IDW2: a Simple Theory of RPGs

“To be overtenacious in the midst of trifles is the mark of a mean understanding.”

The second-most important consideration for me as a relative bumpkin in a world of many developed theories of RPG play is that every attempt to explain what leads to fun or meaningful play is incomplete. You can play an RPG in the most inane way, in a way that seems boring or unagentic or that seems in theory utterly lame, and still nevertheless have wild success by almost any metric.

The most important consideration for a no-account like me in the world of RPG theories is that role-playing games are incredible. We are in awe of them and compelled to discuss them, what we think about them, and how they work. Discussion of theory is dangerous, because it is deadly poison, but it is tempting, because the poison is sweet and the body needs it.

So I would say that procedures matter, systems matter, worlds matter, and all those other things, but surely they can't matter so much that they explain the magic that happens when an orc stabs my guy in a devil shrine or my spouse pretends to be a sad spy consoling me as I pretend to be a sad data analyst who's just so tired of fighting Dracula night after night

While I am suspicious of RPG theory, I am doubly suspicious of literary analysis as a tool for understanding RPGs. It's hard enough to use literary analysis to understand an author. The writer of a gaming text is only a fraction of the authorial power promised by the game they write. Sometimes we spend a lot of time and words constructing a way of seeing some topic and don't even claim that this way of seeing is insightful or true.

I kind of get the impression that RPG theory discourse is some interminable battleground on websites like the Twitter, and I'm not trying to wade into that. I write because these ideas take a hold of me sometimes and I think it's good to try to express them well. Have you noticed that many people might in the moment seem rude or dismissive online, but as soon as you see them writing about something else, or talking on a podcast, or just interact with them in the real world they almost always show themselves to be decent, humble, and kind folks, allowed to express themselves in a situation where context, nonverbals, and tone are more easily sussed?

I Don't Want to Name My Theoretical Framework

(IDW2 Theory for short.)

I think of roleplaying games as being

1. a special kind of conversation
2. where you pretend
3. and are playing a game

When you study communication in university, this is one of the charts they show you. The greatest simplification is to pretend that communication is one-way, when in truth it involves everyone sending messages simultaniously.

Conversation: RPGs involve multiple people transmitting information to each other, to put it like an alien might. I assume this point is pretty obvious and doesn't need explanation, except that to say I consider "Solo RPGs" to be their own kind of thing and won't really write about them in this blog post. One important point is that anything that is true of conversations is true of RPGs. If you google "elements of a conversation", all of those elements are present in your RPG. Just as changing the format and structure of a conversation can have an effect on it, so too can it have an effect on an RPG.

Pretend: This is what I think of as the active ingredient. You're either pretending to be someone or do something, or you're refereeing someone else's pretend. It's in pretending that you get to express something, better position yourself to imagine or understand something, or change your relationship to your goals in the game. Maybe playing chess can teach you some instrumental virtues, but pretending to be someone else is an act of empathy, and of completion of the human heart. Even if you treat the character you're playing as a simple pawn, you're still pretending to do things (like disarming a bear trap or getting eaten by dogs), and that's the detail that separates Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition from Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures Game.

Game: I'm not going to define what a game is, but you know what I mean. I guess I'm excluding things like improv games, even though they are conversation/pretending games. A game with the kind of structure that lets it connect with the pretending. Even a very story-focused rules-light situation or a FKR campaign tends to feature goals or (goal-making) and intelligent attempts to achieve those goals.

If we're going to be generous and say I've sufficiently defined a role-playing game, the fair test is to ask "so what?", to see if we can use my definition to better understand what leads to fun or meaningful play, the thing I claimed other RPG theories failed to do. First, I'll try to explain in a humble way, as though I was naive to my own values and preferences in role-playing games. Then, I will try to explain how I think about this definition in light of the kinds of games I prefer.

(If I do manage to do better than my more learned fellow theoreticians, notice that it's just because I'm putting uninteresting and uncontroversial ideas at the center of my theory. In general, they are better writers and on this topic better thinkers, and whenever I discuss RPG theory with others I feel like I'm badly misunderstanding what they're trying to tell me.)

Naive Explanation of What Leads to Fun or Meaningful Play

Conversations, pretendings, and games are usually less fun when the participants aren't on the same page for the context of the activity. If one person wants to have a serious conversation and their interlocutor wants to have a laid-back one, neither will be happy. Meaningful conversations require the participants to engage with each other in honest and open ways, and to be in some way vulnerable to what is said. You often can't make something meaningful with effort alone. Artistry or insight might play a role. Sometimes, you just can't make meaningfulness happen and the best thing to do is enjoy the time spent. We can prepare endlessly for a conversation but it cannot guarantee any kind of outcome. There is such a thing as being a good conversationalist, or a good improviser, or a good game-player, but there's always collaboration of some sort in a conversation or a scene. Discussion, imagining, and play can all be inherently enjoyable on their own. There is nothing truly mysterious about why we enjoy role-playing games, except for the broad mystery of why humans enjoy anything at all.

Values-Laden Explanation of What Leads to Fun or Meaningful Play

"Okay wise guy," you may be are saying, "but that's just a string of random truisms, unhelpful to anyone." I beg you, please bear with me. While sometimes inane wisdoms bear repeating, I will now stake some more contentious claims. 

• RPGs like a referee: There's often a big subjective difference in the pretending part of RPGs and the playing part. Referees allow for that much-vaunted "tactical infinity" that so engages the mind while also imposing a restriction, as referees interpret those things the player asserts about the world, and can often decide if the assertion stands or not. You can call it "Tactical ∞ - x." In a DMless RPG about solving a mystery, the players can't be flatly wrong about their interpretation of events. In a DM'd RPG, maybe the DM has it all written out how a murder took place, and if the players come up with a hypothesis they may be right or wrong. That probably treats the mystery as a game with degrees of victory or failure. Different kinds of RPGs will set different activities as part of the pretending versus part of the game. In Brindlewood Bay, players pretend to solve a mystery, engaging in an act of creation together as they write an explanation of the clues they found. The fun isn't in the potential to be totally wrong; it's in other parts of the RPG. The presence and purview of a referee can define the RPG.
• Rules don't only elide: This is against what has been described as a "strong formation" of a stance, so it's unclear who, if anyone, believes it. By rule, we mean a game rule, the sort of thing written in a rulebook. This isn't the exact same thing as what I call a game in the conversation/pretend/game triplet, because a rulebook rule might instruct you to, for example, do some pretending, like in the Brindlewood Bay example. A rulebook rule can elicit a feeling of unease if it says "When you attempt to pick a lock, describe something horrible your character imagines might happen, then roll a die and try to meet or exceed your Lockpicking Number." If, like me as a younger man, a referee makes dungeons without any kind of wandering monster and then is convinced by a rulebook rule to add an encounter table to their dungeons, they might not be principally eliding the question of how and when PCs run into monsters so much as conjuring monsters out of the conviction the game might be somehow improved thereby. Rulebook rules can be a good scaffold to connect the things we pretend with the things we play in our conversation. They can help define new ways for these things to relate to each other.
• Bespoke Specific RPGs trump unmodified general RPGs: RPGs have weirdly hitched together a conversation, a pretending, and a game. Tweaking one part reflects on the others, and it will probably make for a more enjoyable game if they have a pleasing assonance (or maybe some intentional dissonance?) If you just want to play another D&D 5e campaign, more power to you, but if the setting of the game world is an ill fit for some of the character options, say, or if everyone playing really digs some house rule, it's a good idea to make changes that reflect that. Poetry, the careful selection and ordering of words, is an art. It doesn't have total dominion-- many well-loved games have inelegant terms like "primary attribute" that could be more artfully expressed. But changing the conversation, the pretending, or the game, will change the other parts. The effect of tinkering with an RPG to give it more evocative and fitting features may be subtle, but if you perversely work to make an RPG less evocative and fit your setting less well, the effect is clear.
• In-world coherence is not king: Weird Writer, a FKR umpire, writes that in FKR play "Abstraction that would contradict or supersede in-world logic is minimal and ideally absent". There's nothing wrong with that, but my framework would claim that abstraction which contradicts in-world logic is just fine, as long as it doesn't ruin the game sector of the RPG. Consider the bashful approach many have to the way HP is treated. For some DMs, it doesn't "make sense" that a high-level fighter can get stabbed many extra times with a sword, and they choose to clarify that HP isn not a measure of how much literal damage your body can take but perhaps a representation of your luck, fighting spirit, don't-get-hittedness, or some other factor. I note sympathetically that some of those DMs, in the excitement of describing a good attack roll in a combat, let themselves get carried away and narrate a big, juicy strike that goes against some of their earlier HP philosophy. My contention is that this is perfectly fine. Many abstractions that contradict in-world logic if you think about them are actually the best or most natural abstractions, especially if you don't think too much about them. Maybe there's some undiscovered, elegant solution to common contradictions of this type, but I reckon that there's a good reason we keep coming back to some of them. It's good food and good for you.

Now that I've staked some more arguable positions, can my theory explain why other people, smart folks all, might think differently? Surely they too are having meaningful game experiences that break with my theory? Yes. While I think my theory explains why RPGs like a referee, it doesn't preclude games that lack one. While I don't think rules only elide, there's nothing to say they can't. In the question of bespoke RPGs trumping unmodified ones, I think the proof is in the pudding when you consider how people will bend over backwards to make bizarre and creative settings that explain the many questions raised in interpreting the minutiae of your average edition of D&D. Those who really value in-world coherence seem to have a great time, but I have not seen the blogpost written that really convinces me that disregarding in-world coherence is so bad in and of itself.

Conclusion

It has rightly been said that it is better to play RPGs, to engage with the hobby, than to theorize about it. But because we are so intrigued by such a wonderful thing as what happens around our table, we are compelled to expound on it. It is good to keep in mind those things that RPGs clearly are-- conversations, pretending, and games-- when trying to understand them. Most useful insights into RPGs are boring and unsurprising on their own, while our own fascination combined with a beautiful culture cohort of artistics, curmudgeons, and mystics can inspire us to overcomplicate how we think and talk about RPGs. There are many ways to enjoy them and to otherwise benefit from them, and isn't that neat? Understanding how an RPG's conversations relate to its pretending and its game is a good way to make your play better.

Thank you to Locheil, Vayra, deus ex parabola, and Gin Bradbury for their advice and suggestions in the composition of this blog post.