Unnatural Twenty

Gameplay tends to be about what you do in a computer game at any given moment. A game might involve stealth, shooting, driving, jumping, crafting, trading, or social gameplay elements. A game that is all about driving might have competition, maintenance, upgrading, repair, and design gameplay elements. A strategy game might have base building and resource management as gameplay elements while another might not, but have research and development among its gameplay elements. So what kind of gameplay elements do TTRPGs have? What kind of things do you find yourself doing for periods of time within a session? There’s combat, fighting, violent conflict, different to this is warfare, when characters are involved in large scale combat, there’s stealth and evasion, also there’s conversation, negotiation, deception, persuasion, seduction, there’s management and planning, and you could have research, learning, investigation, exploration and discovery, as well as choice and argument. Gam...

I think gameplay is a term that gets used in computer games all the time, but I’ve never noticed it used in reference to tabletop RPGs. Maybe there are bigger marketing budgets and more review sites for computer games, and the use of language to describe different types of gameplay have arisen to discuss those games. The language used to describe TTRPGs seems to discuss them at the rulebook level, at the campaign level, or at the session level. The equivalents for computer games would be the product level (e.g. Tomb Raider), the game level (e.g. my first play-through of Tomb Raider) or the session level (the time I spent playing Tomb Raider today). If I watch a promotional video for a new computer game, I’ll generally see all the major gameplay elements of that game in action, so I’ll know if the ones I like are present. I think publishers of TTRPGs don’t describe their games in the same way, they try to appeal to customers by talking about their mechanics, or the setting they use...

I realized that what I want to achieve from all my experimentation with RPGs is to settle on a system, group of people, and a setting, and then play one campaign forever. I don’t feel like I know a set of rules that I can do that with yet though, or at least a set that will enable me to do this with the people I know already. One problem I recently came to understand about D&D is levelling up. I find the changes from low level to high level come too quickly, and change the dynamic of a campaign too much. My current solution to this problem is to pick a starting level for the characters, and then stay there. Everyone gets comfortable with the abilities that they have, and nobody expends any effort wondering about what feat to take next level. Characters develop if the players let them, and they can come across new equipment that enables new abilities. Another game I’ve been playing is Lords of Gossamer and Shadow (linked in the sidebar). It’s a diceless game, so I imagine t...

I’ve been talking to people recently about getting new games started, and I find I often run into a little problem. I’ll be trying to nail down what the game is going to be about, and I’ll mention “the story.” This seems to be a problem for a few people I’ve come across. They don’t want to have a GM write “a story” and then have them stroll through it. But I’m looking at the story as being the events that happen. After the campaign is over, if you tell someone about it, that’s the story. Every RPG will involve events, and anytime you talk about your last game or last session, you’re telling a story. It just seems like some people don’t like using that word to describe the game. They don’t mind an RPG being called a game, but they do mind it being called a story. It’s even worse when I talk about the story before we even start. If I imagine the campaign as a revenge thriller then that’s the kind of story I expect will be created out of the campaign. If we say we’ll play a pirates g...