Deprogramming Design Inversions
How to avoid important TTRPG failures
There is something in human nature that intrigues us about the possibility of the underdog winning. The underdog’s victory is a sign that, even if one is crushed under the heel of something and expects to lose, it’s still possible to turn things around. This possibility fascinates us and inspires some towards strength and creativity.
But what happens when the underdog always wins? Or, to put a finer point on it, what happens when the underdog is expected to win? What happens when the injured and downtrodden female hero is expected to be stronger than the powerful male villain? When these things become acculturated, they create an inversion of reality seeded deep in our psyche that causes analytical, emotional, and spiritual confusion.
It begins innocently at first. We drop a rock and it floats to the sky! This is something novel, something exciting and mysterious. We insert a twist into our story. We speak of subverting expectations when we perform these acts—and it could just be a small flair, an innocent sleight-of-hand to create a memorable experience.
But mass subversion has led to stories where the heroes are the villains, the villains the victims, and the victims the heroes. We have entered a civilizational stage where new entries in the literary canon don’t merely subvert but invert reality, feet to the sky.
And tabletop RPGs have not avoided this shadow. Let’s examine some of these inversions and how to fix and avoid them.
Party-centric Gameplay
Decision-making on behalf of a character or set of characters in a TTRPG world should rely on two things. First, our pointed understanding of that gameworld’s rules, assumptions, and conventions. Second, our understanding of the same set of things from reality to fill in the gaps and allow for non-disjoint interpolations.
If my character sees a woman present her hand in response to a trade deal agreement, I don’t need to ask whether his hand can move normally through the atmosphere to meet hers, whether the intermediate substance between our hands is made of syrup or boiling-hot steam. And yet, the game itself by RAW is almost certainly silent on these issues. The game has enough rules to lend specific expectations, and reality fills in the rest—that is the pattern.
When we have a TTRPG world where the session party of characters is always the central consideration, that undermines a healthy mind’s ability to reason about the gameworld. The gameworld cracks at the edges and eventually falls away into an amorphous fog.
Something happens? It must be related to our party’s quest. Someone approaches us? They’re here to progress the party’s plot. An event halfway across the world reaches our ears through the town crier? It’s clearly a call for us to intervene.
This creates a severe party-centric narcissism—which in turn feeds other worse kinds of narcissism. Player spotlight. Atomic turns that take 20+ minutes. Meandering, meaningless diversions with silly-voiced merchants—leading nowhere! This sort of vapid, self-serving me-time pattern of TTRPG participation is, unfortunately, what most people expect when they gather to play.
The gameworld is discovering the party rather than the party discovering the gameworld. When the world has no concerns of its own, it exists merely as a tool to help players guide their next steps—thus, it ceases to exist!
The Fix: The Disinterested Gameworld
Not every piece of information is relevant to us. A squabble between sisters three days ago may relate to our concerns—or it may be fruitless noise. The fact that we ran into a basilisk on the way into the village may be something sinister or merely a freak occurrence. We must learn whether it’s meaningful or not. Slowly but surely, we build an understanding of the gameworld—what kind of character it has and what events are taking place.
But what happens if we assume every data point was made specifically to present to us? There isn’t any negative space for the world to simply be; the world’s facts and events and character are all part of a grand design to spur us towards our quest.
To correct these problems, the gameworld needs to have actors and motion within it that do not care about the aims of low-level characters. If this sounds too abstract, here’s a simple rundown of the pieces needed.
A gameworld map—physical space for conflict between actors to play out
Realms that lay claim to parts of the map
Well-specified powerful actors; class, level, important role in respective realms
A point or several points of conflict—fight over resources, land ownership claims, realm heirs, good vs. evil etc.
An organized way to game out this conflict as time passes
If we have these elements in play, we have a gameworld that just does not care about low-level characters unless those characters can somehow contribute to the ongoing conflicts. The global conflict adds not only interest and intrigue to the players’ decision-making, it allows them a chance to factionalize—to start taking on tasks where their preferred powerful actors will benefit. This kind of kingmaking instinct comes naturally to players.
This makes navigating the gameworld more interesting. Rather than single-mindedly pursuing their quest, the players are hunting for ways to be more relevant in a world that barely acknowledges they exist. Character death makes more sense in this world; it’s about power, after all. If a character dies, well it’s probably no big deal since they were weak and irrelevant! Roll up a new one.
Eventually, player characters (PCs) will reach a level where the major actors in the gameworld will notice. Suddenly, a lot of the characters the PCs meet will have their aims centered around the PCs—but it will have been earned. It will be an organic outcome of the PCs being able to gain and exert enough power that they have become name-level actors themselves.
It will be the game running as it always has, reaching the players as a natural consequence of its underlying machinery.
Dice as Exerting Influence
The most famous statement in all of recorded history about dice is “Iacta alea est,” (the die is cast) attributed to Iulius Caesar as he marched his army across the Rubicon in defiance of the Roman Senate, bringing about civil war. Today, the quote is often used in situations characterizing a point of no return, a line which cannot be uncrossed.
But there is more to this phrase than that. He is in no way certain about the outcome of the upcoming conflict. War is a thing which often takes on a life of its own, particularly as it drags out; as a commander, he is distinctly aware of this. It is not merely that the dice, once thrown, cannot be un-thrown; the results they’ll ultimately show are unknown.
He made his preparations. He made his plans. He gamed out political maneuvers. But the war, he knew, would play out in an ultimately unpredictable way. The throw of the dice signals an end of his influence over the results.
But today, whenever a player’s turn comes up, they are excited to finally exert some control over circumstances by rolling dice. Let’s clarify this confusion and see how it comes about.
Unbundling the Player Turn
In atomic turn structure designs, players wait until their initiative comes up in the turn order. Then they perform their actions, rolling dice associated with those actions to determine the outcome. The decision-making, declaration of the action, and the resolution of the action are all wrapped up in a confused bundle called the player’s turn.
For contrast, imagine instead a system where every player declares what they intend to do before initiative is determined. The style of declarations has to be different. “I’m going to move to B3 and attack the goblin in C2,” is too specific—we don’t know ahead of time if B3 or C2 will be occupied or by whom etc. Thus, “I’m going to move into melee, in front of my back-rank allies, and attack,” is a more appropriate style.
Let’s go further and imagine that initiative is by side instead of by participant. Us vs. them. Then, after all participants have committed to actions, we discover which side goes first.
There is no room, after having declared actions, to intervene and make updated decisions while the actions are being resolved. The stack of declared actions is being worked through, and we are using the dice only to discover what happens. This splitting of the decision-making and resolution steps makes it more clear that dice are not a means of exerting control—they are instead expressing fate’s influence over our declared actions.
Certainty as a Basis for Uncertainty
If our character attacks a target from shadows; or from behind; or if the target is harried by some curse, then we expect bonuses for that character when attacking that target (or relative penalties on the target). The reasoning is simple: mechanics model action. Actions that are easier to execute should, correspondingly, be more likely to succeed.
Consider a character that needs to roll 14 or better to strike a target. The character receives a magic boon, “True Strike,” giving him a +15 bonus. Does he need to roll when making an attack? The clearest and least complicated answer is that he does not need to roll; he hits automatically.
This is worth reiterating. Not only is it quantitatively true at a glance, it strains common sense to entertain any other answer. If we need to roll a 14+ and receive a bonus of 15, we need to roll -1 or better—it is literally impossible to do otherwise!
Despite that, there are plenty of design structures out there that have led us to question this simple observation. Rather than wallowing in the weeds with them, let’s examine a more pointed question.
If the target is completely restrained (e.g. by magic), does our character need to roll to hit? As with so many other subjects, AD&D gives us the answer with the most clarity.
(DMG pg. 70)
…[held] opponents are automatically struck by any attack to which they would normally be subject, and the maximum damage possible according to the weapon type is inflicted each time such an opponent is so attacked.
Not only is there no need to roll dice for the attack, there is similarly no need to roll damage for the weapon. The chance to hit is maximized (100%), and the effect of the strike is maximized (highest possible damage dealt). “Maximizing potential along the array of possibilities” is a clear and logically consistent interpretation of certainty in a TTRPG context.
Anything that fundamentally strays from this pattern invites confusion and strains common-sense notions, weakening the connection between the player and the gameworld. This concept implicitly rejects the premise that dice-rolling equates to influence or control.
Simply put, players are more in control when actions they declare require zero dice to be rolled.
The Fix: Let Everything Happen (except when you don’t)
Just let everything go without rolling dice. Attacking? Yes. Skill-checks? Yes (but don’t use skill-checks!1 ). Jumping, hiding, running—absolutely everything. Mentally allow it all to simply happen. Then ask whether it’s wise, what it implies. This is simply a reversal of what is conventional.
For a great many things, there is no chance at all of failure! Getting out of bed in the morning, walking 5 feet unhindered, eating breakfast, falling down a well—none of these kinds of things require dice rolling, and we know they don’t. But if an assassin character has managed to make their way to a sleeping target, why are we asking them to roll dice to see if their dagger connects?
The warnings have been ongoing for weeks, but the players decided to stay in town. A tsunami approaches—one with enough power to flatten the whole city. When it finally arrives, are we going to let them roll to see if they get that magical 20 on their reflex save, or whatever? No, it wipes them out.
They fall 1,000 feet? Dead. They drop a troll 1,000 feet? Dead. They successfully launch a boulder downhill directly at a unit of militia? Flattened; routed. These kinds of things are more obvious to us once we are in a mindset to allow things to happen. Only consult the dice when it’s unclear what the outcome must be.
We can train the players to seek certainty in their actions (they will chase success, after all) and train ourselves to recognize certainty. Give the dice back to Fate, and mediate more of your game’s activities without randomness.
Passive Player; Active Referee
Conventional expectations demand that the referee put on an entertaining show for a group of mostly passive players. This includes providing a setting/gameworld, persons of interest in the gameworld, hand-made encounters, a story/plot interwoven with the PC backstories, and so on. Players merely need to create their special dragonblooded half-toaster Revenant/Priest/Hexslinger and show up to figure out where the referee wants them to go next.
Why is this approach an inversion of good gameplay? Why does it result in outcomes and behaviors that seem like a parody of the hobby rather than its fulfillment?
It’s because it is an obscene comedy and a deep perversion that serves only to hide what TTRPGs have to offer.
The Fix: Active Players; Passive Referee
It would be too extensive a task to break conventional play down into pieces just to demonstrate that they fit together poorly. Thus, a more effective means to dispel this problem is to focus on methodically unleashing the full breadth of TTRPG potential.
In a healthy game, the players are plotting their next move. They are thinking, rethinking, overthinking, and out-thinking themselves and everything else they’re imagining to be true. They are deciding where to go, speculating on what’s there, and plotting how to survive what they might meet.
How are they able to do this? With a combination of rules understanding and a discoverable gameworld. Understanding rules is plain, but what makes a gameworld discoverable?
If the players have a gameworld map (or some meaningful portion of it), they can base such decisions on their understanding of different places on that map. The map can be (arguably, should be) highly incomplete, and they can still use it as the basis for these decisions.
There is a natural and rich connectivity that maps provide which simple word-based descriptions cannot. In addition, maps bring inciting questions. Why is this realm shaped like a duck instead of a rectangle? Why are three realms intersecting at this one point? Why doesn’t realm So-and-so expand to the south?
For these maps to be useful, they must contain particular places. These places could be regions, towns, households, zones, realms—any variety of partition.
Imagine you start a campaign in zone A. Among the first things the party will ask is “what’s here?” i.e. what features or points of interest are present in zone A? Their characters may have a lot of information about A that can be “revealed” to the players.
But then they will also have the same questions about B and C and so on before they decide to go there. This seems to imply unending referee toil to anyone paying attention.
A procedure to populate the partitions with “stuff” is the essential tool needed. The variety of “stuff” will depend heavily on the game and setting, but the game itself should provide a method for a referee to discover what is in a partition by just rolling a few dice, making one or two simple assumptions. Excellent games like AD&D and ACKS have well-defined procedures to accomplish this.
In a practical sense, the referee can sit down with a partitioned map and systematically discover things in each partition. Some of those things would be “common knowledge” in the gameworld—i.e. the PCs would see it on the map and know of its presence. Other things will be hidden because of their nature, yet they are nevertheless present.
This (finite) amount of work establishes the static information of the gameworld. But that is only one part of the story.
In the best case, the gameworld is a dynamic machine. The key assumption behind a well-designed TTRPG is that the world is full of moving parts.
An example of this assumption is an Encounter System that is used to discover when and where encounters happen. Every time a party (whether PC or NPC) moves from one partition to another, the referee rolls for an encounter.
Yes, for those of you still new to these ideas, these encounters are discovered while playing—nothing hand-crafted about it. Encounter Systems answer questions about whether, why, and how an encounter can occur; they provide a system to work out all the details, including what creatures (and how many) are present.
Now we’ve arrived at a discoverable gameworld—one which can be investigated, scouted, and roamed. There is now a definite “cost” to move from one partition to another (a risked encounter) to weigh against potential gains. We have the static elements of the world (towns, realms, landmarks, dungeons etc.) and the dynamic aspects (Encounter Systems and other generative methods).
With the combination of dynamic action and static setup, the players have a means of exposing themselves to challenges that reward mastery and luck with power. This power-seeking will drive them forward and inevitably dovetail with the natural motions of the gameworld’s ongoing fiction. PCs and NPCs in dynamic harmony.
What is the referee doing in all this? After some map-filling solitaire, the referee is mostly adjudicating events. Encounter Systems cannot, by their nature, be detailed enough to provide a complete context to their content. Interpolating between events, some creative addition or subtraction, gaming out NPC goals and logic—refereeing between the game rules and the players at the table.
In this way, the referee is a passive actor compared to conventional understanding. He is stuck between the game making demands and the players making demands, and most of what he does is mediation between these two.
A Macro Problem
If you’ve detected that The Disinterested Gameworld and the Active Player; Passive Referee solutions are related, you’re getting it. In a more subtle way, the problem with certainty being treated unseriously is nearly as important.
There are a host of such issues that plague modern TTRPG design and conventional understanding that players bring to the table. It is no accident that a significant movement of hobbyists (including, notably, the BrOSR) has latched onto AD&D in response.
Despite derision (whether overtly or implicitly) from many game designers who came after, AD&D never displayed or encouraged the tremendous rot we see in the holistic poisoning of the TTRPG discourse.
Elements as simple as “don’t saddle players with a plot” and “keep the passage of time in mind so nonsense doesn’t occur” will be met with wild shock and even mockery. No one would do that; it would be crazy to play that way, they say, strangled by a complex support structure of confused assumptions and anti-patterns of play.
This is neither the first nor the last time the topic will be addressed here. Treating TTRPGs as games—with rules, systems, procedures—seems an odd hill to be fighting over, but it’s less surprising when the default mindset and approach of many players is to casually throw away rules after a surface-level judgment. Designers have bloodied their own knees to gut the TTRPG arena so it’s palatable to people that, in truth, would be happier playing a video game.
It takes serious planning, effort, and energy to build a fantastic work of architecture, but it can be appreciated for centuries. TTRPG campaigns are capable of being great works in a similar way, but for many it will require a significant mindset overhaul to move in that direction.
Rejecting the mistakes of modern conventional play is a good start.
More reading on skill checks: