The Nature of the TTRPG
Categorically circumscribing the concept
The central confusions and failures surrounding modern tabletop role-playing games are largely a product of the mass forgetting of TTRPG historical roots. From a design perspective, recovering these ideas comes in two parts.
First, simple investigation and study—reading the old rules, playing them out, and seeing their implications. Second, combating poorly conceived notions that are derived from products masquerading as TTRPGs—or products whose core elements are a significant departure from the TTRPG’s intrinsic qualities. If we do not fight these ideas off, our designs (and our gameplay) are likely to become acculturated by simple inertia.
To accomplish the second part, we have to get back to what a TTRPG actually is and what it isn’t. If we want to get at the benefits that TTRPGs have to offer, we must envision the most complete concept that surrounds and enables the wizards-and-lasers adventures, without being distracted by the theming. We must look beyond specific rules or rulesets and ask about the essential nature of the TTRPG.
TTRPGs are (at least) Wargames
But what is a “wargame,” and why insist on the term?
Consider an ancient Roman general tasked with pushing the barbarians back from the borderlands. He assembles trusted commanders to his tent, and they discuss what is known and how to proceed. In this time in history, there are no mobile phones; neither internet searches nor TV news are available. The Roman general occupies a world completely different from our own—to the point of unrecognizability. The information he has is scant—perhaps it’s been a decade or more since his predecessor saw to this deadly problem, and few written records exist.
Consider yet another world—that of the Cold War period in the United States, pre-1990. There are no smartphones (from a 2020s perspective), though radio towers and satellite signals are capable of creating rapid messaging systems. The challenges faced by leaders in this world are not those of communication delays or lack of knowledge references but a political fog of war—one with a potential nuclear assault hiding behind it.
The world of the Romans and the world of the Cold War era are vastly different from one another—and each are distinct from our own world today. Nevertheless, the Roman general’s solution to his problem is remarkably similar to that of the US Cold War strategists.
The Roman general and his advisers discuss possibilities. If legions A and B secure territory T, what are the downsides? Are we leaving holes open for the barbarians to attack our camps? Are there better distributions of manpower? Which risks are unavoidable? Which locations, if scouted, could best inform our plans? Gaming out scenarios is an attempt to find the best course of action.
A giant table is laid out, and a hundred analysts and other functionaries of the US government are given packets. “You will be the Soviet Union. He will be Chile. She will be Cuba,” and so on down the line—a hundred roles, each with their own packet of dossiers, statistics, and essential facts. Each role is tasked with increasing the wealth, power, and station of its domain; this is wound up in the complexities of their “side” not losing and the opposing “side” not winning. The goal of this exercise is to discover new opportunities, threats, and a finer understanding of the mess the world has shifted towards. Gaming out scenarios is a means of uncovering the “hidden” rules embedded in this complex situation.
Though there are no miniatures on the table representing Napoleonic era fighting-men, these two situations—separated by thousands of years—are different types of the same thing: wargames.
Wargames are Tools
Avoiding the trouble inherent in crafting a precise definition of a wargame, we can understand them best by grasping their purpose as a goal-driven scenario-based exercise. Their structure offers the promise of answers that may be difficult to achieve except by gaming out the scenario.
Sometimes the goal is to find the “best” solution to a situation; the Roman general wants to know the best distribution of his forces. Sometimes the goal is something more murky like investigation; the nuclear wargame is set up so that participants’ desire to perform well should uncover hidden avenues of victory and defeat.
The fact that we often execute wargames for entertainment is not a reflection of their telos; people can take joy in many things, and this is one of them.
Second-World Exercises
Already we can see that wargames contain the seeds of the TTRPG. Just as the Roman commanders envisioned what events might transpire with their barbarian foes, so too can we imagine the events and conditions of some other world. Just as the US government examined the subtleties of nuclear politics, so too can we explore the nuances of an imagined place filled with entities whose precise aims are uncertain.
The TTRPG, as a concept, is the logical extension of these historical wargaming examples1. When someone says “TTRPGs are wargames,” it does not place any limitation on the TTRPG! The TTRPG is at minimum a wargame, and it has the ability to be substantially more.
A wargame is usually concerned with a contained scenario, but a TTRPG extends the “scenario” to include an entire cosmology—the gameworld2—of possibilities.
If we imagine a gameworld in enough detail and take the steps necessary to specify that world’s nature to others, then they too can participate in this mental exercise. The imagined world need not conform to a known time and place! It is well within our ability to imagine possible events from pre-history, for example. In the same way, it is simple enough for creative minds to imagine places apart from what any living human has ever experienced.
Thus, moving forward from the utilitarian aims of historical wargaming exercises, it is easy to contemplate the Second-World Exercise as a creative enterprise, as an engaging means of entertainment, or simply as a structured way of addressing imaginative What-If scenarios.
But importantly, this is the TTRPG’s beginning; it is the logical extension of the wargame concept to the fullness of a Second-World Exercise.
Taking on Roles
Possibly the most important innovation in Second-World Exercises is the role aspect from which role-playing games get their name. The Roman general will get the most use out of his attempts to counter barbarian movements if he can adopt the mindset—play the role of—the barbarian raid leader. Actors in any scenario are always limited by resources, plausibility, motivations, and so on; attempting to understand their thinking will produce ideas that accord with their likely courses of action!
In nuclear politics wargames, the various agents are given information to provide context for future decisions, but these exercises would be infinitely more useful if the actors could simulate what the actual world leaders would do!
How does this idea extend to the TTRPG? Since the TTRPG’s purpose is not problem-solving, attempts to convey an internally consistent world are not aimed at some notion of accuracy! Instead, they are tools that enhance this creative exercise by offering additional constraints players must contend with and additional support for mentally meshing with gameworld circumstances.
Are players stuck worrying over exactly what their character would think? Are players merely trying to “simulate” what these characters would say and do? No—understanding the considerations their character would naturally contemplate is a tool that helps them adopt a gameworld mindset. The decision-making is entirely up to the player taking on the role.
TTRPGs are Disordered
There are many ways to state this idea, but let’s clarify what we mean.
In the boardgame Betrayal at House on the Hill, players choose from among characters with different strengths and weaknesses to investigate a mansion as a team. The mansion is discovered room by room, with the next room appearing determined in a manner similar to rolling a die.
During the course of investigating this mansion, spooky things and traps will attempt to kill players or otherwise hinder their investigation. As the investigation ramps up, an endgame scenario will trigger—for example, the mansion will catch on fire. Some number of rooms will burn each game turn, setting a final time limit and putting enormous pressure on the players to bring things to an end or lose.
Though this experience has many of the trappings of a TTRPG, no one could ever mistake this game for one because it is too highly ordered!
Freedom is Chaos
Consider an established TTRPG campaign where players “dungeon crawl” room by room through haunted houses like this. The players take too long or otherwise trigger the burning to start. They can simply insist on finding ways to put out the fire—or to avoid it or ignore it or otherwise defeat it. Even if you tell the players that the pantheon’s fire deity started the fire and specifically wants this place to burn, they can choose to defy him—even unto death!
More to the point, they can defy the prescribed method of playing and insist that a Second-World have more objects of interest than burning mansions.
In a boardgame (and in video games and many other kinds of games), the rules tell us what we can do. But in a TTRPG, the rules almost exclusively tell us what we cannot do (often by implication) or how we can do a few particular things. On almost every matter, the rules are silent; the giant unstructured void of the gameworld dominates the tiny islands of well-specified structure that exist in the game.
However, this does not mean “anything goes.” TTRPGs, as Second-World Exercises, implicitly work on the basis of substituting our own world’s “rules” into the game, except where the game’s rules specify differences. How many TTRPG rulebooks explain the idea of gravity (“things fall”) or explain in detail what a “door” is and the many ways it might be opened? “Most people have noses, or airtubes between their eyes (usually two eyes).” Such details are unnecessary and serve only as a distraction.
Creativity (often) defeats structure
Consider a wargame scenario with a battlefront along the border between Eastland and Westland. Based on the wargame’s rulebook, it might be about moving supplies to optimally serve battles; or it might be about deciding where to place limited reserves of fighting-men. It might be about a lot of typical logistics-focused activities that war necessarily involves.
But if the Eastland vs. Westland conflict was dropped into a TTRPG setting, a player whose character is loyal to Westland may decide to simply assassinate the king of Eastland and hope the army organization falls apart—or he may decide to insist on a diplomatic solution; or he may decide to involve a third nation and so on. A Second-World Exercise has the same unimaginably huge solution space as a real-world situation. Problems can be attacked from angles that are difficult for a single mind to anticipate.
Even if the game has a prescribed way of playing, it is an essential aspect of a Second-World Exercise that we can at least occasionally venture outside the lines of that prescription. This is what separates the TTRPG from other kinds of games, and it is why we say it is disordered in a fundamental way.
Order Not Included
Though many of us have been exposed to disordered games (like Make-Believe), most players these days have been acculturated into highly ordered gaming spheres. These players come to TTRPGs expecting an ordered game. They look for ordered pathways through what they perceive to be the game’s logical progression of state.
For example, new players will read up on “character builds” so that the characters they create can more successfully climb the “level ladder.” Once they reach near the highest rungs of that ladder, they tell themselves that the campaign is soon to reach its “ending.” And they intend to “win” the campaign by defeating the big bad guy.
But no! The actual progression of the TTRPG’s state is, more naturally, that new players make characters who fail because the players are inexperienced—many such cases!
Most computer games are so intensely ordered that we can speak of “pathways” or “branches” to reach specific endings. They are sometimes so highly ordered that we can achieve a full understanding of the game’s narrative structure (including all its mutually exclusive narrative pathways) by reading a relatively simple wiki.
But consider the task of creating a wiki for the possibilities in a TTRPG—even a crude and simplistic one! It is not only infeasible to map out the ways forward from character creation, it is impossible in principle.
When we encounter a problem in a video game or board game, we think back to the rulebook—how do the game’s mechanisms work, and which lever can we apply to solve the problem? But when we encounter problems in a TTRPG gameworld, there are no such limitations. Game mechanics are a mere point of entry into the logic that the gameworld runs on—and our problem-solving options are limited only by our imaginations and our understanding of the gameworld’s fundamental laws.
If we want order in a TTRPG, its only source is ultimately its players imposing their ordered will on the Second-World environment. This leads us to the next intrinsic quality of the TTRPG.
TTRPGs are Games
If TTRPGs are sprawling, disordered evolutions of wargames—Second-World Exercises—then there is a final lingering question: are they still necessarily games?
The simple answer is “yes.”
A few tiny islands of well-specified structure in the rules sit next to an overwhelming void of unspecified ideas. But importantly, those unspecified ideas are necessarily informed by the way things work in our own world. In our world, only metaphysicals are constant; all else is change. The state of things changes over time but not because of some chaotic bubbling at the root of existence. Causes precede effects—we can exert influence to steer outcomes.
To skip beyond the overphilosophical musings: the world undergoes state changes, and we have inputs in those changes. The idea of “success” and “achievement” is related to our ability to create changes that empower or uplift ourselves.
Players, with their characters, can achieve similar ideas of success through changing the gameworld’s state to be more in their favor. Did they gain a class level (a big boost in personal power)? Then they have been more successful than someone who didn’t. Did they gain in-game wealth or influence important events? That’s another dimension along which they can achieve success.
Among all the organizing principles, the chief one that TTRPGs must naturally follow would have to be excellence, in the sense of mastery. A Second-World is open to us, and the highest achievement we could envision is absolute mastery over it from within its own confines. This principle best captures the TTRPG’s telos. It is an unending test of our abilities and an implicit challenge to go further; it is undeniably a game in the most essential sense.
There are multiple paths to excellence in this Second-World. A participant who is better at executing the game to achieve excellence within the gameworld is considered an excellent player! The organizing principle of excellence thus extends, like all games, to a meta-level outside the game; it is a social phenomenon and its own dimension of success.
Can playing a TTRPG create stories? Yes, but that is not its telos. Trying to design a TTRPG explicitly to create stories will see one constructing something else altogether. The events that happen during a TTRPG campaign can, on reflection, be considered stories—but no one sat down and wrote them out beforehand. If they did, then this “TTRPG” is not a Second-World Exercise at all!
Can TTRPG gameworlds be envisioned as giant simulations? Yes, but that is not its telos. Simulation can enhance the diegetic3 quality of the gameworld, making it easier for players to understand the the world from their character’s perspective. This is a great tool, but it is not the telos of the TTRPG.
The most complete concept of the TTRPG is as an arena for mastery. After-the-fact reconstructed stories can enhance that, and systems-driven simulationist designs can enhance that. But the real purpose of the TTRPG is as a game—stakes on the line, winning, mastery; excellence.
Constructed Excellence
As designers, it is essential that we envision the future of TTRPGs. We are presently gathering the tools and the will to finally throw off the weight of modern missteps. The goal of crafting TTRPGs that reach further and aspire to be higher instantiations of their inherent form is within our grasp.
The closer we get to understanding the highest form of the TTRPG, the more success we will have in creating contenders to battle it out for TTRPG apotheosis. Keep playing, keep rejecting falsehoods, and continue to craft the future of this hobby!
Thank you for your readership! Primeval Patterns thrives on the basis of the sincere interest and support of hobbyists like you.
Some other interesting things:
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Check out BMD, a far-future wargame-infused TTRPG about slaughtering aliens.
Think carefully when designing or using skill systems!
Understand starting an ACKS campaign from scratch.
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Not only is the TTRPG the conceptual successor of the wargame concept, D&D was historically developed as a direct consequence of a free-for-all Second-World Exercise that was the earliest known example of the “Braunstein.”
See a focused discussion of the role of the gameworld in TTRPGs.
The most thorough examination of diegesis in TTRPGs displays the concept from every angle and articulates its importance in TTRPG design.
Really liked this post! The idea of categorizing TTRPG games as disordered second-world exercises seems like a useful framework
I'm deeply curious. Hope i understood you right.
When you write that TTRPGs are at least wargaming could the "war" part of "wargaming" also be the simulation of all kinds of non-martial conflicts(ex: racing, courtrooms, supernatural healthcare, or sleuthing) instead of the simulation of a literal war?