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Zornhau’s Substack

What Isn't a Role-Playing Game: A Final Note

The last few posts have been something of a series, all inspired by a single argument: “Storytelling Games are Not Roleplaying Games.” In What Isn’t a Role-Playing Game? I talked about attempts to redefine the term while also making an argument for why the task seems both doomed and probably pointless…

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2 years ago · 4 likes · Zornhau Studios

Edit 29/01/2024: The intent of my RPG articles is always to Signpost the experiences. Clear the cruft around tabletop game terminology which makes discussion difficult if not impossible and makes people unable to find the experience they’re looking for.

Intended Procedure

The procedure for running a game.

Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World is a game meant to be played in a very specific way, following very specific procedures, and in pursuit of a very specific creative agenda. If you try to play it in other ways, you’re going to struggle with it. It will get in your way, or fail to support you, and generally be a less pleasant experience. We can say the same thing about Ron Edward’s Sorcerer. The creative agenda and intended play style are baked into the rules in such a way that it will fall apart if you try to treat it like, say, D&D.

The term “Playstyle” here is hiding a deeper truth. If something is baked into the rules it is not merely a style, it is the Intended Procedure.

Intended Procedure is the way of running the game that incorporates the core components, practices, rules, mechanics, and techniques that make up the game. In a way, it just is the Game. A role playing game’s procedures are not about producing a specific discrete outcome such as victory, but rather the correct operation of the “machine” of the game, with a compatible intent. Example: Timekeeping is a Procedure.

A huge range of play styles fit into a game’s Intended Procedure because intended procedure is not about style. One player may prefer the style of a cunning wizard who uses tricks rather than flashy fireballs. A second player may prefer a straightforward honourable fighter. Both styles are supported in the rules and procedures of the game. Every playstyle is not supported by every game; a play style has to fit with what a game is about. Ars Magicka doesn’t support the fighting man very well because it is a game about cunning wizards.

A GM may like to plan complex maze-like dungeons, another may prefer straightforward dungeon layouts, but incorporate foes with great tactical acumen. Both of these are styles. In this case particular styles of content. (Though the game would have to include dungeons in what it’s about).

A game such as FATE massively differs from AD&D or GURPS in the form of its Intended Procedure. In FATE, one may gain some kind of advantage with tactics, but the intended procedure of FATE is different: A character attempting to do so will quickly run out of FATE points and find his tactics thwarted by the mechanics of the game: One can only win if one can pay a FATE Point to enforce that narrative outcome. The Intended Procedure of FATE produces the Three Act Structure.

This is not, I think, a jargon term. The procedures of the game that are intended by the designers are the intended procedures (of the game). Considering how fuzzy these discussions get, I had to define it.

Other Terms

Occasionally a response to my previous writing shows confusion on what some other words mean. Here are definitions:

• Game here refers to the total materials of an RPG. Not a campaign. “Game” does not refer to your campaign or any campaign. You are playing a game of D&D, that is your campaign, but a “storytelling game” or an “RPG” is not any particular campaign, it is the game itself, the dice used, the content of the books, including but not limited to the rules, and the procedures of the rules.

• Roleplaying means making decisions for a character in a fictional world based on their rationale. This includes decisions based on game mechanics connected to the campaign world. Roleplaying is commonly conflated with character storytelling, but these are distinct. It is also commonly conflated with play-acting or improv acting, such as speaking in character dialogue. Roleplaying includes deciding what to say; it is not limited to such.

• Traditional RPGs refers to most or any RPG that can be labelled “simulationist”. Merely having roleplay elements and being a game does not make a game an RPG or else most wargames are RPGs.

Do Most RPGs Have an Intended Procedure?

That specific intention in design makes all of these games outliers. They constitute a small fraction of the RPG hobby and its history. Nearly all of what constitutes “traditional rpgs” — every edition of Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, Pathfinder, Rolemaster, Runequest, Savage Worlds, Shadowrun, Warhammer Fantasy Role Play — has been almost entirely unconcerned with specific play style or creative agenda in the way that Apocalypse World or the OSR movement is.

This is the core of Zornhau’s assertion, and the conventional wisdom in large parts of the modern TRRPG community: Traditional TTRPGs have no intended design, they’re just piles of mechanics and stats to be used in any manner. But is this true; are most TTRPGs, including the ones listed there lacking an Intended Procedure?

No: They are not lacking an Intended Procedure.

Much of AD&D is laying out procedures, and saying these must be followed consistently to create the intended game experience. AD&D is not an aberration either; as the supplements for OD&D and text in AD&D explain the rules and procedure aid out were always intended.

The lack of comprehensive written procedures in early games is not a design choice as Zornhau implicitly assumes, it was just a side effect of a new medium still in development. This is the killshot on the idea RPGs are procedure or intent agnostic from the beginning: There are multiple rules, in AD&D marked as vital and essential, that the community has ignored for decades. Thus people —including other designers— thought using the game’s procedures or not was simply a stylistic choice, and not in reality a core requirement to make the game function.

Even many new games leave the intended patterns unsaid to some degree: Conventional wisdom has designers believe core game procedures are not part of an RPG. Or they assume their intent is conveyed implicitly in the rules.1
Forge games have made this mistake too: In Blades in the Dark (BITD), John Harper lays out the intended procedure for the game for the most part however, he assumed the inkblot diagram (BITD page 9) showed how the Free play and Downtime components of the game were to be fluidly switched between rather than discrete steps. The diagram didn’t convey that, and thus he had to clarify later. BITD Players have accepted they were BITD wrong when they heard this (as far as I know).

Evidence of Intent

There’s evidence going right back to the start of the hobby. Gary Gygax made AD&D as a clarification of how he intended D&D to be played. To quote

Gygax spent a lot of ink in the DMG bemoaning that he and Arneson had failed to make OD&D's design philosophy and expected play patterns more explicit. That means that the fact that it appeared to be experience-agnostic was an editorial failure, not a design goal!

Here is some of that ink:

In the quotes above the “killer dungeon” that murders player characters left and right, and the too-generous “monty haul” campaigns are both called nadirs of Dungeon Mastering. Gygax explicitly says “the uninitiated DM cannot be severely faulted” for their errors. He places the blame not on these DMs, but on himself for not adequately explaining the intent, meaning and spirit of the game. This sentiment is repeated multiple times later, such as in the section on Time: “YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.”

Nowadays there is a perception of GMing as a difficult domain, a herculean task only the specially gifted can properly accomplish. It’s even called thankless; players remind each other to be grateful to their GMs. New GMs often struggle even with advice.

This is exactly what we should expect when one tries to run a game without following the proper procedures. When the intended procedure is ignored, other mechanics break down, and do not contribute to gameplay. Example: when timekeeping is ignored, tracking supplies and torches provides no gameplay. Tracking encumbrance provides no gameplay. Spending money on supplies is pointless. The decision and balance functions of “per day” or “per rest” are not fulfilled.

This still more powerful evidence RPGs have intention in their design, and thus intended processes, regardless of whether a particular rulebook states it.2

This is doubly true as the most popular system, D&D 5e is design and procedure-bipolar, and describes itself incorrectly; it was made by people who were themselves confused about what a TTRPG was, working with the legacy of the first one. They tried to cater to everyone; the result is “one of the hardest and least rewarding games to run.”

Traditional RPGs are easier with the right procedures

If RPGs indeed have intended procedures for play, then the opposite of the above should be also true:
Using the correct procedures for a game should make traditional systems easier to run. This is indeed the case. I know this experience is shared with others like me who intuited the procedures of the game.
AD&D lays out certain practices that are marked as vital for the campaign.

BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER, YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS8 DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE

— AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide p230.

This ordering of the game correctly is a hierarchy of considerations for AD&D: Player Characters and their considerations are subordinate to the campaign. The campaign is subordinate to the game as a whole. Though as Gygax says, the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules which is important, and that GMs shouldn’t allow the letter of the rules to become rope by which “Barracks Room Lawyers” can hang them with.

This ordering makes AD&D easier and more fun to run. Yet it’s not the whole of the Intended Procedure: timekeeping and other parts are marked as vital.

My own experience and the experience of others reflects this. As I have discovered the full extent of the the intended procedure for traditional RPGs, my games have become both easier to run and more fun for myself and my players. I feel like I was never that far off, but the full extent has been a noticeable improvement. Plenty of people taught themselves a traditional RPG, whether it was D&D or something else (in my case, GURPS), and we were able to intuit the intended procedure for the systems. But explicitly laid out procedures are better. The Time Use Cards and Improvement by Study rules provided in the GURPS Basic Set now make total sense! I use them regularly now that I’ve enforced Timekeeping and the ‘always on’ campaign to a good reception: Players like their characters doing things and learning! Those rules and cards included in GURPS show that these traditional TTRPGs were in fact, made with the assumption of a similar procedure to AD&D because they are the same medium, the same category of game: RPG.

RPGs were never one specific thing. There was never a purity and specificity of play experience for the Forge to undermine and redefine.

Turns out there was a specificity of play for the Forge to undermine. But they didn’t do all the work. Narrative gamers have been around since the start; as Gary Gygax quickly realised, people were misinterpreting this new medium.

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Ignoring the Procedure in Favour of Narrative

"People were trying to run “narrative,” story-driven games for as long as the hobby has existed."

While true, it doesn’t make them right. They didn’t follow the intended procedures of the games they were supposedly playing, including rules the creators marked as vital, and thus they made their campaigns harder to run and less fun.

The reasons for this are clearly varied: Some GMs are control freaks, some are frustrated authors. Others, including players, wanted something else; they weren’t going into a TTRPG with a desire to inhabit a role and explore a dangerous fictional world. They were going in with a story they wanted to tell.

Traditional RPGs generally do not care about story. They care about the Game (procedures) as a whole and fidelity of the campaign world before any player. Players and GMs are meant to deal with the unexpected and handle situations they didn't want to happen. The game itself issues challenges without care for plot — even to GMs!
These proto-storytelling gamers continually butted up against the procedures & systems producing something other than the story they desired to tell together. So they said ‘system doesn’t matter’, ignored the systems, and ran their games by (benevolent) fiat.

What The Forge Did: Redefinition of the Medium

“System does matter” was the rallying cry of the Forge. In fact, the idea that RPG systems are not intended for specific purposes is anathema to the Forge.3 That’s why Forge games like Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World are so clear about it.
In the end, Vincent Baker, Ben Lehman, Ron Edwards, John Harper, and co. made that ‘something else’ on indie-rpgs.com (aka The Forge) and then story-games.com: Storytelling Games.

To hear the fans of these games speak of discovering Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, or one of their derivatives is to hear someone who feels like they found the gold they were told was buried here after years of finding iron. Because that’s exactly what it is to them.

This is why I say storytelling games are distinct, separate from RPGs. They were made in conscious rejection of the core concepts of TTRPGs, with completely different procedures, in4 and for an utterly different intent.5 The members of the Forge looked at what they wanted these games to be, (not how RPGs were designed to work). Then they declared that their definition of what an RPG was the correct one.
The Forge in effect torpedoed one side of an already splitting culture; they disdained ‘Simulationists’ as in denial or even brain damaged. They looked at RPGs and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to play those, instead of a game where you were an author instead of an ‘actor’.6

Zornhau, you said that it’s pointless to try to (re)define what an RPG is. I disagree, as the evidence is right in front of me that it has been done before successfully. That success was so great that now simulationist7 gamers describe their simulationist RPG campaigns as storytelling. RPG players who have never heard of The Forge or GNS Theory use the concepts invented there.

Many people don’t like the idea that there is actually an intended way to run RPGs because it means they have been doing it wrong, and people don’t like being wrong.

Still, I reiterate:

Storytelling Games are not RPGs

Everything I’ve said that wasn’t about a specific RPG’s procedures also applies to Storytelling Games. If you try to play a storytelling game like BITD in the style of a traditional RPG, it’s either a bad time or it doesn’t even make sense. John Harper had to make a video that explicitly breaks down how rolling the dice only functions in a mutually exclusive use case to how dice rolls work in a traditional RPG. Yet knowledge of how BITD works is helpful for Microscope, and vice-versa. They sprung from the same theory, which is why they do belong in the same category.

If you’re driving nails with the butt of a screwdriver, someone who tells you you’re using the wrong tool and tries to hand you a hammer is trying to help you, not a gatekeeper. Even if you’re already having fun, you’ll have a better time. Or you might realise you wanted a screw instead of a nail all along.

In follow up articles I’ll expand on some of the points here, as well as respond to more of Zornhau.