TTRPGs assumptions and rethinking ideas

Game Design Log #39

Yesterday, the amazing Lexi Ahsby was kind enough to have a look at my game, “Summer Myth Hunt” (SMH), and make a review of it.

If you want to help her grow her channel, you can subscribe to it. Also, you can give a like to the review of SMH to help the game reach more people. Here is the link.

A little about SMH

SMH is a game that I made for a DriveThruRPG jam a few years ago, is the first game I created. The restriction of the jam was to make a game with “summer camps” baked in it somehow. At first I thought it would be very difficult for someone of a country where “summer camps” arent part of the culture to creat something interesting out of this concept, but then I had the idea of SMH: a game where players play as inhabitants of a vast subterrean world, unknown to the common folk of the upper world, that come to the surface every summer to hunt the Myths that common folk unawearly create when telling tales around a campfire.

So the idea of the game was simple, players take the role of these hunters, who go to the upperworld (that by default is our common present-day world), to hunt Myths and/or Imaginarium, that is the substance from which tales and Myths are made of.

As the jam had a restriction of 20 pages (including cover), I defined the underworld (the place where the players came) in very rough brushstrokes, only giving the “lore” that will inform the motivation of the characters, and then I focused on the game play, giving a central stage for the hunting of the Myth, wich I presented as a betting system, where players had to bet to figure out the “attributes” of the Myth they were hunting.

The assumptions of TTRPG

In her review, Lexi had the very fair doubt of how SMH ended, making the also fair assumption that the game was just the hunt and that after hunting a couple of myths, the game should just… end.

I think that her doubts are pointing to something very crucial about TTRPG and how we write them. TTRPGs are a difficult creature to define, and of all of the different approaches to define them, the one that makes more sense for me is to use their openness as their core attribute, in the sense that a TTRPG is a special game where there are no “limits”, where the space of play is not confined by its rules, where you can “play the game”, outside what the rules had explicitly defined. Even roleplaying, in the sense of taking on a character’s persona, I think, is not as exclusive to TTRPG as much as openness is.

But then, how do we write rules for an open game?

This is a question for which I have no answer, but I think that may depend on the degree of openness of the game. What I can say is that from the more trad games, as dnd 5e and how most commonly is played (because playing culture also has an impact in this), it seams that a huge part of the focus of the rules are devoted to a moment that is defined by the rules as the crucial medium trough which resolve, confront, and/or defeat the difficulties/trials of the game, in dnd 5e case, combat. And the rest of it, the “how” to deal with the openness, is managed by a simple system that tries to be flexible enough, for dnd 5e this is the skill check.

This topic is vast and difficult, and putting side by side different game systems (and play cultures), may shed more light on it, as thinking on the openness of PBTAs games vs trad games like 5e, or by looking games that “simpler” rules system, but where its openness feel more contained by the rules (in a way that feels more elegant or focused to what the game desire to accomplish?), as games using the Belonging Outside Belonging system. For this last kind of game may also be useful to contrast them against “story game”. Perhaps, by doing so, openness continues to be an important factor that we instinctively use to say if a game is a TTRPG or a story game, but perhaps it is just a question of grade and not class, and TTRPGs are just at one extreme of a scale of openness, or perhaps openness is just and expression of something more fundamental about TTRPGs.

Apart from how interestingly complicated the topic of defining what is a TTRPG, one thing that all this thinking did was to push me to properly define what I wanted to accomplish with my game SMH, and to find what was the best and most fun way to do it.

Rethinking ideas

Looking at SMH, I realized that I really liked the idea of hunting myths (tales) and the idea of the betting system, but also I had the feeling that I wasn’t managing the openness of it in a particularly fun way, or at least, in this short 20-pager, I didn’t give much tools to the GM to manage this openness (and at best I was just dealing with openness as trad games do, in a way that I may say is a clunky-openness, or at best puts a lot of weight on the GM shoulders). But also, I feel that the myth hunting could have had more subtleties to it.

So, where should I put my efforts? And if I desired to put my efforts on the rules of hunting, and not in dealing with the openness, is a TTRPG the best medium to do it?

Maybe your TTRPG would be better off being something else

Maybe at some moment, when you are giving more and more weight to just some “close” part of the TTRPG, and you are not boosting its openness, it would be better to call it something else. Maybe is just a particular kind of board game to which openness is not so crucial. This is not to said that crunchy systems don’t have a place in TTRPG, just that if you just have just one close set of super crunchy rules, and all the rest dosen’t matter to much, or dosen’t interest you enough, maybe you could focus in that part and make the game just that.

For me, in the case of SMH, this process of thought resulted in rethinking the idea as “just that”, a game of hunting, may not be better nor worse than the way the game is already presented, but I think that is a worthy exploration.

That’s why I began to play with the idea of presenting SMH as a skirmish/miniature game, which is also motivated by my increasing attraction to these games, and because I like the idea of miniature-tactical games where combat is not the sole purpose of the game. This idea of “non-combat miniature games” is being explored by other people (you can look at some very fun ones here) and is a very interesting space.

Miniature games are very appealing because they brings with them a lot of narrative-weight through mini customization, and they cultural spaces had some expressions that are very similar to the TTRPG cultural space, something that I would hate to lose in SMH if I transformed from a TTRPG into a “non-combat miniature games” (in a combat oriented example, Mordheim is an amazing amalgam of miniature tactical game, with lots and lots of narrative expressed through after-battle procedures, and miniatus customization).

So I decided that my plan for the not-so-far-away future is to explore this idea, to try to make SMH into a non-combat miniature game, and see if this is a better form for the game.

TTRPGs as clusters of toys and folk art

But even if I make SMH into a non-combat miniature game, there is also the possibility of using these rules inside the already existing version of the game, right?

This idea led me to think that miniature/board games are a perfect avenue for this kind of crunchy self-contained systems, which can be used by TTRPG, but without the necessity of a TTRPG (a very good example is Forbidden Psalm and Mork Borg).

But wait, then, what is the TTRPG? If, for example, I have a lot of these closed systems that can be used by the same TTRPG, what is the TTRPG? Is it just the negative space between all these board games? Is it the narrative space through which all these disconnected rules are interconnected?

This reminds me of another kind of approach to understand TTRPGs, as an open space to play with, as the gathering and the communal storytelling, where the TTRPG books/rules are just a set of toys to play with inside this space, as Luka Rejec said:

The table (those players participating) and the session (that time outside of time dedicated to roleplay) together combine to create an unrepeatable folk performance art by the players for the players.

I love this way of thinking about TTRPGs. What about you?