Drunk, Prone & On Fire (Tactical Transparency)

The success of Old School Renaissance games has resulted in this happening a lot in mainstream forums:

Someone’s like “OSR games rule! Player skill! Sandboxy freedom!”

And so then because words like “skill” and “freedom” are coded as good and metal, everyone then tries to explain how whatever random game they like is actually secretly OSR. And then you have to be like “No, sorry Magical Owl-Touch Factory is a wonderful game but isn’t OSR” and you sound like you’re being gatekeepy and grumpy.

So it’s good to clarify things, to give us some verbal technology to talk about them:

An important concept in the way OSR-style system-agnostic player skill is encouraged in a tabletop RPG system is “Tactical transparency”.

Tactical transparency is the degree to which a common-sense idea that would be effective in the “real” situation that the game-fiction mimics would also be effective in the game.

If you need to know the system in order to be effective, the system has a low degree of tactical transparency. Magic: The Gathering has a low degree, Dread has a low degree (all risky actions are represented by pulling a Jenga block, so an idea is only as good as you are good at pulling blocks), Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 has an decreasing degree of tactical transparency as you level up (feats and spells with obscure names and tricks with actions-per-round become increasingly important). You can be skilled at these games but that skill is system-specific, it requires system mastery.

If, on the other hand, common-sense tactics that seem to make sense in real life also make sense often in the game, the system has a high degree of tactical transparency. This is an OSR ideal.

Perfect tactical transparency is impossible and would be problematic anyway: first of all it’d require thousands of rules for things like chemistry and physics (our army’s steel swords beat your bronze ones!) which would take a long time to use and consult. But the point of OSR-style player skill is to be as tactically transparent as you can be while keeping the game playable and smooth: thus the requirement for a high-trust table where all players basically agree on the GM’s good judgment and are willing to speak up when they disagree.

So...

-Classic tactical transparency: a slow moving-monster with no distance attacks and no ticking clock (King Kong in the desert), so obviously you use missile weapons (it can’t hurt you but you can hurt it).

In many narrative systems, this wouldn’t matter—if you’re in a system where killing the monster is just a “Go Aggro” roll and it doesn’t matter whether you use a sword or crossbow, it doesn’t have a high degree of tactical transparency and so isn’t a system where player skill (or at least system-agnostic player skill) matters. Further, if thinking to use a distance weapon would only give you a +1 bonus, that is still a pretty low degree of tactical transparency--it's not giving you all the advantages you'd commonsensically have. In PBTA games, yes, fictional positioning can get you a "that won't work at all" or a "that auto-succeeds" but the whole range of options in-between is narrower, so it's less transparent. Keep reading if you don't understand.

-Fantasy tactical transparency: tactical transparency doesn’t have to be about plausibility. It can be about things that make sense by the fiction’s own rules, as long as they aren’t the just the system’s own rules. For example, one time I was playing with some people and they were trying to kill an OSR monster someone made up (Rules, Rolls, Roles) called the “Man of Wounds”. This guy is a man full of swords stabbed through him at every angle. The players keep bashing on him, landing attacks and spells, but he takes no damage.  They’re getting increasingly frustrated. Someone’s aunt is in the kitchen listening to us play—she doesn’t know the system, she probably hasn’t even seen an episode of Game of Thrones—she rolls her eyes and goes “Just pull out the swords”. They try it: the guy dies. If something works by trial and error in the fiction, that’s still tactically transparent because it required a common-sense tactic unrelated to the system: when faced with the unknown or fantastic, try different things to see what works. Trial and error is a legitimate real-world tactic.

-Vagueness works against tactical transparency. For example, World of Dungeons is not much of an OSR system since, for example, all the spells (regardless of what they’re called or “skinned” as) work the same way: they just do whatever you want and have an effectiveness number. There’s very little weighing of “Ok, well this is an area fire effect, so it will result in this while this is a single-target ice effect so it will have this other result, so in this case…” . The system is not asking you to think with much tactical depth because a lot of your decisions don’t matter. You aren't deciding when a bomb is better than a beam or whether the clear advantage of the bomb is worth wasting now before you get to the boss because you get fewer bombs than beams, etc. Different kinds of games are about the different kinds of thinking they involve you in.

-Limited scales of bonus and penalty work against tactical transparency. Meaning like: if you can only get a +1 maximum due to clever fictional positioning, period, then that limits how much tactical thinking you have to do. For example, in an early draft of 5th edition D&D, it was rare to get a worse modifier than just “Disadvantage” —two disadvantage conditions stacked didn’t matter. And, in addition, being drunk granted disadvantage but also gave a minor bonus (it made you inured to pain or something, if I remember?) so it was literally better in that version of the game to be defending while simultaneously drunk, prone, and on fire than it was to just be defending while prone. If you're not the Human Torch and setting you on fire doesn’t put me at an advantage over you, the system is lacking in tactical transparency.

-When a system-specific tactic competes in effectiveness with a common-sense tactic that works against tactical transparency: like Apoc World’s rule that you get bonuses that make you more effective the more you have sex with the “Angel” PC means a tactic nobody would think up unless they’d read the book (bonus mining via fucks) is a way better way to win a battle than, y’know, planning, digging a trench, concentrating force, choosing the right weapon, etc. Torchbearer is open about how it takes over a dozen sessions to master the system, so while, yes, there is a paragraph about how the GM can give you a bonus if your plan is actually reasonably good, the system has low tactical transparency because gaming the system matters a lot more.

-Systems which abstract tactical thought itself into a character skill reduce tactical transparency: like if there's a “Read a Sitch””Discern Realities” or “Tactics” skill which gives you an abstract bonus when invoked and that bonus could matter as much or more than actually reading the situation described or actually discerning the realities from the clues given or actually thinking tactically then that interferes with tactical transparency. Like if using those skills gives me a +1 and me, as a person, taking the high ground gives me a +1, the relative value of my player skill vs the character skill in that system is reduced.

-Tactical transparency is not identical to “realism”, but overlaps with it: often a tired-ass forum n00b complaint that an abstraction in a game makes it less "realistic" is also a legitimate complaint that it makes the game less tactically transparent. See the "drunk, prone and on fire" example above.

-High-powered abilities within the fiction can work against tactical transparency, or at least against tactics: in the Fantasy Flight 40k RPGs there are some weapons, like storm bolters, which’ll just plain murdalize anyone in your way. So while you can sneak around trying to outflank and trip up the enemy, every round you spend cleverly setting up your attack is one less you spent spinning the Ballistic Skill Wheel to see if it lands on “The tyranid dies immediately”.  The only skill there is reading the book enough to know that this gun is really good--and reading about every other gun and piece of armor that doesn't have a clear name like "spiky club" or "shotgun". When a game is full of powerful abilities with in-world names the best tactic is basically just about bringing them to bear asap—even though they are technically elements of the setting not the system, they still involve you less in player skill because the most skilled player will realize the best option is always just “press the nuke button”. Identifying that takes skill, just not much.

-Obscure or misleading names for character abilities can work against tactical transparency: in DC Adventures you can have "Disarming Finesse" and you can have "Advance Disarm". If you're Captain Machiavelli trying to send the Delta League into the fortress and one of your team has the "finesse" one and the other has the "advanced" one, which one do you send to disarm Plasma Pig? It's impossible to tell without reading up on the system, so: not tactically transparent.

-Tactical transparency is not the same as transparency, clarity, or lack of misdirection in the fiction: If Sherlock Holmes can't find Moriarity because he's dressed as a bunny or can't hurt the Ghost Barghest of Belgium with his revolver even though the revolver should work, that has nothing to do with tactical transparency. If Sherlock can't find Moriarity because Sherlock was built with "Enhanced Perception" rather than "Perception Advance +3" or because the rules say Sherlock only can find Moriarity once he reaches Stage 5 then that is the system interfering with tactical transparency.

-Simple mechanics and tactically transparent mechanics can be completely different things. The rules of chess are simpler than those of almost any wargame. Yet the complex mesh of most wargames' rules generally end up reproducing simple military maxims: concentration of fire works, if there are rules for facing then flanking works, taking high ground works (you are above the enemy's cover so at a good angle), etc. Chess is an example of a game that is fairly simple mechanically but can be extremely tactically opaque. So a simple game system does not necessarily lead to simple choices for the player.

-5e's tactical transparency is arguable. At low levels, things that should matter in a fight do. At higher levels, feats and magic and alternate dice math make it less so, unless the GM is careful. You're picking spells: Is it better to have advantage on damage or 2 attacks? If you're trying to figure it out at all before a battle, that's not tactically transparent: that's doing system-specific math.

-A simple test: Is it worth bothering to get an opponent drunk, prone, and on fire before attempting to kill them? The more often true that is, the more tactically transparent the game you're playing probably is. There will be exceptions (no point in trying to get the robot drunk) but I'm going to make a big leap of faith and assume you get it.

This post is part of a series on RPG Theory:
Part 1--Intro to PIG-PIP
Part 2 
Part 3
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"The Game" (that is, "the words")--PIG-PIP

More RPG theory. Thoughts and suggestions welcome and needed.

Part 1--Intro to PIG-PIP
Part 2 
Part 3
Also:
Tactical Transparency

30. Game Text As Reference Vs Game Text As Speech

Tabletop RPG theory has usually, in the past, taken the form of practical advice directed usually and especially to one specific entity involved in games and negotiating its relationship to another entity: Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering is directed toward a GM and telling them how to work with players, the original Threefold Model, GNS, and RSP theory are directed toward matching groups to game texts or instructing writers on how to write game texts. The uniquely rhetorically complex nature of tabletop RPG game texts is often obscured.

The most obvious example is how often the game text is simply called "The Game". An example should illustrate the strangeness of this: you can't fully analyze how a team played baseball without reference to the home-field advantage, even though the home-field advantage is nowhere in the rulebook, yet over and over in formal RPG theory The Game and all its outcomes are supposed to proceed from the rules.

Game books work in many ways. Right now I'm going to draw a distinction between non-fiction texts as reference and non-fiction texts as speech.

"Reference" here means in the sense of a dictionary: a set of statements, recommendations, etc consulted in pieces, where the meaning doesn't depend on reading in a linear way. That is: a dictionary still makes sense if you read  the entry for"Pepper" before "Aardvark".

"Speech" here is used in the sense of "The president gave a speech": that is, a series of rhetorical moves where the order changes or is intended to chance if not the meaning precisely then at least the reception of the words by the audience. A speech is different if it begins "My fellow Americans..." vs "A funny thing happened on the way to the VFW tonight..." even if both statements are somewhere in both versions of the speech.

Most RPG theory treats the game text ("The Game") as if it only acts as reference: The rules are there and allegedly responsible for discrepancies between desire and outcome.

In reality, even before the "What's This Game About?" section, there is an image. This image takes different forms:

If the game is not famous (as with most games that you might hear about online or with Dungeons & Dragons as it appeared to wargamers in 1974) the image is a combination of what is on the cover and what the words on that cover communicate ("Dungeons & Dragons, Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper And Pencil and Miniature Figures" "Men & Magic" and a picture of a warrior in unrealistically--fantastically, you might say--spiky armor).

If the game is famous, the first image is a combination of the reputation of the game, the advertising of the game, and the actual packaging.

This is not a small thing. Because both players and GM:

-Choose to begin participating largely if they are attracted to the image
-Are often given the book or offered the opportunity to play based on someone else's assessment that they are attracted to the image--in some cases by parents who will forever know nothing more than the image, and
-(Most importantly) since tabletop RPGs require that participants invent elements to even work at all, and participants consciously and unconsciously assume that fun happens by bending their choices toward the image and the tropes it implies (name the elf "Silverblade", include a castle with a moat even if moats aren't in the rules yet)

...the initial and subsequent images the text presents shape genuine play in tabletop RPGs in real and extensive ways that are difficult to fully describe without going beyond just a programmer or boardgame designer's vocabulary of rules, but also the vocabularies of art, psychology and sociology.

Some examples:

The very first RPG book includes a fan-submitted illustration of creatures described nowhere in the text: "Beautiful Witch" and "Amazon". Knowing this was a "fantastic medieval" game was enough for at least this player to realize these characters could be in it.

Vampire: The Masquerade has a complex and ongoing LARP culture that uses rules nowhere in the original text. However, the themes emphasized in the LARPs (powers, humanity loss, feeding, etc) are all strongly influenced by the text-as-speech if not loyal to the text-as-reference.

It's usually understood that inventions "inside" a game's presumed genre tropes "should" work and those outside it void the warranty ("firearms will ruin your D&D game") but what does and does not fit the tropes is often assumed to be clearer to each living participant than it is. Genre assumptions are usually treated as something that either need not be said, or something that can very easily be said, when in reality getting a full palette of genre assumptions across is as complex and fraught an act of communication as trying to teach someone what musical gestures represent "jazz" and which don't.

For example, this isn't a flaw in Apocalypse World. That's not because it is mechanically impossible or undesirable in the rules-as-reference, but because the rhetorical structure of Apocalypse World as rules-as-speech would scare off anyone who thought this would be fun.

Because tropes and assumptions shape play as much or sometimes more than rules, when considering the influence of a text-as-speech in forming a game experience, a critic needs to consider a number of cultural and sociological factors including:

-When it was written
-What genre tropes can readers be assumed to be aware of (is steampunk a thing yet for this audience?)
-What the illustrations suggest
-What the wider awareness of the game or games was in the mind of the reader (many small online RPGs assume a reader knows what an RPG is, or assume familiarity with at least D&D)
-What gameplay culture does the text assume is dominant
-Whether audiences interacting with the text can be assumed to be homogenous (all equally aware of steampunk tropes) or heterogeneous (some need it explained more than others)
-How much of the text will be read by different participants and which part (it's common that nobody playing a given D&D game has read all the spell descriptions, or that only one person who's playing Dread has even touched the book)
-How charismatic is the text about presenting different principles and procedures vs others and for which audiences (It's possible one potential player could walk away from Dogs in the Vineyard excited about moral choices while another walks away hoping for shoot-outs with demon children whose hair moves in the wind even when there isn't any--this will shape play).

I would add a caveat saying that the more freedom of choice an RPG offers, the more "soft" rhetorical gestures can influence play, but in practice I've found every RPG offers so much freedom that these gestures always matter. You can "break" pretty much any game by deciding to play against the style it assumes but the textual acrobatics required to procedurally hard-code rules that head-off such fuckery are always a burden in themselves (though that subject should be addressed formally in a later entry).
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What's a Game Text Do? Why are we playing? What went wrong? PIG-PIP 2

Part two of a theory of RPGs.

Part one here.
Part three here.

Also:
Tactical Transparency

20. What Does A Game Text Do?

A game text is a nonliving and static participant in play.

("Static" barring releases of errata and, like, answers from the author in venues like Dragon mag back in the day or Twitter now. The text has some dynamism, it's still way slower than a player or GM.)

The text consists of a series of suggestions about goals to be pursued and procedures to be followed in the game session, usually along with an argument for pursuing those goals and following those procedures.

For example, if the art in a game shows someone in chainmail cutting up an owlbear that's both a suggestion (try to set up situations like this when you run your game) and an argument (it'll be fun if you set up this situation, following the rules here will help you set up this situation, etc).


21. About Fun

"Fun" is a shorthand expression. Really what we usually mean is "an experience the living participant finds desirable" which covers slightly more territory, including the possibility of cathartic experiences.

For example, everything we're talking about should apply to the person who left this comment on the last entry:
"

I think you'll need to say a lot about what you mean by fun. Depending on what you figure out you might need to justify it as the focus of your investigation. Because you need to accommodate some really diverse roleplaying experiences that we should deem successful, but don't seem to involve fun as we normally think about it.

For example: I normally play pretty standard dnd, but my favorite rpg experience was in a really constrained story game (A Walk in Winter Wood) and it was genuinely terrifying. There was no part of it that was pleasant---no jokes, moments of low tension, nothing. Just stress. I was terribly uncomfortable (but of course I was at least comfortable with the level of discomfort I was in. Or I was willing to undergo that much discomfort for the experience. Dunno how to phrase it.).

Anyway that experience was great because it touched on true horror and evoked real feeling. I don't know where fun enters in this analysis.

"

More narrowly, fun is sometimes used casually to refer to light-hearted kinds of desired experiences ("It's just a fun movie" etc) often connoting, in a game context, a relatively permissive game ("It was Pendragon but I broke the rules and played a horse because, hey, fun's fun"). Just noting that here because sometimes discussion gets confused because people are using different definitions.

22. Broad Goal of Play

To distribute the maximum experiences-found-desirable to the living players.

Jargon notes: If you just go "desirable experiences" then you have the silly problem where someone undergoes an experience someone else desires but doesn't like it. Like a vegetarian eating a cheeseburger is having an experience that is "able to be desired", so "desirable" (I like cheeseburgers) but not by them. That's the important part: the person gets a thing they liked.

Also note it's not necessarily desired experience past tense: the person doesn't have to get what they expected to get, only something that, once gotten, was liked.


23. Narrow Goal of Play

While it's all fine and good to say the goal of play is to distribute maximum fun (etc) experiences, practically speaking, planned leisure experiences always involve imagining a specific kind of desired experience ("let's go bowling it will be loud and convivial and there'll be melted cheese" "let's curl up on the couch and watch Antiques Roadshow it'll be cozy and chill")  and then, as it were, carving life down until it is sharp enough to penetrate the force field of boredom or the other foes of leisure from a very specific angle. One does not just throw unrelated fun-suggestions against the wall of Fort Boredom and hope one makes it through.

The game text argues not just for the desirability of experiences but for a specific kind of experience. This is where we can talk about the "desired experience": What you went in expecting and wanting.

For example: Procedures and advice for a horror game and for a comedy game have the same broad goal (22) and very different narrow goals.


24. Observation on Evaluating Game Texts

A lot of digital ink has gotten spilled over whether a game is "well-designed" or "poorly-designed" in arguments between people who are talking past each other because one is describing a failure to hit a purported Narrow Goal of Play (common phrases you'll hear: "but it failed because it was advertised as...", "but it failed because the author's intent was..." etc) and the other is describing a success in hitting the Broad Goal of Play.

A common iteration of this argument is about whether D&D or a version of it succeeds because people like it (often over all other experienced options) or a failure because the illustrations and ads suggest the Narrow Goal of Play is epic fantasy but actual play can be more like serial pulp or picaresque fantasy or just bathetic.


25. Observation on Game Communities

People (the game's living participants) are influenced by-, and in some cases arguably products of-, communities. Communities have norms, ranging from use of language ("dual-wield" is a gamerism, not a military-historical way of referring to two-handed weapon fighting) to procedural assumptions ("GM is always right"). As soon as a game involves more than one person, gaming can never exist outside of some kind of cultural assumptions (even if they are so limited as "What language do we use when we play?").

Cultural assumptions are thus very close to a "participant" (though technically: "a characteristic that participants have in common") and can and should be analyzed with the same scrutiny one analyzes the game text or individual player behavior when asking what went wrong or what went right in a game.


26. Practical Consideration for Game Texts About Community Assumptions

Since:

a) There are far fewer game communities than gamers
b) The author of a game text is far more likely to be familiar with the assumptions of game communities than individual gamers,
c) Assumptions in these communities vary widely, and
d) These assumptions can affect how the text's suggestions are interpreted

...it is desirable for a game text to, all other considerations being equal, communicate as much about how the suggestions inside interact with different communal assumptions as possible.


27. Limit on 26

There are few assumptions so bizarre that some gamer community on the internet somewhere does not hold them (including: you don't have to read the text to run the game and then decide it doesn't work), therefore there is a practical limit on the ability of any text to communicate every single aspect of how it interacts with communal assumptions.

A game text that spends time addressing each of the infinite ways communities could misconstrue it will eventually become so difficult to read (ie uncharismatic) that it works against its purpose of effectively providing suggestions for play.


28. Post-Game Analysis

A PIG-PIP analysis of a game session would consist of:

-Listing the participants (including players, texts, and other paraphernalia used)
-Describing specific contributions made by specific participants, with an eye specifically toward contributions that were atypical or different from contributions made in a game session that had a different outcome--like if trying to figure out why a session failed, look at how it was different than a similar one that succeeded and vice versa.
-Looking for "chemistry effects"--that is, interactions between participants whose result was complex or unusual. This is by far the most difficult part.

A good analysis might examine things like the interaction between GM and text (how many of the text's suggestions were thrown out or altered, which ones were used) player and text (which of the rules did the players engage especially, including spells, items, feats, etc) player and player (were they interpersonally helpful or disruptive to some players more than others) etc.

One tool would be a Punnet-squarish matrix like this: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/03/zaks-ez-adventure-making-chart_30.html

Part three is here.
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PIG-PIP Theory of RPGs

So this the first of maybe several posts attempting to create a new comprehensive theory of tabletop RPGs.

Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
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Specific Ideas:
Tactical Transparency

It'll need your help.

Here goes:

PIG-PIP Theory

Participants Invent Games-"Participants" Includes Paraphernalia

1. Meta-note on Development:

I'm Zak and I started this theory, but there are several areas here which could use development, and likely technicalities I've missed so: I welcome commentary and contributions based on your own observations and with any luck this gets both expanded and tightened up.

2. Meta-note on Format:

Theory and assertions of fact like this, extra commentary and context like this.

3. Meta-note on Goal:

The purpose of the theory is to help match participants and potential participants in tabletop RPGs with game experiences they enjoy as much as possible.

This should be applicable to recommending games, altering games, designing games, matching players, running games (GMing), etc.

4. Meta-note: Justifications Negative & Positive

Negative: Other extant theories of tabletop RPGs are vaguer than they need to be and/or make inaccurate predictions.

Negative: Bad theories exist now and continue to be used. This has had disastrous effects, leading to genuine real-world abuses. Replacing them might ameliorate that.

Positive: It saves time to have a vocabulary with which to describe games, players, play practices etc.


5. Meta-Note on Jargon:

Under current conditions, the main immediate impact of a theory of tabletop RPGs is likely to be use and re-use of its vocabulary, including by people who haven't read the theory.

On the one hand: in that case, there's little point in even having a theory unless it has words and phrases that are locally defined in a special way that allows them to stand in for common complex concepts. A theory or at least a common language should mean we all have to type less.

For example: People continue to use the word "simulationist" because they need a word to describe games that have rules which extensively distinguish imaginary in-game objects and actions from each other from similar in-game objects and actions (like say, spear vs halberd) despite the fact that word "simulationist" is ill-defined and part of a whole theory they may not believe. But they still want and should be able to talk about the difference between like The Pool and GURPS and it'd be nice to have a way.

On the other hand: under these same conditions, words with misleading connotations or whose meaning is more difficult to intuit than necessary are undesirable. To the degree possible, we'll want to have words that mean, in the context of game design, as much like what it sounds like they mean to the average native english speaker in a native english-speaking country as possible.

PIG-PIP is obviously not a word that explains a lot, so someone encountering it for the first time somewhere else will go "What's PIG-PIP?" and the other person goes "It stands for Participants Invent Games-Participants Includes Paraphernalia". Which should at least get them asking the right questions.


6. Scope: What Is A Role-Playing Game?

This is a descriptive, not a prescriptive definition.

"Role-playing game" is a category used usually informally in discussion and used more formally commercially (like when deciding what to order for a game store, f'rinstance, a pie is not a role-playing game so you don't order a pie and put it on the shelf next to Star Frontiers).

The category basically covers a variety of activities that lie between wargames, therapeutic role-play and improv-theatre exercises. That is: all things currently discussed as role-playing games share characteristics with at least one of those three activities, usually all three, yet have elements none of them have.

Unlike therapeutic and some improv exercises they do not tend to have a specific personal-development goal (ie psychological wellness or improved acting ability). Unlike some improv exercises they aren't primarily meant for entertaining spectators (though actual-play vids are an interesting overlap, especially high-improv versions of RPG play like HarmonQuest), and unlike wargames they do not usually focus on competitive play between players in control of large forces of multiple units (though this kind of play is wholly subsumed within the possibilities of many RPG games).

Note: These are lines drawn that describe different histories and commercial spaces--therapeutic games, wargames and improv games have separate histories, all predating modern RPGs. One could alternately imagine a less historically-based definition where all three of these activities (as well as computer RPGs and the kinds of tabletop games this theory is mostly about) exist within a larger circle called "RPGs" which would simply be defined as "any at-least-partially unscripted activity, with defined rules, where people take on imagined roles". The "with defined rules" is the hair that splits it away from any theatrical performance that is improvised. So in this definition commedia del'arte is an RPG but that line in Star Wars where Leia goes "I love you" and Han Solo goes "I know" isn't.

We could go on to list elements RPGs usually have but this isn't necessary--there are always outliers that don't have them (some like Amber don't use dice, some like DCC have players controlling more than one character, some don't have game masters, etc). What we want here is to make true statements about "RPGs" whatever that is, so these statements should apply to the outliers as well. This definition therefore includes not just tabletop games but LARPS etc.)


7. The Basic PIG-PIP Claim: Participants determine the character and quality of a game experience.

In addition to the players and GM, "participants" includes paraphernalia used during the game and preparation for the game--game texts, house rules, miniatures, tables, chairs, the physical or virtual space the game is played in, snacks, etc.

8. Predictions based on The Basic PIG-PIP Claim:

More often than not, replacing a major participant with one all the people playing have previously experienced and would agree to call "substantially worse" while keeping every other variable the same should result in what most of the people involved would agree is a "worse" play experience.

More often than not, replacing a major participant with one all the people playing have previously experienced and would agree is "substantially better" while keeping every other variable the same should result in what most of the people involved would agree is a better play experience.

These are testable predictions. They haven't been rigorously tested.

9. The Chemistry Principle (Possible exceptions to 8):

It's possible that one or more participants of (what everyone experienced involved would agree to call) inferior quality might be more compatible than participants filling similar roles that  (what everyone experienced involved would agree to call) superior quality.

Thus replacing specific high-quality participants with lower-quality but more compatible participants might improve the game for everyone present.

Like: maybe everyone playing likes Rolemaster better than Tunnels and Trolls but they all know the rules to T&T better that day so they actually have more fun that day than they would had they played Rolemaster that day.

10. The Asymmetry Principle: Not all participants' contributions are equal in terms of deciding the quality of the game experience. 

Living participants have a choice about how active or passive to be, (with some--but less--latitude given to the GM, if there is a GM) and about how faithful to be to the suggestions of rules texts and other paraphernalia. Texts and paraphernalia can't make adaptive choices about the living participants or their contributions.

11. Prediction based on The Asymmetry Principle:

More often than not, if a living participant moves from a passive to an active role they will have more influence over the quality of the play experience and vice versa. If a player all living participants judge as "better" is more active in a group of average players then they will judge the play experience as having being better than if that participant was passive, all other variables being equal. Same goes for "worse"--etc.

12. Evaluated vs Unevaluated Challenges:

Nearly any task a live participant might perform during a game could be considered a challenge  ("it was challenging to think up a good name for my PC" etc) but there is a distinction between evaluated and unevaluated challenges. Evaluated challenges are linked to specific mechanically relevant in-game consequences.

Even if making up a name for a PC is a challenge for a given player, there are few games where the attempt to meet that challenge is evaluated--that is, a game procedure changes in a way that could be considered by those engaged as "towards" or "away from" a win condition.

Killing a monster in the game is usually an evaluated challenge. If, under no time pressure. you use only missile weapons at a distance against a very powerful but slow moving foe which itself has no missile weapons you have probably thought up a good strategy and are less likely to die before the monster. That is: it's evaluated.

"Evaluated challenges" are the core of what can, in some contexts. be called competition or competitive games.

Evaluated challenges are linked to in-game consequences though not necessarily in-the-game-world consequences, like successfully completing an evaluated challenge might get you a "hero point" which doesn't represent a specific in-world thing but is useful in the game.

13. Limits of Evaluated and Unevaluated Challenge

Evaluated challenges attempt to mechanically force responses to have more of a quality of "exercise" (doing something hard which theoretically involves learning or improvement. The analogy to physical exercise is literal.)

Unevaluated challenges admit a larger variety of outcomes into the game.

HOWEVER, participants who hold themselves to high standards of creativity--that is, try to think of solutions they normally would not--can experience as much exercise with unevaluated challenges.

14. Challenges and the Definition of RPGs

All RPGs have unevaluated challenges--or at least unevaluated activities. Even in Final Fantasy you can walk in a circle 90 times if you feel like it and it has no effect on the mechanics. Not so in a wargame.

Not all RPGs have evaluated challenges. These tend to be the games people claim "aren't games" or "aren't RPGs".

15. System-Specific Vs System-Agnostic Evaluated Challenges

Some evaluated challenges are tests of a players' mastery of the game system, and some are simply general problem-solving challenges.

If, under no time pressure, you use only missile weapons at a distance against a very powerful but slow moving foe which itself has no missile weapons you have probably thought up a good strategy and are less likely to die before the monster--that's a system-agnostic choice, because it would still be a good idea if the situation we're really happening.

If you use a Wand of Fireballs instead of a Rod of Fireballs because in that system the Wand is mechanically superior (does more damage, etc), that's a system-specific challenge.  Or, rather it's meeting a challenge in a system-specific way.

System-mastery is the quality of being good at system-specific challenges. System-specific challenges reward participants who've read the books carefully.

16. Simulation and System-Agnostic Evaluated Challenges

In order for system-agnostic evaluated challenges to occur in a game, the game must mechanically describe the relevant in-game objects to such a degree (and with such a fidelity to if-it-were-real) that the factors that make the tactic a good idea in real life are also factors which matter in the game.

For example, if combat is only resolved by comparing Fight scores of two opponents and then adding a d6 roll to each, the challenge of  knowing, under no time pressure, to use only missile weapons at a distance against a very powerful but slow moving foe which itself has no missile weapons, is negated, as none of the factors that make that a good tactical choice are in the game.

17. Note On Participant Preference and Options

Since many activities which include only unevaluated challenges or only evaluated challenges exist, most people who choose to play RPGs like both unevaluated and evaluated challenges.

Not all though, individual RPGs have enough distinctive characteristics and a distinctive enough audience that a person might like only one of those kinds of challenges but put up with the occasional call to engage the other in order to experience the other benefits.

18. Tom Sawyer Principle

Living participants' interests aren't static. Even players deeply-invested in one aspect of play might become interested in another if other participants make it look fun.


19. Participant Butterfly Effect

Many role-playing games allow for a wide variety of scenarios that are not only non-overlapping in terms of content but also in terms of the mechanics engaged. As participants invent games over and over, the character of two game sessions derived from the same text (ie "two groups playing the same game")  can be completely different even if the participants are the same. This is merely because of choices they make.

For example: if an Apocalypse World player decides to deal with a siege against their hardhold like this, the entire session might very well be both in terms of mechanics and fictional content basically non-overlapping with another session of Apocalypse World. The two groups have played a pair of "games" so different as to be as-different as if they had used different game texts (ie two games of Apocalypse World as different from each other as they would be from a game of Mutant Future).


more tomorrow...
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