what sort of game is an RPG? part 4: restrictions

Let’s come back to the question that has been motivating us so far: is D&D as a whole a ‘Suitsian’ game?

It seems that where we’ve ended up is that RPGs might be composite structures which can contain Suitsian games as elements, but old Bernard’s model is not really the right frame to capture RPG playing as a whole.

However, even if we are not striving to achieve a prelusory goal, voluntary restrictions are still a major part of RPGs. Indeed, they are probably the main thing that makes it a ‘game’.

RPGs generally speaking involve, in large part, people narrating stuff that happens in the fiction. As Peterson put it,

Both speakers phrase their statements as contributions to a common story, as if they are taking turns adding sentences to a fictional work in progress—in the course of the transcript, neither challenges the other’s authority to make any utterance.

The major function of rules in an RPG is therefore to determine what statements can and can’t be made.

After all, a group of people simply telling a ‘freeform’ story could narrate anything they damn well pleased. Any system of rules is inviting constraints on what is allowed to be narrated, in the hopes that it will make the resulting narrative more interesting.

So, yes to voluntary restrictions, but we are usually not taking on those restrictions for the challenging structure they create in pursuit of an arbitrary goal. Rather, it seems like we’re taking them on to define a free space of ‘play’ with interesting contours.

On that note, while anything could be said, not everything would be said. As well as limiting what can be narrated, a game rule can call something into existence by bringing it to the players’ attention. As the King of Façade put it, “rules exist so that we may know our freedoms”.

RPG game states, graphs, and positioning

In a game such as chess, we can link up all the possible game states into a mathematical directed graph, with each node representing a possible state of the game, and each edge representing a valid transition from one state to another. This is commonly used to mathematically ‘solve’ games and identify the optimal strategy. Even for a seemingly simple set of rules, the combinatoric possibilities of the rules can result in an enormously complicated game tree where it is by no means obvious how to find a path to the target state.

For RPGs, the situation is even more extreme. In a sense, the ‘state’ of an RPG is everything that has been said in the game so far, coupled with all the mechanical pieces used to support it. The ‘representable’ (but not necessarily valid!) states of the RPG amount to the whole of Borges’ Library of Babel! The rules of an RPG, both written and unwritten, thus specify a path through all possible narrations, a thin web running through the Library.

(Incidentally, in Vincent’s terminology, this is roughly ‘positioning’.)

Since remembering everything that was said is pretty much impossible for players, the various mechanical aids step in to help abstract over some of this complexity. You don’t need to remember every attack and possible injury if you just keep a total of hitpoints on your sheet. You can keep track of the position of characters in a space more easily with miniatures. You can write down a summary of a session, and recap it when you begin the next session. If you happen to forget a minor detail, no big deal at the end of the day.

The process of playing an RPG can be compared with building up text with a Markov chain. But instead of deciding the next element entirely at random, the players consider what’s happened so far, and their model of the ‘current state’ of the fiction, and make a judgement on how best to continue narrating, under the influence of the rules.

This can of course include ‘thinking ahead’, and in this regard, there may be an element of strategy.

novels with rules

RPGs are not the only case of creating a narrative with restrictions. For example, they might carry out a writing exercise where they avoid the letter ‘e’, or more generally write in a strict format like an epistolary novel. The author of a detective novel might decide to strictly follow Knox’s rules—or to deliberately flout them.

Even for novels that don’t play with such specific formats, authors will generally try to obey certain conventions of fiction. The actions characters take should (eventually!) seem well-motivated. If something is important to the story, it is usually expected that it will be introduced earlier. They can play with genre assumptions, following them or breaking them. They might adhere to standard plot structures, like a three-act structure or a kishōtenketsu.

Are these Suitsian rules? Sorta. They are voluntary restrictions taken on to enable a certain activity. And in working within those limits, you may have to employ strategy. For example, if an author wants to have a character be shot, they will make sure to mention a gun. This is what Emily Care Boss called fictional positioning in the context of RPGs, slightly narrower than Vincent’s definition.

If you were determined to make writing a novel be a Suitsian game, perhaps you could argue that the prelusory goal is that a story exists. But the rules are usually taken not to make it harder to reach the state of ‘a story exists’, but to shape the sort of story that emerges at the other end.

In any case, most people don’t try to make that move. Calling writing a novel a game seems to be an over-expansion of the idea of ‘games’.

Until we invented ‘solo journaling games’, anyway…

how much is playing an RPG like writing a novel?

RPGs are unlike writing a novel because…

1. there are other players, and you must work their contributions into the story (solo journaling games notwithstanding)
2. you can’t go back and edit it, mostly, outside of minor ‘retcons’
3. the rules are much more complicated and strict, and might be devised by a third party

Maybe we could think of other reasons.

Which of these makes an RPG a ‘game’, and a novel not ‘a game’?

All of them could apply to writing novels, in some circumstances.

1. A co-written novel such as This Is How You Lose The Time War involves accepting the contributions of at least one other writer. I participated in similar ‘chainwriting’ projects at university, and we regarded it as a game. In webfiction, ‘Quests’ which allow reader suggestions are also considered game-like.
2. Serial fiction is generally not significantly edited once a chapter has been published. (Which can be very frustrating for authors of serials! It might get an editing pass if it gets republished in another context.) This is usually not regarded as a game unless there is significant audience interaction.
3. I mentioned a few rules that authors might choose to follow above. On top of this, they may use writing guides like Save the Cat which specify a formulaic structure. Additionally, ‘LitRPG’ novels obey the rules of a computer RPG. The more demanding the rule, the more it seems likely that the activity will be characterised as a game.

So it seems that points 1 and 3 make a ‘telling a story’ more ‘game-like’.

Of course, Bernard Suits isn’t the only person to identify following rules with games. But it’s interesting that ‘sharing writing with another person’ makes it feel more game-like as well. You’re welcome to dispute whether any of these are really games, by Suits’s definition or any other.

Still, if allowing a story to be shaped by rules, and negotiating contributions from multiple authors, are the things that make it a game… let’s take a look at how some of these rules work in practice.

implicit limitations and encouragements

Let’s consider a rule like this, in a game where different characters have different abilities:

Nostril Laser

Once per round, a character with this ability can shoot a laser out of their nostril that gives a creature within ten feet the Unpleasant Sensation trait.

In theory, without this rule being printed in the game, anyone could declare they fire a nostril laser and the GM (or players at large in a GMless game) would have to rule whether that’s a thing they can do. However, it is very unlikely that a player would bring that up, and even if they did, the answer would probably be ‘what? no, that’s stupid’. Once that rule is declared and accepted by the players, however, its presence acts as an invitation. Nostril lasers are on the table and their effects are well-defined.

Once the ‘nostril laser’ ability is defined into existence as an optional ability, it implicitly defines a restriction: a player whose character is missing that ability should not narrate shooting a nostril laser, because that would be stepping on the toes of the nostril laser player. At best, in a game that aims for ‘balance’ (more on that in a second), their nostril laser should be significantly less powerful than the nostril laser of a player who had spent resources on it.

OK, I don’t think that sounds like a very big loss. After all, the default assumption here is that nobody has a nostril laser.

Now, let’s consider a D&D 5e rule, an optional ability for a Battlemaster Fighter (2014 version)…

Trip Attack

When you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can expend one superiority die to attempt to knock the target down. You add the superiority die to the attack’s damage roll, and if the target is Large or smaller, it must make a Strength saving throw. On a failed save, you knock the target prone.

Attempting to trip someone up is something that a player might reasonably think to propose in an OSR-style game. A DM in a 5e game might also want to come up with a ruling for that, but they would need to worry about not treading on the toes of the Battlemaster. So they’d need to make it more difficult to trip someone than ‘Trip Attack’.

So, both in games with a long list of mechanical options (like modern D&D) and games with a brief list of options (like many OSR games), the option always exists to handle a narrative proposal with an ad-hoc ruling—an on-the-fly piece of game design. However, when there are more lots of mechanics in play, the on-the-fly game design puzzle becomes more difficult (it has more considerations to keep in mind), so you’re less likely to do it.

By default, players will narrate in accordance with their understanding of genre and the narrative context. Relative to that baseline, rules can…

codify that into something more precise by forbidding certain narrations

it is unclear when a character can trip someone up in a fantasy game, but with the rule, we know that only characters with the ‘Trip Attack’ ability can do so

a character narratively defined to be a wizard is expected to be able to cast magic, but magic has these restrictions and can only do this

the game is about townswomen trying to appeal to Kagematsu, but there is a specific order to follow of who approaches him when, and they get only one shot at each type of affection

allow for a violation of the default assumption

it is assumed that characters cannot read minds, so by default players would not attempt to do so and GMs would not allow it, but a character with the ‘mind reader’ ability can do so

normally a character taking their clothes off wouldn’t cause anything special to happen, but for a character with ‘An Arresting Skinner’ it causes everyone nearby to freeze and stare

in this area, gravity is inverted. when something travels into the inverted-gravity area, this happens

This applies equally to rules developed beforehand and rules invented on the fly as ad-hoc rulings.

Let’s look at some common RPG mechanics, to see how they connect up to the fiction.

moves

Many story games don’t follow the ‘characters have distinct mechanical abilities’ paradigm at all, but this is a common thing in the PbtA tradition, which works using ‘moves’.

Matching up with Vincent’s theory of ‘arrows’ from fiction to tokens and back, a ‘move’ in Apocalypse World and its many successors refers to a packet of game mechanics with a fictional trigger. For example, the Hocus might have “When you speak the truth to a mob, roll+weird.” followed by a list of possible results. Then, whenever the narration is judged by the players to correspond to the trigger, the rules require them to carry out the procedure.

In Apocalypse World, many moves then have one of three possible consequences for different levels of success; the potential benefits are relatively precisely defined, while the potential consequences on failure are usually left to the MC to make a hard move that likely causes trouble for the character. Unlike games like D&D, where the DC for a roll is often hidden, the probabilities in Apocalypse World are usually the same every time, and always known in advance. This doesn’t have to be the case, but most successor PbtA games work the same way.

In theory, any character might try to speak the truth to a mob in Apocalypse World. It might be handled using one of the more abstract common moves, like ‘Seduce/Manipulate’. However, only a player controlling a character who has selected the ‘Frenzy’ ability gets a mechanical guarantee that if they succeed on a roll, they can get the people to ‘Bring forward all their precious things’ or fight as a gang.

Having that option prominently listed on their character sheet will also act as encouragement for the player and MC to look for situations where they might get to speak the truth to a mob, exercising a more subtle influence on the game.

Apocalypse World moves cover both types of rule above. Some moves grant a character an unusual ability that would not be assumed by default. Other moves codify how an ambiguous part of the ‘genre assumptions’ should be handled.

aspects, skills and freeform spells

In a board game, the mechanical options at each stage are usually quite precisely defined. RPGs, on the other hand, allow a different sort of mechanic to exist, one which interacts with the shared fiction in a deliberately vague and open-ended way.

Looking at another part of the story-game tradition, FATE uses a system called ‘aspects’; Burning Wheel has a very long list of skills that might qualify as ‘fields of related knowledge’; other games have similar rules. In all these cases, the player has a list of short phrases, which give some sort of bonus when it seems to be relevant.

This isn’t so far afield from moves in Apocalypse World, or skills and ability checks in D&D. The difference is that 1. the player controlling the character has the responsibility to bring it up when it is relevant and 2. the condition is more vague so the player needs to make an argument for it.

A similar technique has been adopted in certain games in the OSR tradition such as White Hack as a way to handle magic. Here, the player comes up with arbitrary spell names at character creation in much the same way.

An aspect/skill might be something dry like ‘strength’ or ‘pistol-shooting’ or it might be some more descriptive phrase like ‘international enby of mystery’. For magic spells, the phrase might be something broad like ‘pyrotechnics’ or narrow like ‘Bigby’s Big Blue Ball’.

What it means for an aspect to be relevant is left deliberately vague and up to interpretation. Playing a game of Fate amounts to making an argument that your aspect is relevant to a given situation. For example, if a situation involves knowledge of another country, the player with ‘international enby of mystery’ might have strong grounds for invoking that aspect.

In most cases, once an aspect has been deemed to be relevant, its mechanical effect is basically the same: a fixed bonus or number of dice added to the dice pool. The result of this is that it can have a mechanically flattening effect: whatever the situation, you’ll be checking your list of aspects and arguing for a certain thing to be relevant. In terms of Vincent’s arrows, determining whether an aspect is relevant is a fiction->tokens arrow which is sensitive to details, but its effect on the fiction is cast into the binary of success/failure on a roll.

That said, in the case of spells in games like White Hack, having a spell gives you the license to narrate certain things, so it’s a more granular tokens->fiction arrow. If you have ‘Bigby’s Big Blue Ball’, you can say ‘I will use the spell to create a big ball blocking the corridor’. This would not seem fictionally appropriate otherwise. In this case, the spell is closer to the moves/abilities we discussed previously.

the role of the game designer

As we saw previously in the ‘unwritten rules’ article, calling an RPG into existence involves many moments of ‘game design’. The person who wrote a rulebook is certainly a game designer, laying out instructions which they claim will result in a good game when followed.

But, to interpret these instructions into an actual game in progress, players must elaborate on these instructions. If a rulebook instructs them to narrate something, they must decide how specifically to narrate it. If they hit on an edge case or ambiguity in the rules, they must devise an on-the-fly ruling to resolve it. If there is something that is not covered in the printed rules but which they wish to systematise, they must create a system and hook it up to the rest of the game. And for the many RPGs which do not declare a specific scenario or characters to play, the players must furnish the game with these things.

As a result, every actually played RPG is a co-creation of the game designer and the group. So that leads to the question of, how should the responsibilities be divided?

This is a question which has had many different answers over the last half-century of RPGs, and we’ll get into it in Part 5.