In many months of writing the Campaign News, and a few reference pages for our game, I have focused almost exclusively on the game play procedures and the mechanics of the game. AD&D, and tabletop role-playing games in general, differ from other games like chess, tennis, Risk, poker, and others, in that an important part of the game exists at least partially outside the body of rules. Even in those board games whose design includes a very strong “theme,” the mechanics of the game are not just primary, they override any thematic considerations, not the other way around—one doesn’t modify the rules of the game on the fly to better model the theme of the game! Yet, with TTRPGs there is often a temptation, and in some cases explicit encouragement in the rules, to override or ignore rules for the sake of the game’s theme, the players’ enjoyment, or even the referee’s preference for how the game should play and end. Ignoring or overriding rules, however, changes the activity from being a game to being something else, maybe a pastime, make-believe, or collaborative story-telling, but definitely not a game.
In order to keep AD&D from degenerating into a mere board game, the fiction of the game must somehow be accommodated, but without violating the rules of the game, lest it instead devolve into mere make-believe.
In the Afterword of the Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax writes a philosophic summary of how the game was intended to be played from the designer’s point of view: “BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER, YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE.”
I take the game as a whole to be the body of rules, and the visible intent behind them. Throughout the rules there are gaps, and it is explicitly stated that referees and players are expected to fill these gaps according to the needs of their game. These rules focus primarily on the mechanics of the “playing board” and “pieces,” the procedures participants must follow in order to play the game as it was written. These procedures describe in detail combat resolution, dungeon and wilderness navigation, and character advancement and impediments. They describe engines for generating the game board (dungeons and wilderness areas) as instructive examples that can be used either literally to create the game board, or as guidelines for how referees should create their own game boards.
The campaign consists of the “game board,” the players’ pieces, and all the pieces on the board that the players do not control. Appendixes A and B of the DMG illustrate game board design for dungeons and wilderness areas, respectively. Appendix C illustrates placement of the non-player pieces on the board. Together, these provide some theme for the game, but not the whole fiction. It is left to the referee to figure that out for him- or herself, from only some vague suggestions and a reading list of inspirational literature.
To a large extent, the open-endedness of the game’s design serves to accommodate the fiction. This allows players to take actions that aren’t itemized in the rules as the legal moves of the game, and yet they are “legal moves.” Using an iron spike pounded into the crack of the archway to hold up a portcullis, for example, is something a character might do, effectively modifying the game board, yet is not an explicitly described rule of the game. A sensible referee would allow this move under many conditions, and not under some others, perhaps if the portcullis is unusually heavy or the walls slick from slime, for example. Once established, it’s a rule the players can count on, at least under the same circumstances under which it worked previously. The referee and players both use information about the setting to figure out options and the chances of those options working as intended.
There remains much more scope for the fiction of the game than only the rules themselves and the players’ decisions produce. I’d like to explore with you how to create engines to generate fiction that adds depth to the game while remaining within the “game as a whole,” and excluding any bias either in favor or opposed to the players. Let’s please discuss this https://discord.gg/ebtDvfphX.
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