A Sociology of Tabletop Roleplaying Games

Thomas Manuel

I. Dear Reader,

Every once in a while, one must embrace hubris.

Let’s start with play. Play is an important part of life – mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physiologically, grammatically. It has uses. As a child, it helps with learning and growth. As an adult, it helps with not being sad all the time. But people don’t play because it’s useful. People play because it feels good to do – because it’s enjoyable, pleasurable, delightful.

The big joys for me are winning, risk-taking, solving, mastery, socializing, performance, storytelling, humour, novelty and catharsis. If you want a more in-depth list, it’s hard to do better than Levi Kornelsen’s Manyfold, which lists 17 different kinds of fun. But even that list is thinking about RPGs specifically and if you start including stuff like sports or sex or crafting, the list probably gets longer.

What I like about Kornelsen’s Manyfold is that it makes sure to focus on the fact that these are joys, not types of people. Which avoids 90% of the most annoying arguments.

Based on what kinds of enjoyment they’re chasing and what they’re avoiding, people make games. People connect with games that evoke their preferred kinds of enjoyment and fun. This leads to people making games that build on what came before in different ways – specializing, generalizing, forking, mutating, etc.

They also lead to cultures of play. These cultures are social infrastructure – values and practices that congeal around certain places or communities aimed at certain combinations of joys. These cultures develop norms and then expectations. Also, they tend to spawn sub-cultures constantly and immediately, often consciously defined in opposition to their roots. The three that I refer to most in this newsletter are trad, storygames, and OSR.

Trad play culture, the dominant play culture, is best understood as a specific model of player and GM roles and responsibilities. According to Retired Adventurer, “Trad holds that the primary goal of a game is to tell an emotionally satisfying narrative, and the DM is the primary creative agent in making that happen – building the world, establishing all the details of the story, playing all the antagonists, and doing so mostly in line with their personal tastes and vision. The PCs can contribute, but their contributions are secondary in value and authority to the DM’s.” In terms of joy, I feel like that the trad play style is defined by not specializing in specific forms of enjoyment and allowing groups to “wander” (as Kornelsen puts it in Manyfold) around from one kind of fun to another.

Storygames and OSR are both usually defined in opposition to trad. The storygames playstyle changes the trad model of GM-player by trying to make the GM more of a player. In terms of joy, the play style clusters around storytelling, performance, and risk-taking with less emphasis on solving or winning.

The OSR is an umbrella term of play cultures that accept older forms of d&d as a kind of lingua franca of roleplaying. They veer away from the trad model by eliminating the GM’s responsibility for a satisfying narrative (and resulting knock-on effects). In terms of joy, there’s a spectrum of cultures that vary in their emphasis on solving, winning, humour, and risk-taking.

There are probably an infinite number of potential cultures of play but some are particularly visible because they lead to design cultures (where games are made for a specific culture) and become markets (where game-sellers target cultures to reach customers).

In terms of design traditions, trad, storygames and OSR have their own norms which create a feedback loop with the play cultures associated with them.

Trad games are often built around detailed settings, involved character creation, and often tactical combat. They tend to avoid specificity in narrative, preferring to let the GM decide or use (often very specific) adventure modules.

Storygames tend to focus on specific narratives or scenarios and rules designed to support those outcomes exclusively. Settings tend to be co-created amongst the player and the GM and are thus, often improvised rather than prepared beforehand.

The OSR has a DIY ethos that values creativity and ease-of-use in setting and scenario design. So while settings are concrete, rule sets, while plentiful, tend to be improvised.

And markets, well, you know ’em.

That’s quite enough from me. I assume this kind of post can do no good but I typed it out anyway.

Yours verbosely,

Thomas

II. Media of the Week

  • Nothing this week!

III. Links of the Week

  • Lovely post from video game developer Melos Han-tani about thinking about games as relationships rather than products
    • “People who play games tend to equate ‘good and bad design’ with ‘I did or did not like this.’ What this feels like is when someone says something is bad design, it reflects how they wish to see the world. To state something is bad design is to hold a conviction of what kind of game design should live or die. But it’s okay to hold opinions. However, on a systemic level, the tendency to classify stuff as bad produces an emergent conservatism that affects what kind of games get made. This is the problem of “legacy taste”: the idea that what you liked in the past has a huge effect on what you tend to like now – and what you classify as ‘too hard to approach’ vs. ‘very easy to understand.’”
  • Knight at the Opera makes a monster post listing dozens of initiative systems. I think this kind of exhaustive surveying is really cool and useful.
    • I’d also love to read a follow up about how different all these various methods actually feel from each other in the grand scheme of things.
  • Open Hearth, the play community, has a great post titled “Why do your actual play videos look like ass?” and it’s got lots of good info. I’m linking to the tumblr version where you can see the best possible addition which is user Mint talking about how they started GMing through some of Open Hearth’s rough and ready videos.

Reviews

News/Misc

  • Origins game fair announced the finalists for their 2023 Awards and the RPG had a game that I completely missed: the Devil’s Dandy Dogs from Monte Cook where you play dogs who work for the (dandy) devil and it seems like a well-produced storygame.
  • KiwiRPG Week, a week-long streaming event showcasing games, from Aoteroa New Zealand starts on 23rd Junr.

From the archive:

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

  • The much-loved Operation Unfathomable and its sequel Odious Uplands from OSR designer, Jason Sholtis, in a nice bundle.
  • As well as a bundle of all the original books for Metamorphosis Alpha, the game that led to Gamma World.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

One response to “A Sociology of Tabletop Roleplaying Games”

  1. morgue2013 Avatar
    morgue2013

    “I assume this kind of post can do no good but I typed it out anyway.” lol I really enjoyed this Thomas, particularly your invocation of Levi’s Manyfold. It strikes me that you’ve managed to create a model of play cultures that won’t immediately provoke a big fight, which is an achievement in itself!

    (And thanks for the KiwiRPG shoutout!) morgue

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