There are many broad functions that rules can have. Here is one: representing the details of a broader fictional world. The fictional world might not work exactly like the world of day to day phenomenological experience that we inhabit and experience as the real world, but it nonetheless makes sense, loosely speaking. Sure, monsters might exist that we have never encountered and sorcerers might be able to, with long study, cast spells to open portals. But there remains the basic assumption that behind the scenes there is a living, breathing world that both shapes and constrains the shared imagination of play.

Call these reflective rules. Rules as the physics of the imagined world. That is, the rules reflect the imagined campaign. In reflective rules, the cause is (conceptually) outside the formal game elements. A rule is a good rule if it produces logical and realistic outcomes, relative to the shared understanding of the campaign setting. This is a common-sense vernacular approach, and it has had a wide currency, arguably undergirding most mainstream tabletop roleplaying games from varieties of TSR D&D to Rolemaster to D&D 5E. The assumption that rules should reflect the campaign world is something like the equivalent of Literary Realism for tabletop roleplaying games. It is the equivalent of what you get most of the time if you watch a serial drama on Neflix or pick up an airport novel.

Here is another function rules can have: determining the situations and details of play. Call these formative rules. The results may or may not make sense fictionally, but they are the rules, so you execute them and then interpret the outcomes as best you can. The fireball might detonate in a square. The random encounter generates a dragon one hex outside of town, three times in a row. The rules form the situation of play. In formative rules, the cause is (conceptually) the rules themselves and interpretation happens (if at all) subsequently. When one stocks a dungeon using the B/X procedures presented on page B52, the outcome is not really intended to model any kind of naturalistic situation. It might, but the goal is not logic or naturalism. You need monsters and treasures and traps in some rough distribution for the game to work, so the rule does that. Consider traditional spell slots. Sure, there is some very loose Vancian inspiration, but really original style D&D spells need limits of some sort to support challenges. Fire and forget is a way to do that. If one adopts the approach of assuming D&D is always right, that is in the mode of formative rules.

The most effective formative rules are designed to generate the dynamics and situations necessary to a particular game. They create satisfying tension and result in outcomes where player decisions matter. They can provide oracles into the imagined world. They might facilitate complex tactical contests or generate genre-appropriate thematic outcomes. Formative rules can also provide practical support for simplifying or abstracting elements of an imagined world which might be impractical to model explicitly. Additionally, the interpretation and reconciliation required by occasionally illogical results can serve as an engine of creativity. What might explain three dragon encounters in a row, so near to civilization? However, thoughtlessly designed or applied formative rules can be a straitjacket or procrustean bed, trapping players in abstract or solipsistic formalism, rewarding optimization and homework.

Does this matter, or is it just semantics, another arbitrary taxonomy to create more specialist language? It seems to me that the potential of the form, what tabletop roleplaying can uniquely provide compared to other forms of entertainment, media, and art, involves a fusion of these two modes.

If one leans too heavily on formative rules, where players weave results into some shared narrative fabric unrelated to any ideal of living breathing world, one risks losing the richness of possibility inherent in the idea of a campaign with integrity. Pathologies of formative rules include repetitive outcomes and the peasant railgun. That idea of the campaign world as external, causal source, along with some degree of shared commonsense understanding of how things work, is what enables principled and flexible rulings at the table.

If one leans too heavily on reflective rules, where logic and verisimilitude dominate, one gets lost in minutiae unconnected to the experience of play. Pathologies of reflective rules include, in the D&D context, Shopkeepers & Spreadsheets and fixation on realistic fictional economies at a level of detail far exceeding relevance to play. The OSR etc aversion to extensive fictional histories and backstories is not just a practical norm, nor is it just a rejection of tabletop roleplaying as a thespian concern; this aversion is also a recognition that the most useful elements of setting are those that provide contact surfaces for play at the table.

Ideally, a campaign is both internally consistent and makes sense on its own terms, broadly speaking, but simultaneously provides a stage for play with all of the concerns that entails. The reflective and formative components can feed back into each other, providing mutual enrichment. Some idiosyncratic element of a campaign setting might emerge from a seemingly illogical random stocking result (formative) later interpreted and explained in the logic of the setting, informing later concrete details and rulings experienced by players in play (reflective).

I tried real hard to avoid bogging this post down with technical jargon. However, to give credit where credit is due I will note that these ideas are related to formative and reflective constructs in the philosophy of science. This article is a good on ramp:

Edwards, J. R., & Bagozzi, R. P. (2000). On the nature and direction of relationships between constructs and measures. Psychological Methods, 5(2), 155–174.

Is there a “founding myth” of OSR? Here is one proposal:

The founding myth of the OSR, that it is based either in an original play style or in the Gygaxian style, … My view is that many of the communities, past or present, which identify with the “OSR” are based on that myth despite it being inconsistent with the multi-various ways in which hobbyists played in the 70s and 80s, as well as with the specific vision of D&D which Gygax propagated.

— Marcia B., Addendum

At first glance, it does seem like discovering an original play style, or original authorial intent (and perhaps design principles) is an attractive project. For example, here is James of Grognardia writing in 2008:

… “D&D is always right,” by which I mean that the ideas and concepts we got in OD&D, whatever their origins, must be the standard by which we judge everything else. Enough things weren’t added to OD&D that I can only conclude that, if they were there, they were there because Gygax and Arneson both signed off on them and deemed them a good fit for the game they’d created. … In the end, though, OD&D was written according to a certain vision and I think that vision is both recoverable and worth investigating.

— James M., June 2, 2008 comment

However, in the context of other discussion around that time, and in further recent conversations, I think it is clear that the goal (here at least) is not to recover some pure Gygaxian canon, brilliant and untarnished, but rather to assume that there may be some value in a rule or game element, whether or not it was an intentional creation, and see where that assumption leads. This was certainly the approach I took when, inspired by Dwimmermount session reports, I started my Vaults of Pahvelorn campaign taking only the 3 LBBs (core OD&D) as base rules chassis. This necessitated substantial interpretation and invention given the patchy disorganized nature of the game and text, but for me was more about personal creative constraint than about traditionalism for the sake of tradition or about nostalgia (I didn’t even know OD&D existed until around the time I discovered Grognardia).

Many strands make up artistic or hobby movements and scenes, arising from the various and idiosyncratic priorities of participants, so it would be surprising if one could come up with a simple explanation or single goal that unifies a scene. While some of the impetus might have been exegesis, other motivations might have involved connecting with old friends or (as Richard writes) resisting the then-current dominant practice that was being marketed by Wizards of the Coast. That is by no means an exhaustive catalog.

Trying to distinguish between genuine cultural genealogy and founding myths has led to claims about the invention of tradition, where someone (or a group) takes a novel idea but frames it as traditional in order to increase legitimacy. One can find many examples of this in the history of ideas. Here is one that approaches prototypicality. In ancient China, explicit innovation was not a winning rhetorical strategy. Instead:

Authorship as an act of creation was a fraught notion in traditional China, since true “creation” (zuo 作) was reserved for sages. Already Confucius embraced instead “transmission” (shu 述) as a weaker form of agency indebted to an imagined higher authority.

— The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature, p. 344

That is, Confucius (and the others associated with his school of thought) presented his ideas not as invention or even synthesis, but rather as transmitting the already revered wisdom of sage kings, the original culture heroes of China. Though I am curious about the historical development of play styles, I am not sure Sage Gygax has much cultural currency in this manner. Maybe someone could find some forum scenes that lean in this direction if one looked hard. And many OSR norms and assumptions do not seem to reflect past practice or texts. For myself, as grab bag of inspiration and techniques, how people actually played (or what is written in old texts) seems potentially useful, but not as prescription with sacred imprimatur.

Sometimes I think about all game rules and supplements in terms of prosthetics. Broadly speaking, a prosthetic is an artifact to replace a missing body part or remediate some deficiency. Some prosthetics are useful to almost everybody sometimes (stepladder) while some remediate a common deficit (glasses) and others are highly idiosyncratic. Similarly, the tasks referees and players need help with when playing a roleplaying game are various. Some seemingly common prosthetics include procedural systems to resolve fictional violence and guidelines to come up with fictional people having inner lives with some degree of complexity (such as non-player characters). Or how to decide how much fire a wizard can conjure.

So how does one decide what aspects of a game deserve elaboration and which can be left for the imagination of the players? What counts as design that punts where it should run? There is an essentially relativist objection to general standards for what deserves elaboration. It is hard to get beyond this subjective hurdle to make truly general recommendations without doing extensive observational research that people have not so far seemed interested in or resourced to do, especially for tabletop roleplaying games specifically.

For example, I have a low tolerance for certain kinds of hassle in rules, so I designed a lot of my mechanics as a prosthetic for that. Who knows what proportion of players are happy to track coin weight encumbrance exactly with spreadsheets or whatever? And might even enjoy it? I suspect that proportion is lower than players for whom slot based encumbrance would be more functional, but I lack the data, and I doubt anyone has much evidence relevant to this question beyond common sense platitudes and personal anecdotes.

Rules Cyclopedia and BECMI D&D provide rules for advancement up to level 36, with guidelines that adventurers should gain one level every five adventures (Rules Cyclopedia, page 129). I generally take “an adventure” to entail multiple game sessions, but even if you complete one adventure every session, assuming no setbacks such as adventurer death or level drain, and play once per week, a group must play for almost 3.5 years to reach level 36¹. It seems reasonable to assume that few actual campaigns have followed this procedurally proposed trajectory. This is an extreme, but other TSR rulesets, such as B/X or AD&D, seem to also imply an implausible level of commitment for most people playing most campaigns in most situations. One interpretation of this fact is that the rules are flawed, and it would be better to make endgame rules that people will, in fact, actually play. But what if the main function of late game rules material in TSR D&D, and descendants, is more to entice players into longer games?

A design trend exists around more focused games, which values explicit and transparent description of both rules and intent. According to this sort of evaluative criteria, the late game TSR D&D rules are ineffective, and perhaps even misleading or disingenuous. They promised me a castle, and all I got was this lousy longsword +2! However, there is no inherent reason that the most effective rule, functionally, must articulate its intent and function, or even that the designer must understand the likely function. Surely there are exceptions, but in general focused games tend toward one-shot, mini-series, or shorter campaigns. It seems possible that the lack of enticing phantasm in such designs may partly explain this difference.

Goals are only motivating prior to being reached. Following goal accomplishment, it is on to the next goal. Perhaps the TSR endgame is a form of ultimate imagined goal that works exactly because it is unlikely to be obtained. Lack of complete consummation does come with some drawbacks, such as the anecdotal observation that campaigns often end, following Eliot, not with a bang, but a whimper. As the duration of a campaign increases, an anticlimactic ending becomes more likely, even if players do maintain interest and attention, as changes in life circumstances will implacably conspire against the campaign of unusual ambition’s persistence. Whether a longer, complex campaign, often lacking closure, or a shorter, more contained campaign is better seems like a matter of taste, but either way having rules that players almost never use could still shape gameplay in substantial ways. This is another example showing how taking a text at face value may be a poor, or at least incomplete, guide to game functionality or game meaning.

^{1. A fighter requires approximately 3.4 million XP to reach level 36. A magic-user requires approximately 4.3 million XP to reach level 36. ↩}

People often use different words for the same (or highly similar) concepts, or the same word for radically different concepts. Academia in particular has driven home for me the mismatch of jargon and meaning across silos, but the same thing happens in nontechnical discussions. The confusion around creative agenda modes shows an example within discussion about tabletop RPGs. In general, I suspect actual communication happens far less often than people assume, in any domain. In this post I will highlight a few more terms that scenes seem to use in different ways, specifically simulation and exploration.

Forge-speak simulationism seems close to what OSR/etc gamers (myself included, I suppose) mean when we speak of exploration. When a big model theorist discusses simulationism it has almost nothing to do with whether, for example, sailing rules in a game accurately capture wind dynamics as might be modeled by a physicist. Recall that the subtitle of the original Edwards essay on simulationism is The Right to Dream. And Forge-speak uses exploration to denote a completely different concept, as should be superficially obvious when you look at the diagram/logo for the big model wiki, something more like engaged play. Here is a big model explanation of Exploration:

What’s Exploration? Exploration is playing the game. If you are imagining stuff, rolling dice, talking in character, or paying attention to someone else’s scene in the game- you’re playing and you’re Exploring. If you’re busy playing videogames on your DS and not paying attention, if you’re on your cell phone, reading comics, or otherwise in any common sense way not playing the game, you’re not Exploring.

And here is Ben on OSR/classic exploration:

The lack of knowledge is thus a source of peril and uncertainty. It is both an obstacle to be overcome and a hazard to be dared. There is also a thrill of discovery, of uncovering things that are hidden. If the game is being played well, what is uncovered are not boring things. Every dungeon is initially a mystery, every artifact a hidden wonder, every faction an unknown quantity. To explore a dungeon is to unravel the mystery of the place.

A pair of Dark Souls analogies may help further illustrate this distinction. OSR exploration has to do with the feeling you get when you hear the new area sound, which has been burned into my mind as the sound of a new vista opening up:

This feeling is tied heavily to interaction with the fictional context as a coherent and meaningful place rather than as game mechanisms or story progressions. (Tangentially, I would also add that this is more about imagined possibility than it is about immersion in the method acting or narrative transportation sense.) In contrast, big model exploration would be closer to what is going on when the player learns and exploits the pattern of an enemy’s move set:

This is more like a structural fitting in of the player’s voluntary actions with the mechanisms and interfaces that the game presents. You could get the first kind of exploration without engaging many of the Dark Souls game mechanisms at all. And you could get the second kind of exploration in a wireframe test arena totally disconnected from the stages or levels of the game (which would be the campaign setting or shared imaginary space in tabletop roleplaying).

Recently I was thinking to myself: people have written some words about tabletop RPG theory (understatement of the decade). This work is often “empirical” in the loose sense that theorists base conclusions on observing their own play experiences and the experiences of others (often second-hand) but it is not empirical in the sense that a social scientist would generally use that term. And so I was thinking, I have some quantitative data about player preferences, would it be possible to see whether this data could substantiate some of these claims using quantitative methods, or perhaps suggest alternatives based on something beyond anecdote? Specifically, I was thinking about that venerable Forge concept “creative agenda” and the various creative agenda modes proposed as incompatible: gamism, narrativism, and simulationism. These four concepts belong to a broader collection of ideas called the big model, though the GNS subcomponent has had the largest impact on general thinking about RPGs, of the big model concepts.

Before exploring creative agendas in data about player preferences, I had to make sure that I understood the concepts, beyond surface associations. This means taking the theorists seriously, and accepting definitions, even (perhaps especially) when the naming seems counterintuitive or disconnected from the lay understanding of terms. It is unproductive to approach the theory of electromagnetism with the stubborn idea that a field is properly only an expanse of ground covered by grass, flowers, and so forth. Ideally, jargon will involve some congruence between intuitive and technical meanings, but that is perhaps unrealistic to expect in all cases. Sometimes it is best to just use the imperfect, established term, and move on with your life.

After several conversations with people who have engaged heavily with these concepts and find parts of the big model personally useful, I have come to believe that I (and probably many people outside of the Forge and story games diasporas) misunderstand both the specific terms and the broader goal of this collection of ideas. Rather than explanation, I think the purpose of big model thinking generally, and the more specific ideas around creative agenda, is to present particular ideals of possible game practice. This is in many ways closer to a therapeutic framework in counseling psychology, such as psychoanalysis, person-centered therapy, CBT, or DBT. Therapeutic frameworks generally involve a greater focus on particular interventions and some alignment with evidence based practice compared to the big model, but once you understand the theory like this, the way people use and discuss it makes a lot more sense, at least to me.

To be (somewhat) more concrete: the big model theorist looks at a collection of play goals aligned in some way, such as learning and challenge (“gamism”) and wonders whether purifying a play experience around only these play goals might be uniquely satisfying for the collective experience of a group of players. Similarly for other modes. This is what the big model means by coherent play. Whether this matches any particular experience is almost beside the point, much like the way a three-minute sprint mile is an ideal that has never been reached for the sprinter (though obviously the activity of sprinting is far simpler than tabletop roleplaying).

So what about the player preferences data? Based on this understanding, it would be a poor fit for big model concepts, even accepting that measurement at the individual level could approximate a group-level analysis consistent with big model claims. People will have to think a lot harder about ways to measure big model concepts before that will become possible, and from what I can tell there has been little enthusiasm for that kind of work to date. The data I have still has potential to reveal connections between what players enjoy during play and what players find useful in games, which I may explore in a future post.

Some simple takeaways for outsiders when trying to make sense of big model ideas: substitute “play goal” (or perhaps “ultimate play goal”) whenever you see the words creative agenda, and realize that the point of the theory is presenting possible ideals, rather than explanation. You may lose some nuance, particularly involving individual versus collective experience, but that is probably closer to the intended meaning than running with intuitive associations.

On my last grocery run, I listened to the first episode of Alex’s podcast Text to Table, which is a discussion of Troika with David Wilkie (Anxiety Wizard). One detail jumped out at me, which was the dynamic of play that David described in his Troika game. The focus of play seemed to be more interaction between player characters rather than exploration or problem solving.

The characters in the party included a lonesome monarch, a zoanthrope, a chaos champion, and maybe some others but those are the ones I recall. In the game the zoanthrope tried to eat the king’s crown, triggering some sort of existential crisis regarding kinghood, and then there was some interaction between the king and the chaos champion, details somewhat unimportant. What I want to highlight here is the interaction of player characters as more autonomous entities as compared to a team working together to accomplish some goal. (Please read this as descriptive rather than judgmental; the game sounded memorable and fun.)

I am always on the lookout for key play aspects that distinguish different modes and cultures of play. (For example, degree of proceduralism.) Whether players form a team working together to confront challenges (or not) seems to be another one of these key aspects of play, more interesting for the fact that it is rarely described explicitly, even in games that try to discuss things like play agendas explicitly. Looking at another game, in many ways Apocalypse World is a highly traditional design (each player controls a single character with stats, there are rules for fighting, characters improve, and so forth), but many or most of the rules (and examples in the text) seem geared toward priming confrontations between characters, resulting in a kind of soap opera dynamic. That is, much of the play seems to involve generating drama between player characters rather than navigating challenges between player characters and the fictional environment. In contrast, in TSR D&D and many OSR games, the (never? rarely?) stated assumption is that player characters form a band of picaros or commandos intent on dungeon heists. There seems to be some highly influential spectrum between autonomous interaction and team-based problem solving.

Discussing this with Eero Tuovinen, he mentioned some terminology around drama versus adventure or PvP versus PvE, which are relevant but don’t seem to quite capture the differences on this spectrum. For example, PvP seems to connote a degree of conflict that may be absent from autonomous character based games (it certainly didn’t seem like the player characters in David’s Troika game were trying to kill each other or competing directly in any way). Further, there was probably some adventure going on, so saying that the Troika game was not (categorically) an “adventure” game seems like a mistake, though maybe prioritizing drama versus prioritizing adventure gets part of the way there. This distinction does seem to underly at a deep level what it is that players are doing when they play however.

Unlike D&D, Troika ties advancement to using skills successfully rather than to a clear gameplay goal such as recovering treasure, defeating monsters, or completing event milestones, so there is some textual support underlying this mode of play, whatever your opinion on causation between text and play experience. Troika differs in many other ways from traditional play assumptions, such as the surrealist setting prompts, so there may be additional dynamics at play here, but encoded incentives seem unambiguously relevant to the question of shared goals at the least. I also think that it would be a mistake to oversimplify this to broader play culture, where “story games” are about drama based on interactions between autonomous characters and “OSR” games are about goal-oriented team play, given that the player base of Troika is probably mostly located in the OSR (or what have you) play culture.

Personally, my default mode of play tends toward team-oriented. The elements of play I enjoy most are exploration and problem solving, both when I run games and when I play games. Some media touchstones of action in these kinds of games (to reference a few TV shows) include seeing how the characters of early-seasons Lost explore the island, or how the characters in The Walking Dead manage to carve out a niche for themselves in the apocalyptic landscape. These are the team-oriented aspects of these stories. I think there are some practical advantages to team-based play in that teams support varying degrees of engagement whereas the mode of more autonomous player characters requires all players to be on point as needed, somewhat like improv, though I imagine perhaps systems could help here (providing tables of voluntary action prompts relevant to character backgrounds, for example).

Roleplaying, taken descriptively, is a means, which can be applied to a wide variety of ends. Before proceeding to expand on this claim directly, consider the following analogy with another activity, in the physical domain, that is also a means: running. Apologies in advance for the exceedingly literal discussion that follows, but it will be useful later. First, descriptively: running is locomotion which includes an “aerial” phase during which all feet are above the ground. The activity is recognizable on a treadmill, in a forest or alley fleeing a predator, on an athletic track, in the context of a competition, alone or in a group, on a sidewalk toward a bus leaving soon, in quadrupeds, and so forth. Learning how to run well in one context likely translates to others, though perhaps incompletely. Varieties of running exist, such as sprinting and endurance running, which activate different biological energy recruitment and waste management systems (aerobic and anaerobic respiration, for example). Running well can include both comparative performance, such as speed or duration, but also technique, judged on aesthetic other grounds.

Descriptively, roleplaying is taking on the role of a fictional character, either through direct narrative acting—speaking “as if” the player was the character or pantomiming, perhaps incompletely, physical actions that a character performs. Or, with reduced immersion, through explanatory puppeteering—my character opens the door, my character reacts with surprise. The activity can be recognizable in a military war game exercise, a mock trial, the behavior of a digital game avatar, acting in a play, as an exploratory or practice exercise during a therapy session, and, of course, playing a tabletop roleplaying game such as D&D. Similarly to running, roleplaying well can include both performance, such as inflicting damage, recovering treasure, or solving puzzles, but also technique, judged on aesthetic grounds—coolness, sincere and expressive performance—or in the quality of tales recounted after the game between human players.

I suspect this is so far noncontroversial, but consider the different kinds of satisfaction that people can experience by means of the same activity applied to different ends. For example, compare a 20 minute sprint that raises the heart rate to a specific point and proceeds at a given pace, in one case pulled by a bus schedule and in another case pushed by a pursuing mugger. The physical description of the activity in terms of vital readouts, shorn of context, might be identical. The difference, then, comes from, at least: contextual constraints, situational expectation, and personal goals. Another: running across a room to meet a loved one returning from a long trip compared to running across a room to catch a teetering vase.

Now consider a roleplaying example where the agreed end would be to play through the events of The Lord of the Rings, perhaps with minor variations, but hitting all the major movements of the story. Especially within the OSR (or what have you) tradition, this may seem unsatisfying, perhaps barely even roleplaying, due to the highly constrained, almost entirely predetermined, set of narrative outcomes. Yet, the activity is still descriptively roleplaying, obviously so, despite the lack of playing to find out what happens. Considering the prospect of playing such a game incites little enthusiasm from me, but if I take a step back I can see how someone might experience satisfaction through reenacting The Lord of the Rings by means of a tabletop roleplaying game framework.

The term “reenacting” is perhaps a clue; why might someone take pleasure in putting on a production of Hamlet? Wages are one reason, but other motivations also likely exist. One might object that reenacting The Lord of the Rings might be roleplaying but that doing so lacks some sense of game since failing is by hypothesis difficult or impossible. It is easy to modify the case to handle this objection by, perhaps, awarding points for remembering textual details, persistence attainments for reaching milestones, creative reinterpretations, or clarity of self-expression through the constrained vehicle of Tolkien’s plot (notably distinct from Tolkien’s literary accomplishment). Is Super Mario Brothers any less of a game because all players must proceed through the stages following broadly the same sequence?

Could reenacting Rise of the Runelords, or Gygax’s G-D-Q modules, provide a similar form of satisfaction? Would introducing the possibility of character death and replacement substantially vary the experience, or would it remain reenactment even if particular details of how the players proceed from episode to episode varied? I pose these questions less to express my personal interest in playing or running such a game and more as a thought experiment to understand unknown pleasures. Many players seem self-evidently to enjoy compartmentalizing the game elements of roleplaying games in different parts of the activity, whether in the deck-building subgame of character build optimization, the tactical chess of 4E grid combat, the accumulation of loot, the collection of relationships with non-player characters, the exploration of bonds with other player characters, the uncovering of campaign secrets, the skillful, entertaining performance of character acting, or another accomplishment of your own devising.

Cavegirl posted about the function of dice resolution and stats in a certain kind of tabletop roleplaying game. In her words: we use dice rolls and game mechanics to make a decision on the GM’s behalf when the outcome is otherwise in doubt and hard to adjudicate. I agree with the value of all the functions she lays out for using dice. However, there is another substantial use for dice in this kind of game. As resolution systems, dice provide answers, but they can also provide questions.

The principle that dice come out only or primarily when the referee is at a loss or resolution is difficult excludes or deemphasizes pursuit of oracles, when the referee or players consult dice for inspiration or to expand the set of possibilities. The invocation of fairness suggests that dice exist for determinations that might otherwise seem impartial or unfair.

Framing the process as adjudication imposes or implies a set of juridical assumptions. Jurisprudence relies heavily on the idea of precedent and extrapolating future outcomes from past examples. In the context of roleplaying games, the precedent or fact of the matter is the campaign setting, the scenario, the dungeon map, relationship matrices, the personality of non-player characters, and so forth. Following the above principle, the dice come out in the moment of play when the interaction of those elements with player characters is unclear or fraught with potentially deleterious consequences.

Many of the ways in which I find that dice contribute most to the richness of play fit uncomfortably within the adjudication frame. For example, the random encounter check seems more about varying the pattern of experience than about resolving any particularly difficult determination, even though it does represent an immediate moment in the game world. Similarly, stocking the dungeon functions to help a referee create unstable equilibria rather than resolving an outcome. Other examples include many multi-table generators, in the mode of Appendix D: Random Generation of Creatures from the Lower Planes from the original Dungeon Masters Guide, or the procedures in Gardens of Ynn (automated version), or my apocalypse generator. Telecanter’s “Generating” blog tag provides many more examples.

Randomness in the generation of player characters can also be about providing inspiration. There may be an aspect of impartiality to rolling for, say, ability scores, where there is at least a superficial sense that players may want one outcome more than another (though to be honest, having good or bad ability scores makes little difference in the kind of games I like to run). However, determining other parts of characters randomly—such as class or appearance—is less understandable as maintaining a fair playing field and seems more about facilitating creativity by expanding potentiality that might remain otherwise unexplored by players. While less common, I have also observed non-referee players turning to the dice as oracles occasionally at the moment of decision during play, such as rolling to determine a character’s motivation rather than deciding based on character personality as established or situational imperatives.

In terms of dramatic structure, dice can contribute to exposition and rising action, as well as falling action and denouement.

In terms of complexity, dice can expand the set of possible situations as well as contracting a set of possible outcomes into a consensually established single fictional outcome.

Breathing in, breathing out.