At last, we have arrived at the meat of our argument. Having given you reading material, a most simple definition of a roleplaying game, our theories of design and three forces that oversee design, we now present you with the five aspects contained in every roleplaying game.
The Five Elements
We separate the details of roleplaying game designs into five elements: Avatars, Simulations, Uncertainty, Players and Setting.
Avatars
Avatars are the roles the players adopt. Also commonly referred to as characters (a term which we avoid here to prevent confusion with other applications of the term character). Avatars are a player’s touchpoint between the conversational interface of the roleplaying game and the game’s current state. By collecting mechanics that interface with the game’s simulations and providing context within the game’s setting, Avatars provide positionality within the game's settings and simulations that drive narrative response and strategic choice. The focus on avatars and making decisions through them is perhaps the hallmark feature of roleplaying games.
In Dungeons & Dragons, your role as an adventurer who seeks fame & fortune provides a motivation for your activities, and the particular mechanics and systems your class provides give you specific ways you can update the game state. If you are a cleric, you can restore health to other players and prolong longevity. If you are a thief, you can gather information about the unknown and open or discover new routes.1
Setting
Every roleplaying game has a setting—a place and time in which the action of the game transpires. Settings provide motivation for narrative choice. The setting can be contemporary and based on our own world and experiences, or it can be a fictional world either of the game designer’s invention or based on existing works of fiction. Even games that claim to have no setting have a setting! But for our purposes, since we are limiting our field of study to fantasy roleplaying games, our settings will likewise be fantastical places and times.
In Dungeons & Dragons, the setting is a generic fantasy pastiche—a canvas that contains multitudes so you can draw your own stories within it, whether from published worlds or your own design. But that pastiche has key elements associated with fantasy stories of the type that Dungeons & Dragons is built for—there are kingdoms, powerful mystic forces, evil creatures, magical spells, and treasure. These setting elements help motivate the choices players make within the games simulations—in a world of treasure, I am motivated to pursue it, take actions within the game’s frameworks to do so.
Uncertainty
Uncertainty refers to a core aspect of the roleplaying game as a game. By their nature, games must have indeterminate outcomes. A game with a known outcome is a book or play or performance—or perhaps an experiment. A game necessitates the unknown, and that unknown creates risk which motivates strategic choice. Thus we must ask what creates that uncertainty or variance in results. Most roleplaying games adopt a central die-roll mechanic as their uncertainty engine—Prince Valiant’s coin flips, Burning Wheel’s d6s vs a target number or Dungeons & Dragons d20 roll plus modifier.
In Dungeons & Dragons uncertainty is used in most of the game’s simulations, proposing that the challenge is in doing something well—the system simulates the quality of your idea, and the dice generate your performance—incorporating uncertainty into your performance and pressure on you the player to invent good ideas.
Simulation
A simulation is a method by which a game recreates facets of fiction or even reality. Simulations include common features like combat, injury, magic and even character creation. Simulations provide frameworks for strategic choice.2
In Dungeons and Dragons, the system of hit points simulates health and endurance in a way that creates a risk-forward environment, as it is framed as an expendable resource that can be restored. Different editions of the game have taken different approaches to how that health is restored, creating different types of inherent risk for characters in the game. How costly the restoration of health is influences how likely the player is to engage in activities that risk those hit points.
People
People—all games need at least one player and our conception of roleplaying games requires at least two—to have a conversation! This category of our concept includes rules, mechanics and systems that address the people at the table rather than trying to simulate an interaction, represent the world or create uncertainty.
In Dungeons & Dragons, one of the most important rules is the one that creates the Dungeon Master role. Their responsibilities touch the game world through a super system of creativity and operations. This dynamic lies at the center of Dungeons & Dragons core loop of exploration and challenges, requiring a player who manifests the results of those activities as an interpretation of the rules and dice. In early editions of the game, there existed a player role known as the Caller whose duty it was to state the party’s intention as a whole. This rule counterintuitively reinforced the solve-problems-together team dynamic of the game, and its removal in later editions reflected a desire for the game to provide more opportunities for individual players to take the spotlight.
This post concludes our intro to the Elements of Roleplaying Game Design. In our next series, we’ll be deep diving into each of these elements, with examples of how they work in game designs, painting a deeper, richer picture of the roleplaying game fundamentals.
If you enjoyed this essay, you can listen to more of us rambling on far too long about game design on our podcast, The Hypothesis.
On the Ancient Dragon: Dear reader, before we go on, we must acknowledge the ancient dragon in the room. Dungeons & Dragons is the first published fantasy roleplaying game and it is by far the most popular roleplaying game of all time. You might have heard of it. Despite its popularity, we do not seek to instruct on how to recreate that game. Dungeons & Dragons is only one type of one kind of roleplaying game. In addition to its many merits, that game is full of assumptions, quirks and oddities that need not be imitated by us or you. Rather, we seek to give you voice here to bring to life your own ideas around fantasy roleplaying games, not to carve a memorial to the Ur-Dragon.
Simulation not system. You may have noticed that we eschew the term “system” to describe any of our elements or forces. The term is overburdened in design as to be useless. And to our thinking, each element is a system and design is a collection of those systems. Thus we’ve developed a helpful rubric you can use when thinking about designing roleplaying games:
A roleplaying game is a collection of systems whose motivated interactions and differentiated operations produce a dramatic narrative.
A mechanic is a rule that players operate to produce a result. For example, rolling for weapon damage is a mechanic in Dungeons & Dragons. The die roll result reduces your target’s hit points.
A system is a collection of mechanics that produces more nuanced or more detailed results. Combat is a system in Dungeons & Dragons. It collects the mechanics of uncertainty, combat prowess, weapon damage, hit points, movement and magic and combines their results to produce exciting, unexpected results.