I’ve been getting more into System Theory lately, and Luhmann’s takes on social systems more specifically, and it’s inspired me to take a shot at systematizing exactly what goes on during a session of a RPG. This is going to be fairly zoomed out, and probably a lot less immediately applicable or prescriptive than a lot of existing models of RPGs floating around out there.
I’ll also note that this definition intentionally casts a wide net--it also encompasses activities like improv comedy and childrens’ make believe. If you want to call this a theory of collaborative storytelling (collaborative imagining?), then that’s okay. I’m going to call it a theory of roleplaying games as a shorthand, though, since that’s going to be my main focus.
I’m going to start with a general description of how this theory views RPGs, breaking them into three main parts, going over each of them in brief before going deeper and deeper into the sub-parts that make them up.
What Is A RPG?
A RPG is a group of Players engaging in the shared creation of a Shared Imaginary Space--a shared image of a fictional world that the Players all hold in their heads and contribute to together. However, because each Player’s mind is a closed system, the only way they can contribute to the SIS is through Artifacts of Play--spoken words/character sheets/etc--which act constantly to synchronize their mental images, maintain the stability of the SIS, and allow for its evolution. Playing a RPG is a process of constant synchronization between Players’ mental images and constant negotiation wherein the group collectively offers contributions to the SIS, which must then be either accepted, rejected, or mutated, generally through a pre-agreed upon system.
Let’s take a closer look at each of those three main concepts.
After describing each major concept here, I will provide a few concrete examples. For the most part, during this segment, I will stick to the most ‘traditional’ modes of play--games with a clear GM and player divide, often based in fantasy and combat. Later, we’ll get to lots of play examples to dissect that are full of ambiguity and novel configurations, but for now let’s keep things as mainstream and recognizable as possible.
The Shared Imaginary Space
The Shared Imaginary Space is the central focus of the RPG--a fictional world/narrative/situation that the players collectively imagine and contribute to. The Shared Imaginary Space is inherently a contradiction--in reality each player holds an entirely different mental image of the game’s space, and the SIS exists more as an ideal that must be constantly worked towards than as a reality. That process of constant synchronization generally happens invisibly, but is absolutely vital to the maintenance of a Shared Imaginary Space; the moment that the players can not come to an agreement as to what “really” is happening within the Shared Imaginary Space the RPG has, definitionally, stopped functioning.
The Shared Imaginary Space within this model encompasses all of the things about the game and world which are collectively known to the players. This includes the Fiction, the world and events that the players are collectively imagining. I am also placing the game’s System within the SIS--the process by which contributions to the Fiction are presented and contradictions are resolved. The System itself is split into two sub-sections, the distribution of Authority throughout the players and the Rules that the players have collectively agreed to operate under. Ambiguously part of the SIS is the game’s Metacommentary, communally shared thoughts that are about the game but are neither Fiction nor System.
The Fiction of a RPG is the story, situation, or space being created through the act of play. This often includes a cast of characters, the passage of time, a story being told, etc, but such features are not definitionally required--The Quiet Year does not feature traditional named characters, for example. What is consistently true about the Fiction of a game, however, is that it is made up of a collection of Facts about the world, each contributed by one or more players.
Common Examples of Facts
Pretty much any fact about the world being created that would make sense from the point of view of a character within the world would qualify.
The identity of characters: “Howard is an Elven mercenary who hates goblins and fights with a bow.”
The actions of characters: “Howard asks the innkeeper about the rat cult.”
Information about the situation at hand: “There are ten zombies in the room. The closest is ten feet away from you.”
Information about the world: “Ten thousand years ago the Rat God was slain by a host of angels.”
The System of a RPG is the process by which those contributions are either integrated into the Fiction, and to a lesser extent the process by which contradictions that are discovered within the Fiction are resolved. On some level, every RPG uses the same system--one player makes a claim about the Fiction and the group then decides to either fully accept that claim and integrate it into the Fiction as a new Fact, reject it, or mutate it in some way--changing it before accepting it as Fact. In practice, however, most RPG groups find such an ambiguous method lacking in support and structure, and choose to adopt collections of communally agreed upon procedures to assist in this process.
Many games distribute Authority, or the ability to control specific parts of the Fiction, unevenly among the players and process--the classic example of this is a game in which all but one players each control the actions of a single character, and the remaining player acts as a Game Master who controls the rest of the world, while a rules document modifies this Authority in specific situations and dice rolls complicate Authority through the introduction of randomness.
This distribution of Authority helps facilitate long-term play by making sure that there is always a process for resolving disagreements over whether to accept a player’s contribution or not--it, in theory, gives the final authority on whether to accept a contribution or not to a single player, to avoid stalemates that would threaten to grind the game to a halt. The distribution of Authority acts as a lubricant to help the process of contributing to the Fiction flow more smoothly and with less time spent consensus-building. That said, this Authority is on some level a contrivance--at any time any player retains the ability to object to any contribution they find objectionable enough; imagine a situation in which one player’s character dies in a particularly unsatisfying and unfair manner and the table rises up in objection and demands the event be rejected.
Common Examples of Authority
The Authority to dictate the actions of a character: Mike can dictate what Howard the elf thinks, says, and does.
The Authority to dictate the state and actions of the world: The GM can dictate the actions, forms, and histories of all non-player characters, as well as the world itself.
The Authority to invoke mechanics: The GM can dictate what is an appropriate time to make a skill check.
The Authority to resolve rules disputes: The GM declares “We’ll go with Mary’s reading of the rules over Mike’s”.
Authority is further modified by the adoption of Rules, a list of constraints and procedures the group has collectively chosen to use. These often come in large part from a Rulebook (Dungeon & Dragons 5e, Fiasco, RIFTS, Apocalypse World, etc), but also include any rules agreed upon by the group. These Rules can either be Hard Rules, part of an informationally closed system of mechanical numbers, tags, and operations used to resolve specific situations, or Soft Rules, which are more conventions that the group either explicitly or implicitly sets for itself on matters such as setting, fairness, acceptable content, and tone.
Hard Rules are what most people think of as RPG mechanics--they relate to the State of the game, concrete Facts that can be recorded as data and manipulated with logical or mathematical operations. State includes common RPG concepts such as Hit Points, Ability Scores, Skill Ratings, Traits, Movement Speed, position on a grid, Initiative Score, etc, and Hard Rules are the operations that use or modify these Facts such as attack rolls, taking damage, skill checks, taking a turn, expending a resource, etc. These Facts and operations often have a loose connection to the Fiction--they usually (but not always) correspond to elements within the fiction (Hit Points vs how injured a character is), but don’t necessarily exist as a concept within the Fiction itself.
Hard Rules exist as in a parallel stream to the Fiction, both affecting each other, and both usually attempting to synchronize, but they are ultimately separate systems. Generally, an event within the Fiction (a player character attacking a goblin with a sword) will be recognized as having a specific Rule that covers it (an attack roll) and play will dip momentarily out of the Fiction layer and into the Rules layer as the players resolve the operation. Typically the operation both modifies the State (the goblin loses HP) and also contributes to the Fiction (the PC’s sword strikes the goblin and draws blood).
The existence of Hard Rules and State are arguably the dividing line between a Role Playing Game and other methods of collaborative storytelling such as Improv Comedy or Cops & Robbers.
Common Examples of State
Numeric Character Sheet Data: “Howard has 12 hit points and a Strength rating of 12.”
Character Tags & Options: “Howard is a Ranger. He has the Fast Feet trait.”
Operations that respond to occurrences within the fiction: “When you attack someone, roll 1d20 and add your Attack Bonus Rating. If you beat their Armor Class your attack succeeds and you proceed to the Roll Damage step.”
Situational information that plugs into the above: “The goblin is standing at position X:10, Y:5 on the combat grid.”
Soft Rules are agreements constraining the players that lack the hard computational forms of Hard Rules--things like social conventions, common sense, and expectations for setting, tone, content, fairness, etc. Some of these are explicit, either coming from a Rulebook (setting expectations) or from discussion among the players (discussions beforehand about the type of game people want to play), but many are implicit--there are endless norms surrounding play that are unstated but generally understood within a social group (players should do what’s fun and not what’s boring, players should act fairly towards other players, players should not be sexist/racist/etc, and so on).
Soft Rules do not typically have procedures tied to them, but they do shape and restrict play in a more organic fashion, by informing and aligning the types of Facts that the players choose to accept into the Fiction. Soft Rules both keep the Fiction more coherent, by establishing beforehand what types of play are expected, and also help to make the process of contribution more structured and less ambiguous for the players--they help to send a message that if your contribution aligns with the rules, it will likely be accepted by the other players without significant need for negotiation.
Common Examples of Soft Rules
Norms related to what is an appropriate contribution to the fiction: “No depictions of torture or sexual assault”, “Don’t make contributions that grossly violate common sense or verisimilitude”
Tone expectations: “This is going to be a spooky horror campaign”, “This takes place in the real world, so elves don’t exist”
Implicit common-sense norms: “Keep things interesting”, “Players should not defecate on the table”
Creative Agendas: “This campaign is going to be all about moral challenge, so please take that side of play seriously and engage with it thoughtfully”
Rules exist to set expectations within a group and to give players more predictability and structure to their play while lessening the amount of time spent consensus building; a set of commonly understood rules allows players to make contributions to the Fiction and know that they are almost assured to be accepted to the group with no pushback, while also allowing them to strategize and engage in conflicts with other players (usually the GM) while assuring that their actions will be meaningful--if they were to fight a goblin, the winner of the fight will generally be determined by the strategies used, dice rolled, and stat sheets of each character rather than by one player simply declaring that they win or by a contextless coinflip.
An important quality of both types of rules is that they are collectively known--this is the reason that I place them within the Shared Imaginary Space. The process of adding new rules or editing existing rules is not dissimilar to the process for adding to or editing the Fiction--changes can be made by group consensus both at the start of play when choosing what Rulebooks, norms, and house rules to incorporate, and also in the middle of play, if a situation arises that the current rules are not handling to the group’s satisfaction.
A game will inevitably accumulate Metacommentary, collectively shared thoughts that are neither Fiction nor System. This includes table talk and strategizing--Players discussing what they should do next, discussing how they feel about how the game is going so far, etc. Metacommentary is different from the other parts of the SIS in that it does not go through the same process of consensus approval that the rest of the SIS does. It is useful for coordinating play and can have great impact on the way the rest of the SIS is perceived by the Players.
Common Examples of Metacommentary
Reactions to the gameplay: “That was cool!”
Planning & strategizing: “On my turn I’ll cast Sleep on the goblins.”
Negotiations over contributions: “It doesn’t make sense that the NPC would do that, and here’s why”
Clarifications of confusion and contradictions within the SIS: “Wasn’t that NPC dead?” “No, you’re thinking of another NPC with a similar name.”
The Players
The Players are the group of people who are engaging in playing the RPG. Each of them has their own Personal Imaginary Space, the version of the Shared Imaginary Space held within their own mind. Their PIS is made up of Facts already incorporated into the SIS and their own personal Headcanon, a mix of the ideas they use to bridge the gaps in description provided by the SIS and their own not yet stated contributions to the Fiction. The RPG is driven by their Desires, what they hope to get out of play, their Strategies, their plans and intentions, and their Histories, their lives outside the scope of the game. Through play they have an Experience, which may or may not fulfill those or other Desires.
Because each Player’s mind is a closed system, the Shared Imaginary Space exists more as a goal to work towards or a dynamic than as an actual existent thing--it exists instead as a series of Personal Imaginary Spaces, each existing in the minds of one of the Players. These Personal Imaginary Spaces are constantly synchronizing through play, and in a functional game are able to stay close enough to each other in shape that a Shared Imaginary Space is able to exist on a practical level. As Players generate Artifacts of play--such as verbal statements or filled out character sheets--the other Players perceive these Artifacts and use the information contained within in order to stay more or less on the same page as the other Players.
This process is imperfect, of course--if one Player describes a scene, two other Players are very likely to have two different mental images of the scene described. Is one character’s hair brown or red? How close are they standing to me? What does a space vampire look like? The Players will contribute their own Headcanons, filling in the gaps in description that naturally occur. These Headcanons are generally ever-changing, updated as additional details are described or as clarifying questions are asked, and can easily turn into full-fledged Facts as the Players act off of them in creating their contributions to the Fiction.
When two Headcanons are revealed to differ, the group must decide which one to accept as Fact--a process usually handled by Authority, although if there’s a general consensus that one Player’s idea is more compelling than another’s it may be accepted even if contributed by a Player without Authority in that area.
It is common for a Player to have ideas of what’s going on within the portion of the Fiction that they have Authority over that they have not yet communicated to the other Players--this is also an element of Headcanon, although it is much less fluid and ever-changing. For a non-GM Player this might include things such as a character’s thoughts, emotional state, or backstory. For a GM this might include the setting prep they did before the session, the truth behind mysteries, and ideas for homebrew rulings.
Artifacts that have not been shared with and accepted by the group also have more to do with Headcanons than the Fiction--be it a character’s backstory written on the back of a character sheet that nobody else has read or a keyed map kept secret from the other Players by the GM.
Common Examples of Headcanons
Unstated character thoughts: “Howard is angry right now”
Imagined gaps between descriptions: “When I think of Mary’s character, I imagine someone with brown hair”
Behind the scenes parts of the fiction: “The true murderer of this murder mystery is the butler.”
Play would not happen if it were not for the Desires of the Players--the productive force that motivates them to join together and decide to hold a RPG session. This force can take countless forms and may be different for different Players, but it is the thing that provides the players with the energy needed to actually organize and carry out play.
Importantly, the Desires that motivate a Player to begin a RPG session may or may not line up with what they actually get out of the play--a Player who thinks they enjoy RPGs due to the opportunity to perform system mastery may actually enjoy them because of the excuse to spend time with friends, or a Player who comes to a RPG session with the Desire to learn what RPGs are may quickly replace that Desire with the Desire to see their character’s story play out. Desires are explicitly what motivate a person to play, not the value the Player gets from the game in practice.
Common Examples of Desires
Roleplay Desires: “I want to pretend to be a cool elf with a big sword.”
Mechanical Desires: “Now that I’m level five I can finally cast Fireball.” “I spent a long time optimizing my build and now I want to put it to action”
Narrative Desires: “I want to see what happens next”
Social Desires: “I want to hang out with my friends”
Non-Play Desires: “I am a professional Actual Play podcaster and I want to be able to pay rent”
Habitual Desires: “I play RPGs on Fridays”
Vague Desires: “I’ve heard RPGs are fun, I should try one some time”
As a Player plays the game, they naturally form their Strategy--their relationship to the SIS and their intentions for how to contribute to it in the future. You can think of this as a sort of local Metacommentary, the thoughts the Player has about the game.
Strategy can have significant overlap with Desire--what one is planning to do next and what one wants to do are often one and the same thing.
Common Examples of Strategies
Tactical Strategies: “Next turn I’m going to cast Sleep on the goblins”
Narrative Strategies: “I’ll use our victory to convince the king to back our struggle”
Relational Strategies: “I like the NPC gnome bartender” “I think the Fireball spell is overpowered”
Each player has a History, the thoughts and experiences from their lives that they bring to play. This encompasses literally everything that has happened to the players before they sat down to play, but the most relevant parts of it are elements such as their preconceived notions of how the real world works, their expectations for how fictional worlds existing within a certain genre work, their personalities, their past experiences, their ability to use language, and so on.
When players make contributions to the SIS, and also when they decide whether to accept or reject another player’s contribution, they are drawing from their personal History for context and inspiration.
Some Examples of Histories Impacting Play
Knowledge Histories: “As someone who used to live in Arizona, let me describe the desert you’re walking through”
Genre Expectation Histories: “As a fan of Conan novels, I’m expecting the game world to look this way”
Reaction Histories: “As someone with arachnophobia, I hate that you’re making me fight a giant spider”
Opinion Histories: “As a socialist, here’s what I think we should do to the king”
Ability Histories: “As someone who can speak English, I’ll use English to contribute to the SIS”
The Experience of a Player is what they are actually getting out of roleplaying--the pleasure, fun, frustration, boredom, memories, social bonds, etc that they might gain through play. This can be quite varied, depending on the shape and environment of play. If the RPG is to replicate itself--that is, if the Players are going to continue playing--the Experience must maintain or create Desires in the Players. This may be accomplished by fulfilling existing Desires, failing to fulfill existing Desires, creating new Desires, or any other similar process that ends with the Players Desiring to play more sessions.
Common Examples of Experiences
Fulfillment of Desires: “I’m having fun pretending to be an elf”
Discovery of Desires: “I want to beat up this goblin”
Neutral Experiences: “I am imagining what this goblin looks like”
Emotional Experience: “I am happy that we saved the unicorn” “I’m bored”
Physical Experiences: “I picked up a die and rolled it.”
This theory is not especially interested in prescriptive descriptions of RPGs, or of reducing the shapes they might take into completed lists, but I figure I should probably take a moment to address where Fun fits into this theory. It is my strong opinion that fun/pleasure/fulfillment for some subset of Players can be found in just about any moving part of this theory. There is pleasure to be had in the fulfillment of pre-existing Desires, but there is also pleasure to be discovered in exploring the tension between the Fiction and Hard Rules, or in building up Headcanons, or in speaking in a funny voice as you generate Artifacts, or in system mastery, or in watching a story unfold, or in the physical act of rolling dice, or in any of infinite other spaces. This theory is a bit too zoomed out to engage with fun too directly, but it is my hope that in taking such a zoomed out view of RPGs unexplored spaces that fun could be found in might be discovered and worked within.
Artifacts of Play
If the Personal Imaginary Space of each Players exists only within their own mind, how do the Players communicate their visions and create the consensus needed to support a Shared Imaginary Space? They do so through the creation and use of Artifacts of Play--all of the communicative acts and props used during play. These include Utterances, ephemeral spoken word contributions to the SIS, as well as Records, physical recordings of the game State or Fiction, Rulebooks, documents brought into the group that were created outside of play that the Players collectively agree to adhere to, and Randomizers, processes that exist outside of the Players which can create unexpected results. Also acting upon the process of play is the Environment, everything that is not the RPG.
One of the first steps of play is the creation of the game’s System. This process may be small to the point of invisibility, as in the case of a child’s game of Cops & Robbers, but for most RPG groups it begins with the choice of which Rulebooks to use. Rulebook is a blanket term for any Artifact that contains a bundle of Rules and Facts that has been created before play began--its most usual form is a written document.
Common Examples of Rulebooks
System Rulebooks: The Dungeons & Dragons 5e Player Handbook
Content Rulebooks: The D&D 5e Monster Manual
Setting Rulebooks: The 5e D&D Spelljammer setting guide. A module such as B2-Keep on the Borderlands
Homebrew Rulebooks: A list of homerules or a blog post a group agrees to hold to before play
Tone Rulebooks: The art inside the Vampire: The Masquerade rulebook, which subtly guides player expectations and implicitly sets up Soft Rules
The majority of play is made up of a process by which the Players make a series of contributions to the Fiction and State of the game. When those contributions are ephemeral, such as made via spoken word or pantomime, they are Utterances, and when they create lasting documentation, such as a character sheet adjustment or chat log, they are Records. Both behave in fundamentally the same manner--a Player presents the contribution to the group and it is either accepted and added to the Shared Imaginary Space, it is rejected, or it is mutated and changed in some way before being accepted.
Some Example Utterances & Records
Narrative Utterances: “I open the door”
Systemic Utterances: “I use a luck point to reroll that result”
Records of State: The stats written down on a character’s character sheet
Records of Narrative: Notes a player took on what happened during a session
Shared Records: The location of minis on a grid battlemap
Records of Utterances: A video recording of a session of play
For example, let’s say that a Player says that their character opens a door. The contribution may be accepted by the group--the door is now open within the Fiction. It may be declared by the GM or the other Players that there is no door and that the character does not try to do this thing--perhaps the Player forgot that the door was kicked off its hinges earlier in the scene and so this would cause a contradiction if accepted. The GM could also modify the action, by saying that the character attempts to open the door but finds it locked instead. They could also invoke or create a Hard Rule operation to modify the action unpredictably by having the player roll a six sided die plus their Door Opening skill rating and have different outcomes based on the result of the roll--on a 4+ they open the door and on a 3- they find it too stuck shut to open.
Any such technique that uses inputs from outside of Player’s intent to modify the process by which the Shared Imaginary Space is added to is a Randomizer. These Randomizers add unpredictability to the events of play, either by creating the possibility that a player’s contribution is not fully accepted, or by making contributions of its own. Randomizers generally plug into the Hard Rules part of the SIS, and can be seen as a sort of semi-Player, offering up contributions that shape the SIS takes every bit as much as the true Players.
Some Example Randomizers
Success Randomizers: Rolling dice to see if an action succeeds or not
Narrative Randomizers: Rolling dice against a table to see which random event happens
Non-Random Randomizers: Letting the player who can grab a token off the table fastest win initiative
Other Randomizers: Drawing a card from a deck, flipping a coin, rock-paper-scissors, guessing which hand is holding a token, asking an AI chatbot for ideas, etc
The Environment is a catch-all term for everything that is not the process of playing the RPG. It includes things such as the room that play is occurring in (if it is happening in person), the non-RPG topics that have been on the minds of Players, the social dynamics between Players, the snacks on the table, the moon, non-RPG table talk, the history of human civilization, and literally everything that is not the game itself. While it does have an impact on the manner that play occurs--a swelteringly hot room may drain the energy from play, personal enmity between players may impact the player Desires and contributions--it is not part of the RPG itself.
Unclassified Thoughts
Rulebooks, and the fact that they are often not read in full by all (or often, any) of the Players, can create a strange dynamic where there are elements that are both within the Shared Imaginary Space (they are written in the Rulebook, which has been added to the SIS) and simultaneously not within the SIS (nobody knows about them because nobody has read/remembers that part of the Rulebook). A more common relative of this dynamic is the one where some Players have read the Rulebook and others have not. Similarly, a Record that has been written down but not shared with the group is not truly in the SIS yet and can come to contradict the rest of the game (for example, a Player may make a Rules error when creating their character). All situations create contradictions within the Shared Imaginary Space which must be corrected by Player consensus once the contradiction comes up in play.
The System by which contributions are accepted or rejected from the SIS defaults to a negotiation--a Player makes a contribution and the group must reach consensus on whether it will be added or not. This consensus can be reached explicitly, through discussion, or implicitly, by lack of objection. In simple children’s games, like Cops & Robbers, this may be the only System that exists (this is probably being unfair to children, actually--even within Cops & Robbers there are all sorts of norms and expectations present and developing through the process). This system has a great drawback, however--it is relatively easy for it to come to an impasse; if a situation arises where consensus can not be reached the game simply tears itself apart and can not progress, and for this reason most RPGs have additional Rules and Authorities to lubricate the process.
Player Contributions to the SIS are not only to the game’s Fiction--any Player can attempt a Contribution to the game’s Soft or Hard Rules at any time if they are unsatisfied with the current dynamics of the System. In practice, this process is less common and more stingily reviewed than Fiction contributions mid-play, but it is entirely possible for a player to request a change to Soft Rules (“Hey everyone, can we cut down on the graphic descriptions of gore and violence?”), Hard Rules (“Now that a PC is at 0hp, do you all want to try out rolling on a Death & Dismemberment table instead of our normal system?”), or State (“Actually, can I swap out what Feats I took last level real quick?”).
Some collaborative storytelling playstyles may include only Soft Rules. In improv comedy, there are typically not hard mechanical processes, but there are a series of cultural Soft Rules such as “Say Yes”. Free Kriegspiel has quite a few Soft Rules meant to facilitate play but actively avoids incorporating any Hard Rules. More classical RPGs contain a mix of both Soft and Hard rules, although there are some games not commonly referred to as RPGs that also contain both, such as Matrix Games.
The interplay between Hard Rules and the Fiction is one of the great unique features of RPGs. They exist as two parallel streams, both informationally closed, but both constantly affecting and being affected by the other. Typically, an occurrence within the Fiction will be judged by the Players to activate the conditions for a Hard Rule to come into play. Play will then switch to the resolution of the operation associated with the Hard Rule--a process that may involve a simple binary check (once per day you may take X action), incorporate Randomizers (make a die roll), dip back into the Fiction (gains a +2 when used on a friend), or incorporate additional Player contributions (state your desired effect). The process, once resolved, will then have some impact on (usually) the Fiction and (often) the State, and the normal process of play will resume.
Contradictions can easily crop up within the Shared Imaginary Space, and once discovered must be resolved in order for play to continue. For example, it might be noticed that two differing contributions stating a character’s hair color might have both been accepted by the group--the group must then come to a conclusion as to what that character’s hair color “truly” is in order for the coherence of the SIS to hold. The process for doing this is not significantly different than ordinary contributions to the SIS--Players will simply contribute resolutions until a consensus is reached.
Those Contradictions can most noticeably and easily pop up within the Fiction (agreeing what color a character’s hair is), but they can occur on and between most layers. Soft Rules can easily reach states of Contradiction. Most groups adopt the implicit Soft Rules of "Keep things interesting" and "Players get to choose what their own characters do". If a player is just consistently being really boring, those two Rules create a contradiction and the group has to decide how to resolve it--choosing between letting the play stay boring or do saying "come on, don't do that--do something interesting instead".
This isn't unique to Soft Rules vs Soft Rules contradictions. If an already-decided fight goes on too long the Hard Rules of the combat system can contradict the "keep things interesting" Soft Rule, and it's entirely reasonable that the group may choose to end the fight faster--possibly through dropping the enemy's max hp. If one player has a cool idea for a hook relating to their father being a pirate king, but then they realized that they mentioned offhandedly that their father was a farmer ten sessions ago, it's fair that the Fiction could get into a fight with "keep things interesting" and the group could choose to retcon the Fact of the farmer father. Nothing is immutable within the SIS, as long as the group can reach consensus about changing it.
Existing Theory
If it isn’t obvious from this post's title, this is in large part a response to Ron Edward’s Big Model. I should probably spend a little time talking about how the theories are similar and how they’re different, and why.
The basic structure of the two theories are compatible up to a point. The Big Model posits a hierarchy of nested “boxes” that describe the elements of a roleplaying game session--a Social Contract giving context to Exploration which uses Techniques which manifest as Ephemera. I have some instinctive aversion to hierarchy and I break things into a few more parts, but the gists aren’t especially contradictory. I’m a bit more interested in zooming in on the Ephemera side of play, while he seems to be coming from a more System-centric view. The big split occurs once we bring up Creative Agendas--a force in the Big Model piercing through and connecting all four boxes. Under the Big Model, that Creative Agenda takes one of three forms--Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulation.
Desire (and to some extent Experience) are loose analogues to the Creative Agenda in my system, but there’s a fundamental divide in approach here--the Big Model is meant to be a guide to help designers create systems along a certain set of guidelines--”What should you design?” On the other hand, I’m actively avoiding prescriptive statements with this model--my goal could better be stated as trying to discover “How might one play?” The Big Model attempts to cut down the design space into only its ‘best’ forms, while I’m more interested in discovering untapped veins of potential. Both methods have their value--although I do have to admit that I think GNS theory is an active cognitohazard to aspiring designers and is easily the least interesting idea to come out of The Forge (I do not think this take is especially controversial in the year 2023).
There are elements of the Big Model that I largely ignore such as Character and Color. Again, it makes sense that a system based around assisting actual development would include them as they are usually important to design, but to my mind they are not definitionally important to what a RPG is and so I omit them. I also take issue with the very concept of Color--the idea that you could have Facts contributed to the SIS that have no potential for affecting the development of a situation just seems fundamentally wrong to me. Grabbing and weaponizing seemingly minor throwaway details about a scene is half the fun of RPGs to me.
The concept of the Shared Imagined Space--popularized by Ron Edwards--is obviously fundamental to my model, although I hope I have contributed something to the idea with my contrast between the SIS and Personal Imaginary Spaces and the process by which they synchronize. I also call it an “Imaginary Space” instead of an “Imagined” one because I’m de-emphasizing its objective existence and because it’s easier to say for some reason. I also include System within it because I think System and Fiction are both fluid, prone to desynchronization between Players, and made up via a system of mutual Contribution.
Vincent Baker’s conception of Boxes and Clouds should be fairly obvious as huge inspirations to me, and have a big influence on my descriptions of Fiction and State. I don’t have much to contribute to the concept.
I’ve gotten a fair bit of good feedback from people pointing out sources I should really be engaging with more directly. Once I’ve checked them out I’ll revise this in response.
What’s Next?
Probably my biggest dissatisfaction with this description is that my examples are all (intentionally) uninspired. It’d be fun to do some deep dives into various actual play/actual book examples and try to dissect them using this theory. It’d also be fun to try to imagine some areas of play that haven’t been as explored as they could be, using this theory as a guide.
I should also probably try to use this theory to come up with some methods for trying to create or evaluate “good” play. That’s really not what this theory is about, but it is what people are going to be wanting out of it, so maybe I should take a shot at that eventually.
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