Delivering on the Promise

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Doublespeak

In 2024 I find myself wanting to have two conversations about a TTRPG. The first conversation is concerned solely with my preferences: Do I like this game? The second conversation involves the game’s quality: Is this a good game? 

The conversation on preference is fine, but the second conversation is often frustrating. It’s because the conversation on quality often is just the conversation about preferences pretending to be objective. Worse yet, the conversation taken to extremes becomes a mind-numbing version of “What a TTRPG should be.” You go far enough down this road and people are telling you it’s not a TTRPG if:

- the characters don’t have Hit Points

- there isn’t a combat system 

- the gamemaster doesn’t roll dice…

I wish I were being hyperbolic but I’ve had all of these conversations and worse in over 30 years in this hobby. I get why people turn their preference into design criteria. There are as  many ways to appreciate TTRPGs as there are to design them; that’s why we love them! But this variability means it is easy to confuse preference with what the game is actually trying to do. Just because it doesn’t do what you expect a game to do doesn’t make it bad.

I’m not looking for objective truth. I don’t want a one-size-fits-all box for TTRPGs to fit in. I want a small and actionable lexicon for describing the properties of an RPG. I've been using this with close friends for a while, and it’s actually been a corner piece of some really great discussions - we still get to hold our preferences while actively discussing what a game is doing and not doing.

When I say lexicon, I mean there are three words. Here they are.

Promise

A quality TTRPG is one that satisfies its promise.

Promise is the contract between the game and its audience about what experiences it aims to help players create. Promise is part designer intent, part context derived from genre and setting. TTRPGs don’t exist in a vacuum and must communicate their promise within the space of expectations that players bring from other games. If I tell you a game is Powered by the Apocalypse, that is a different set of expectations than if I tell you the game is a 5e OGL game. Putting preferences aside, the conventions that each of those choices brings impacts my game’s promise in different ways.

A role-playing game can’t be of a high quality without a strong and clear promise. It can stumble on how it delivers on the promise and still have great impact, but I can’t think of a game with a muddled or poor promise that overcomes it.

At a high level, the ways a game implements its promise are with consistency and economy.

Consistency

A quality TTRPG satisfies its promise in a way that is appropriately consistent for different groups of players.

Consistency describes how  easy it is for different groups is to have similar patterns of experience.  A game has low consistency if everyone tends to play the game their own way, with many house rules and different takes; it’s expected that people will make the rulings they need to at the table in a wide range of situations. A game is highly consistent if different play groups have different experiences (the whole purpose of games that create stories!) but similar patterns. 

High consistency is no better than low consistency. Why? Because it’s all about what the game is promising. Different games and genres promise different levels of consistency.

Economy

A quality TTRPG satisfies its promise with rules of sufficient economy.

Economy (or as my friend Chris Chinn likes to call it, "Burden") measures how much cognitive load a game incurs in fulfilling its promise. How many different rules and procedures does the game have? How complex are its rules? How much do we have to keep in working memory during play? 

The more cognitive load required, the lower its economy. Games with a high economy have a minimum of rules that achieve more than their initial footprint would imply.

I’ll repeat what I said on consistency: There is no right level of economy other than what is promised. What did the game and genre context tell you to expect, and what did you deliver? 

In Detail, in Practice

I hope these elements make sense and you can see where I’m going with it. I’ll talk about each of these in detail over the next few weeks, but in the meantime let me know what questions you have!