduced elements by the Players, from the personalities they take on on down to the nitty gritty of internal logic or even physics.

The thing about RPGs as we know them, is that the Players in the improv game aren't just what we colloquially recognize as RPG players. The GM is a Player in this sense, as is the Rules system itself, which includes any and all info thats introduced to the gameworld by the game's overall designers.

All three collectively provide the foundation of the RPG gameworld and collectively manage it from scene to scene. Traditionally in RPGs, this management was strictly codified along specific Player roles (ie players only manage their characters, GMs everything else), but exceptions existed, and unfortunately for quite a long time (and, I'd argue, still today) the share of that management on part of the Rules system was ignored, denied, or otherwise neglected, which is a really big problem.

Why its a big problem is simple: the vast bulk of RPGs heavily rely on the Improv game as the core gameplay loop, but don't actually teach how to engage with it, instead relying on oral traditions and in-group onboarding.

While one can plausibly forgive the great surplus of lightweight games for not spending page counts on the relatively complex topic of how to roleplay, many games spend hundreds if not thousands of pages on so much that isn't always all that relevant.

The other parts of RPGs are a mechanistic pattern called playstyle reinforcement. What Actions a given Player takes compel specific feedback that's designed to reinforce the choice that was made, in addition to whatever standard effect it introduces mechanically. (

This can also be called choices and consequences, and this typically manifests in two ways.

The first way it manifests comes organically out of the improv game; the mechanisms involved are reinforcing in nature, as what Players introduce compels other Players to accept and modify (or some variation) it, and in turn the original Player is compelled to do the same to them, and it continues in this fashion until the scene resolves. In video games, this often has to come through prewritten elements rather than spontaneous creation, though they are starting to catch up on that.

The second way though is traditionally through character building, where different traits are collected and applied to a given "Entity" that serves as the Player's proxy in the gameworld, and the choices made between these traits, especially over a long period, reinforce the choices the Player makes.

While others have also expressed disagreement with this, the problem I see in not embracing the idea is that by refusing to do so, we miss what makes games like DND or Pathfinder or Gurps click for their audience over that of games like FATE or BITD, and, for that matter, vice versa.

But beyond that, the things that we see discussed in this topic, these complex and ephemeral things that are used to try and explain these games, are virtually all emergent from a combination of these base mechanisms and the overall "aesthetics" of the game.

Aesthetics here is defined as the overall effect of a given mechanism in terms of gamefeel (what feedback feels like to engage with), thematics (what purpose that feedback serves contextually), and player perception (what they intuitively expect and can understand about the mechanism and its feedback).

Getting all three of these as close to identical as possible is key to immersion, incidentally. (Immersion here referring to the capability of the game to induce a flow state; challenge and/or realism focused games are often a shortcut to getting the aesthetics right in this regard, as both compel the design towards making these elements identical)

And as such, when we want to examine a given design problem, where we want to figure out how to produce the kind of experience we want the game to have, we can leverage the simplicity to find viable solutions.

So much of the classic problems of RPGs have pretty much exact parallels to the classic problems of colloquial Improv, which makes sense after all, if one embraces that they're fundamentally run off the same mechanisms. A GM railroading players for example is a clear instance of blocking, which is an improv issue that results when the a Player breaks the feedback loop.

(Spoiler warning, Im now going to cover some specific opinions I have to illustrate my point, so lets be clear and delineate between the above, which is me trying to be objective, and the below, which is me being opinionated)

The issue for blocking, and the idea that both GM and Rules are Players, ties into my thoughts on many kinds of Narrative game design, as we see in games like ApocWorld, BITD, and others.

Because there's an apparent refusal, or at least general ignorance, of the idea of the Rules being a Player, these games very often run into a problem of blocking, and people understandably bounce off of them when it happens. In service of making a narrative occur, the Rules don't respect the mechanisms involved in the improv game, and so if you follow the improv game as those mechanisms provide for, you're eventually going to run into the loop breaking when the Rules deny you those mechanisms.

And this isn't an issue of Constraints, mind. Constraints are a useful and valid form of feedback. Its an aesthetic issue; one of either gamefeel, thematics, or player perception is being violated (as in, done poorly), and oftentimes the worst offenders are violating all three.

Thats why I believe I was able to grok and get into Ironsworn and yet have bounced off pretty much every other game in its heritage. Ironsworn handily smooths over those aesthetic issues because, as a solo oriented game, it fundamentally can't rely on the heavily segregated Player roles that other games can, and by doing so it removes a lot of the capability of the Rules to cause blocking. There's still some (tl;dr higher stat arrays fixes the rest), but its overall clean.

And naturally, it has to be said non-narrative games aren't intrinsically immune from doing the same thing. Its been my observation that pretty much every RPG does, and that's my theory for why Rule 0 is so prevalent in the hobby. There's an underlying issue that isn't being resolved by designers, because they don't or don't want to recognize what these games are made of on a fundamental level, and thus their audiences have increasingly relied on fiat modification to eliminate the problem.

As a matter of fact, I think its rather apropos given all this that the only two games I can really stand playing anymore are DCC and Ironsworn, because they're both games I didn't really have to modify just to reach playability; I played Ironsworn for about a year before I tried fixing the stat problem, and it only got better after I did. A relatively minor change that didn't require extensive modding to pull off is a pretty forgivable ask, and thats proven as I continue to play today, and still don't feel compelled to homebrew anything into it (though that'll change soon enough as I hijack it for my own game design)

Meanwhile, while the DCC I play is greatly modified (I hijacked it to testbed my own game design), I can easily shift back into its original form and its still just as riveting. Short of new content, I've never once felt compelled to change anything about how DCC works, other than the often maligned funky dice.

I don't personally mind the dice, but not everyones going to buy them just for one game, and especially not when they aren't sold on the game to begin with. So adjusting the game to use a standard set is the most I've ever done.

 

[clearstream]

Only if combat is the only thing that needs rules...

That was very much my thought. It seems tricky though, to picture that there will be some core activity that needs rules while also not being a kind of activity falling within a character concept. Do you feel that this has the practical implication that groups preferencing this mode should start with their character concepts, and then choose rule set?

...a big part of my transition to PF2e, was how excited I was for more robust exploration and downtime stuff.

This represents a risk or at least problem to solve of the approach: what counts as needed core rules? They mustn't injure character concepts, and they must cover activities we expect to do often or that will be crucial enough to our play. Say I want to play a scout of some sort and the chosen "robust exploration" rules don't map to my take on exploration? The rules give way, right?

 

[kenada]

Because there's an apparent refusal, or at least general ignorance, of the idea of the Rules being a Player, these games very often run into a problem of blocking, and people understandably bounce off of them when it happens. In service of making a narrative occur, the Rules don't respect the mechanisms involved in the improv game, and so if you follow the improv game as those mechanisms provide for, you're eventually going to run into the loop breaking when the Rules deny you those mechanisms.

Including the rules as a player seems like a stretch. I am having trouble with it because common definitions of game definite it as an activity where players act in accordance to rules. The issue with calling rules a player in that game is they do not operate in accordance to themselves because there’s nothing binding them to do so. The players can agree to bind themselves, but rules are not capable of that (being an idea rather than a person).

What you’ve identified seems to be what Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Adams and Dormans refers to as social interaction mechanics. While I know you’re familiar with that work, allow me to explain for others: these are mechanics that govern how players interact with each other. Adams gives examples such as gift-giving mechanics in a video game that allow players to reward each other and also mentions board games, which I would take to mean things like how bids are handled in a game with auctions (etc).

Adams suggests “play acting” for tabletop RPGs as their social interaction mechanics, but I don’t think that’s sufficient. The book’s understanding of tabletop RPGs overall has some blind spots. This is a conversation we’ve had before, so I’m not going to rehash it here. However, just like continuous mechanics tend to be something that only video games can do, I’d argue that the various formulations of social interaction mechanics in tabletop RPGs occupy a similar space in game design (though obviously not strictly limited to them).

You’ve identified a few key things here.

The first is that there are different social interaction mechanics. It’s not stated explicitly, but it is an implication of the problem you identified. In that situation, players are expecting one set of social interaction mechanics (what you would call “improv play”) but are getting a different set (what I would call “PbtA” for lack of a better name). I would also identify “Kriegspiel/Braunstein” (as inspired Arneson to do his Blackmoor campaign) as another one, but I would not limit the scope of social interaction mechanics to just those three.

I’m more of a splitter than a lumper, so while they may viewed as instances of a general improvisational pattern (including but distinct from “improv play”, which would be an instance of the pattern), I find more value in treating them as separate in general. I think that helps avoid implications of legitimacy while allowing for a potentially larger field of mechanics to be considered and compared. That’s particularly important in RPG discourse where particular patterns or style play are treated as normative and others as deviant (or illegitimate).

The other issue you identify correctly is how common it is for games to rely on oral traditions and in-group onboarding to promulgate their social interaction mechanics. You mention “improv play”, but that is but one possible set of social interaction mechanics. While it’s obviously problematic for learning a game if your only resource is the game’s text, I think a bigger issue is it serves as a natural limiter on what social interaction mechanics games can have. People will do what they know, and if the are only taught one set (such as “improv play”), that’s all they’ll do or expect to do, resulting in friction when trying games with different mechanics.

What I’m trying to set up here is looking at differences in social interaction mechanics as similar to differences between other kinds of mechanics. The friction people experience trying different games comes from an expectation that parts of the game they play are taught, and having learned those parts already, dissonance follows when a new game doesn’t work like they expect. It would be like being taught that every takes turns after rolling initiative once at the start of combat, and then having trouble when a game doesn’t use initiative or handles it differently (e.g., side-based initiative, making certain decisions at the start of the round, etc).

⁂​

As an aside, I encountered a situation with initiative in my homebrew system. Combat starts with an equip phase where you declare which items are equiped in your hands (or that you have “equipped” certain abilities such as spellcasting). During the round, you can’t change the item you have equipped short of dropping it. If you want to swap to a new item, you have to wait for the next equip phase. If you want to get something out of your pack, you equip your pack, then you use your action to swap items between it and your inventory grid, making them available in the next equip phase. I do this for a few reasons.

It forces a specific cadence in combat. If you don’t pick the right thing or anticipate correctly, it makes you naturally off guard. You don’t have the tools you need, and the best you can do is retreat or reposition. It also provides a natural trigger for combat. If someone draws a weapon, they are instigating an equip phase, so then they roll initiative (along with any other PCs who performed an equip phase, which the referee should prompt to see if who is joining the battle). It also allows me to do monster telegraphs. The PCs in my game once fought a gibbering mouther. All it took was saying, “the monster equips gibbering,” to instill fear in my players.

Anyway, one of my players has been confused by how this works. He made a mistake and wanted to change his equipment during a round, which you can’t do. That’s not how things work. He’s not wrong or bad for making a mistake and being confused, but it’s also not bad that my homebrew system is different. His issue came from seeing the game as a D&D-like, which is fair, but also expecting initiative to be handled in a traditional way (though as noted here, having to commit to certain actions at the start of the round is not unprecedented in D&D).

 

[Emberashh]

Including the rules as a player seems like a stretch. I am having trouble with it because common definitions of game definite it as an activity where players act in accordance to rules.

Its unintuitive but it makes sense contextually. It we define the Players in improv as being any "entity" that contributes to the overall reality of a given scene, the non-Improv Rules overwhelmingly fit that distinction alongside the colloquial Player role and the GM role. The overall structure of the game is tied to the improv mechanisms, and the additional Rules act as a Player within those mechanisms. (As such, solutions come easier if we look at certain problems as certain rules contradicting each other and not following either a heirarchical or equitable structure, either allowing improv to supercede or designing both to blend together, respectively)

Thats part of the logic in distinguishing most RPGs as hybrids. For comparison, I'd say that FKR much of the time is a non-hybrid example, being basically just a slightly elaborated on form of pure roleplaying.

The issue with calling rules a player in that game is they do not operate in accordance to themselves because there’s nothing binding them to do so. The players can agree to bind themselves, but rules are not capable of that (being an idea rather than a person).

Thats where the game designer comes in. The non-improv rules themselves have to be designed to cooperate with the base feedback loop.

An example of that I can point to is the Oracle system in my Exploration mechanics. The rules define different prompts to be Interpreted (improv mechanic), and provides mechanisms to determine when they're given to the colloquial Player.

Improv mechanisms then take over from there. You can interpret the Oracle however you like, up to and including substituting in your own ideas, and this kickstarts the Improv loop as all three Players (GM, cPlayers, and the Rules) provide feedback and you to them in turn, over and over until the scene is resolved.

This keeps the rules non-contradictory as they have no capability to cause blocking or otherwise break the feedback loop (short of instances where the improv leads to someone getting killed, but thats an exception). GMs and cPlayers absolutely still could, but you can't design your way around that. Either the humans cooperate or they don't.

Adams suggests “play acting” for tabletop RPGs as their social interaction mechanics, but I don’t think that’s sufficient.

Id agree, as improv mechanisms go well beyond covering how two or more people interact. Cooperative reality management and all that isn't limited to just talking.

The first is that there are different social interaction mechanics. It’s not stated explicitly, but it is an implication of the problem you identified. In that situation, players are expecting one set of social interaction mechanics (what you would call “improv play”) but are getting a different set (what I would call “PbtA” for lack of a better name). I would also identify “Kriegspiel/Braunstein” (as inspired Arneson to do his Blackmoor campaign) as another one, but I would not limit the scope of social interaction mechanics to just those three.

This I'd not agree with at all, however.

What I assume you're referring to as PBTA is still just the higher level hybrid of improv play with other mechanisms.

And Braunstein in particular is rooted in the same improv mechanisms, even if Wesley and eventually Arneson didn't realize that's what they were doing. Braunstein could be very literally described as a session of freeform narrative improv with ~20 something Players, including Wesley and Arneson.

You mention “improv play”, but that is but one possible set of social interaction mechanics. While it’s obviously problematic for learning a game if your only resource is the game’s text, I think a bigger issue is it serves as a natural limiter on what social interaction mechanics games can have. People will do what they know, and if the are only taught one set (such as “improv play”), that’s all they’ll do or expect to do, resulting in friction when trying games with different mechanics.

The issue is that there isn't any alternatives. Its all improv all the way down, and if it isn't, it isn't going to resemble anything we recognize as an (TT)RPG.

That is the inherent problem with pitching RPGs in general as unlimited play experiences, the vast bulk of which do not actually shy away from embracing that idea, even when it isn't actually true.

What I’m trying to set up here is looking at differences in social interaction mechanics as similar to differences between other kinds of mechanics. The friction people experience trying different games comes from an expectation that parts of the game they play are taught, and having learned those parts already, dissonance follows when a new game doesn’t work like they expect. It would be like being taught that every takes turns after rolling initiative once at the start of combat, and then having trouble when a game doesn’t use initiative or handles it differently (e.g., side-based initiative, making certain decisions at the start of the round, etc).

I think part of the disagreement here is mostly that we don't have precise enough of a shared language, if you will.

From my perspective, you're just repeating my overall point back to me but its as though you disagree.

I don't believe we do, which I'd figure is partly why we can continue to have these talks and not have them degenerate into uh, red text lol.

 

[kenada]

Its unintuitive but it makes sense contextually. It we define the Players in improv as being any "entity" that contributes to the overall reality of a given scene, the non-Improv Rules overwhelmingly fit that distinction alongside the colloquial Player role and the GM role. The overall structure of the game is tied to the improv mechanisms, and the additional Rules act as a Player within those mechanisms. (As such, solutions come easier if we look at certain problems as certain rules contradicting each other and not following either a heirarchical or equitable structure, either allowing improv to supercede or designing both to blend together, respectively)

Thats part of the logic in distinguishing most RPGs as hybrids. For comparison, I'd say that FKR much of the time is a non-hybrid example, being basically just a slightly elaborated on form of pure roleplaying.



Thats where the game designer comes in. The non-improv rules themselves have to be designed to cooperate with the base feedback loop.

An example of that I can point to is the Oracle system in my Exploration mechanics. The rules define different prompts to be Interpreted (improv mechanic), and provides mechanisms to determine when they're given to the colloquial Player.

Improv mechanisms then take over from there. You can interpret the Oracle however you like, up to and including substituting in your own ideas, and this kickstarts the Improv loop as all three Players (GM, cPlayers, and the Rules) provide feedback and you to them in turn, over and over until the scene is resolved.

This keeps the rules non-contradictory as they have no capability to cause blocking or otherwise break the feedback loop (short of instances where the improv leads to someone getting killed, but thats an exception). GMs and cPlayers absolutely still could, but you can't design your way around that. Either the humans cooperate or they don't.


Id agree, as improv mechanisms go well beyond covering how two or more people interact. Cooperative reality management and all that isn't limited to just talking.


This I'd not agree with at all, however.

What I assume you're referring to as PBTA is still just the higher level hybrid of improv play with other mechanisms.

And Braunstein in particular is rooted in the same improv mechanisms, even if Wesley and eventually Arneson didn't realize that's what they were doing. Braunstein could be very literally described as a session of freeform narrative improv with ~20 something Players, including Wesley and Arneson.



The issue is that there isn't any alternatives. Its all improv all the way down, and if it isn't, it isn't going to resemble anything we recognize as an (TT)RPG.

That is the inherent problem with pitching RPGs in general as unlimited play experiences, the vast bulk of which do not actually shy away from embracing that idea, even when it isn't actually true.



I think part of the disagreement here is mostly that we don't have precise enough of a shared language, if you will.

From my perspective, you're just repeating my overall point back to me but its as though you disagree.

I don't believe we do, which I'd figure is partly why we can continue to have these talks and not have them degenerate into uh, red text lol.

I do disagree. I don’t accept that RPGing is just improvisational theater. Improvisational theater is a performing art. It does not have a monopoly on improvisation (or is jazz also improv?) nor it a fact of nature. Some RPG discourse has adopted the language of improv, but it doesn’t follow that RPGs are therefore improv. That “player” needs to be defined in such an unintuitive way to protect the improv aspect from the rules of the game should suggest something isn’t right.

Take the example I quoted in my reply: “Because there's an apparent refusal, or at least general ignorance, of the idea of the Rules being a Player, these games very often run into a problem of blocking, and people understandably bounce off of them when it happens. In service of making a narrative occur, the Rules don't respect the mechanisms involved in the improv game, and so if you follow the improv game as those mechanisms provide for, you're eventually going to run into the loop breaking when the Rules deny you those mechanisms.”

There are two ideas being proposed:

• The designers are ignorant of or hostile to (through apparent refusal) the what RPGs are, which is that they are a form of improvisational theater and bound to the rules of such (and their mistake as designers was in failing to understand how their own rules sit in relation to that); or
• The designers intend a different set of social interaction mechanics.

The latter seems more instrumentally useful to me, specifically looking at different play loops and distributions of authority as different social interaction mechanics. What it doesn’t do is allow the impugnment of designers nor establish a right or wrong way to design games, but those should be non-goals. It’s not about establishing a categorical model of putting games into various buckets or insisting they conform in some way.

When I look at design and theory, I want tools that help me solve problems and understand the game I’m making. There are a lot of ideas out there. Some are more useful than others. These discussions have also been useful in helping me explore ideas and gain exposure to new resources (such as the book by Adams you introduced). However, if we’re at an impasse, maybe there’s not more fruitful discussion of this topic to be had.

 

[Shardstone]

Reading through this topic, I feel compelled to say yet again, perhaps in a less abrasive way, that I simply don't find this sort of theory crafting, as in stuff like Six Cultures, particularly valuable from a design perspective.

It attempts to categorize and desseminate across players a bunch of emergent game states that have resulted out of games that are called RPGs, and thats fine, it really is, but the problem is that it then results in conversations like this one, where its all high concept jargon-laden cross-talk that doesn't result in much thats practical to design with.

RPGs in general, even on the lightest end, are more complex than a lot of games, but that doesn't mean developing them is necessarily complex, nor that it has to be. Theres value in simplifying things so we can examine them better.

Thats not to say that these ephemeral concepts that so much RPG theory focuses on isn't valuable at all, but more that there's something more fundamental thats, in my opinion, more than a little neglected in comparison.

People have disagreed for various reasons, but thats whats core to my noting that RPGs as we know them today (the earliest possible examples are debatable) are, fundamentally, a greatly elaborated hybrid of an improv game and at least one form of playstyle reinforcement game, usually two.

Now what do those terms mean?

Well improv game as I use it just refers to the collective mechanistic patterns that allow for Improvisational scene management as an interactive gameplay (aka feedback) loop. Players take "Actions" to add to a given scene, and other players respond in kind through different mechanisms like Yes, And, and collectively this produces a shared, imagined reality, which effectively is a gameworld.

In colloquial Improv, this gameworld is simplistic and only serves to contextualize the player's Actions temporarily, typically only for as long as a single "Scene".

But you can step the Improv game up in complexity; narrative improv provides for a much more complex and persistent gameworld, and naturally the conclusion of that is full blown Roleplay, where the shared gameworld is incredibly complex and persists even across entire Sessions of gameplay rather than just a group of Scenes.

The gameworld itself, meanwhile, comprises of all introduced elements by the Players, from the personalities they take on on down to the nitty gritty of internal logic or even physics.

The thing about RPGs as we know them, is that the Players in the improv game aren't just what we colloquially recognize as RPG players. The GM is a Player in this sense, as is the Rules system itself, which includes any and all info thats introduced to the gameworld by the game's overall designers.

All three collectively provide the foundation of the RPG gameworld and collectively manage it from scene to scene. Traditionally in RPGs, this management was strictly codified along specific Player roles (ie players only manage their characters, GMs everything else), but exceptions existed, and unfortunately for quite a long time (and, I'd argue, still today) the share of that management on part of the Rules system was ignored, denied, or otherwise neglected, which is a really big problem.

Why its a big problem is simple: the vast bulk of RPGs heavily rely on the Improv game as the core gameplay loop, but don't actually teach how to engage with it, instead relying on oral traditions and in-group onboarding.

While one can plausibly forgive the great surplus of lightweight games for not spending page counts on the relatively complex topic of how to roleplay, many games spend hundreds if not thousands of pages on so much that isn't always all that relevant.

The other parts of RPGs are a mechanistic pattern called playstyle reinforcement. What Actions a given Player takes compel specific feedback that's designed to reinforce the choice that was made, in addition to whatever standard effect it introduces mechanically. (

This can also be called choices and consequences, and this typically manifests in two ways.

The first way it manifests comes organically out of the improv game; the mechanisms involved are reinforcing in nature, as what Players introduce compels other Players to accept and modify (or some variation) it, and in turn the original Player is compelled to do the same to them, and it continues in this fashion until the scene resolves. In video games, this often has to come through prewritten elements rather than spontaneous creation, though they are starting to catch up on that.

The second way though is traditionally through character building, where different traits are collected and applied to a given "Entity" that serves as the Player's proxy in the gameworld, and the choices made between these traits, especially over a long period, reinforce the choices the Player makes.

While others have also expressed disagreement with this, the problem I see in not embracing the idea is that by refusing to do so, we miss what makes games like DND or Pathfinder or Gurps click for their audience over that of games like FATE or BITD, and, for that matter, vice versa.

But beyond that, the things that we see discussed in this topic, these complex and ephemeral things that are used to try and explain these games, are virtually all emergent from a combination of these base mechanisms and the overall "aesthetics" of the game.

Aesthetics here is defined as the overall effect of a given mechanism in terms of gamefeel (what feedback feels like to engage with), thematics (what purpose that feedback serves contextually), and player perception (what they intuitively expect and can understand about the mechanism and its feedback).

Getting all three of these as close to identical as possible is key to immersion, incidentally. (Immersion here referring to the capability of the game to induce a flow state; challenge and/or realism focused games are often a shortcut to getting the aesthetics right in this regard, as both compel the design towards making these elements identical)

And as such, when we want to examine a given design problem, where we want to figure out how to produce the kind of experience we want the game to have, we can leverage the simplicity to find viable solutions.

So much of the classic problems of RPGs have pretty much exact parallels to the classic problems of colloquial Improv, which makes sense after all, if one embraces that they're fundamentally run off the same mechanisms. A GM railroading players for example is a clear instance of blocking, which is an improv issue that results when the a Player breaks the feedback loop.

(Spoiler warning, Im now going to cover some specific opinions I have to illustrate my point, so lets be clear and delineate between the above, which is me trying to be objective, and the below, which is me being opinionated)

The issue for blocking, and the idea that both GM and Rules are Players, ties into my thoughts on many kinds of Narrative game design, as we see in games like ApocWorld, BITD, and others.

Because there's an apparent refusal, or at least general ignorance, of the idea of the Rules being a Player, these games very often run into a problem of blocking, and people understandably bounce off of them when it happens. In service of making a narrative occur, the Rules don't respect the mechanisms involved in the improv game, and so if you follow the improv game as those mechanisms provide for, you're eventually going to run into the loop breaking when the Rules deny you those mechanisms.

And this isn't an issue of Constraints, mind. Constraints are a useful and valid form of feedback. Its an aesthetic issue; one of either gamefeel, thematics, or player perception is being violated (as in, done poorly), and oftentimes the worst offenders are violating all three.

Thats why I believe I was able to grok and get into Ironsworn and yet have bounced off pretty much every other game in its heritage. Ironsworn handily smooths over those aesthetic issues because, as a solo oriented game, it fundamentally can't rely on the heavily segregated Player roles that other games can, and by doing so it removes a lot of the capability of the Rules to cause blocking. There's still some (tl;dr higher stat arrays fixes the rest), but its overall clean.

And naturally, it has to be said non-narrative games aren't intrinsically immune from doing the same thing. Its been my observation that pretty much every RPG does, and that's my theory for why Rule 0 is so prevalent in the hobby. There's an underlying issue that isn't being resolved by designers, because they don't or don't want to recognize what these games are made of on a fundamental level, and thus their audiences have increasingly relied on fiat modification to eliminate the problem.

As a matter of fact, I think its rather apropos given all this that the only two games I can really stand playing anymore are DCC and Ironsworn, because they're both games I didn't really have to modify just to reach playability; I played Ironsworn for about a year before I tried fixing the stat problem, and it only got better after I did. A relatively minor change that didn't require extensive modding to pull off is a pretty forgivable ask, and thats proven as I continue to play today, and still don't feel compelled to homebrew anything into it (though that'll change soon enough as I hijack it for my own game design)

Meanwhile, while the DCC I play is greatly modified (I hijacked it to testbed my own game design), I can easily shift back into its original form and its still just as riveting. Short of new content, I've never once felt compelled to change anything about how DCC works, other than the often maligned funky dice.

I don't personally mind the dice, but not everyones going to buy them just for one game, and especially not when they aren't sold on the game to begin with. So adjusting the game to use a standard set is the most I've ever done.

Your definition of improv game weirdly cuts out actual, real, non rp-related improv games.

 

[Emberashh]

I don’t accept that RPGing is just improvisational theater.

Thats pretty prejudicial, not to mention inaccurate to what I'm saying. English is a cruddy language but I'd hope we could recognize that just because the word "improv" has implications you don't like doesn't mean whats being said is wrong.

Improvisational theater is a performing art. It does not have a monopoly on improvisation (or is jazz also improv?) nor it a fact of nature. Some RPG discourse has adopted the language of improv, but it doesn’t follow that RPGs are therefore improv. That “player” needs to be defined in such an unintuitive way to protect the improv aspect from the rules of the game should suggest something isn’t right.

This suggests to me that you're letting your disdain for improv theater cloud your judgement. I've already defined what I'm saying more than once. Improv theater is an entirely separate kind of game from RPGs; that doesn't mean both aren't still improv games, as I defined them.

which is that they are a form of improvisational theater

Incorrect. I've explained this more than once.

The designers intend a different set of social interaction mechanics.

Also incorrect. Social interaction mechanics as defined by Adams aren't what improv mechanics are.

What it doesn’t do is allow the impugnment of designers nor establish a right or wrong way to design games, but those should be non-goals.

So the issue is that one feels compelled to resist the argument because I'm passing mild judgement, as though I'm not directly observing extremely common issues and utilizing a language and a theory that voices what that problem is, why its so common, and how it can be fixed.

Frankly, you're kind of illustrating the exact issue I'm pointing out. You don't like the implication of improv, and no matter what preemptive steps are taken to ensure clarity, the use of the word is just a step too far I suppose.

And honestly, I would say that's exactly what I'm pointing to when I say designers are refusing to recognize what these games are. You're too caught up in the cruddy imprecision of the English language leaving us with a lot of baggage in certain words.

Speaking for myself as an English major, I've long since just accepted that especially in the realms of theory, English just isn't going to always give us perfectly clean words to use for the things we mean.

But if we really need to drop the dirty, icky word "improv", how about reality management? Scene management?

Improv game is more precise than those, to be frank. Improv mechanisms were invented, or at least formalized, by what we colloquially recognize as improv games, so refusing to call a spade a spade because we think the word is icky is a waste of energy.

When I look at design and theory, I want tools that help me solve problems and understand the game I’m making.

Then you should be more open minded.

Your definition of improv game weirdly cuts out actual, real, non rp-related improv games.

Do you care to elaborate or?

 

[pemerton]

RPGing, in its canonical forms (ie the game that Arneson and Gygax invented, and the very many and varied successors to that game), involves imagination. The participants in the game imagine things together.

What is imagined includes, very importantly, characters - including certain characters who are the main "vehicle" whereby the player (non-GM) participants propose changes to the imagined state of affairs, by proposing that their characters perform actions.

Those characters are in a situation - some sort of circumstance that invites them to perform actions, and hence that invites their players to declare actions; and that provides context for those actions.

Very commonly, the characters and the situation are located within a broader setting. Managing the setting in play, including using it to derive/establish new situations, is typically the job of the GM participant. (Establishing the setting is often a group endeavour; and in some RPGs the player participants also have limited capacities to manage the setting, particular those parts of the setting that are closely connected to their characters.)

The various rules, including mechanical rules, and other expectations, that govern the ways in which declared actions are resolved, situations are progressed/transformed/resolved, the setting managed, etc, we can call system.

I don't see that it helps us understand RPGs to characterise the system as an "improv" one, as I think that will tend to elide some of what is distinctive about RPG systems - they take imagined stuff as their input, and produce constraints on or prompts to imagination as their output, but whether or not this is improvised will depend heavily on the system in question. Eg there is not much that is "improv"-like about reading and applying a Rolemaster critical result; whereas (say) a GM having to make a "move" in Apocalypse World, or having to establish a twist in Torchbearer, often will require making things up. But these are all instances of RPG systems.