The Elements of TTRPGs: A Starting Point

Revisiting a Big Bad Con Panel from 2022

Last year, I delivered a panel entitled “The Elements of TTRPGs” at Big Bad Con. Joining me on the panel was Shao Han Tan, a dear friend of mine and a designer par excellence from Singapore. You should absolutely follow him on Twitter if you’re still on the bird app, and check the stuff he makes out over at Curious Chimeras. He is joined by Alanna Yeo, another fantastic human being. Here is Shao’s website.

This is going to be an expansion on the theoretical framework Shao and I put together. For those of you who have a copy of the document I gave out after BBC 2022, consider this an updated version.

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Rubric

The first step to building critical discourse within a creative field is to begin locating common definitions. Every time a thing is defined, emergent extensions of its definition appear along with emergent divergences and oppositions. This is a good thing.

This is an attempt to locate “identifiable” elements to tabletop roleplaying games. We’re here to start conversations and offer possibilities, NOT answer questions with finality, or speak with absolute authority, or prescribe specific recommendations on what your game should or should not contain.

How might this help a designer?

Many game designers in our space do not know where to start the moment they have a concept for their game. Perhaps zeroing in on “essential” elements will provide a starting checklist that can be adjusted to their purposes.

“When we analyze literature, we often speak of things like Plot, Character, Setting, Theme, and all that jazz. What, then, are things we should consider when we talk about TTRPGs?”

The Elements

The elements that will be discussed in this article are:

• Fantasy

• World

• Body (Audience & Players)

• Tension

• Design (Rules/System)

• Principles

• Form

• Touch

• Intent

Each element will be presented with a question that is meant to serve as a guide post. The question is worded with a critical reader in mind.

Fantasy, Form, and Touch are new additions to the original spread that Shao and I presented during our panel. Furthermore, “World” used to be the alternative title to the element “Premise”. With the development of the concept of the Fantasy, I’ve decided to move away from “Premise”.

Fantasy

Answers the question: “What experience or experiences do you want your game to bring to life?”

Inspired by the analytical framework of Story Stacking in video games, as outlined by this post - the author uses Mass Effect 2 in their example.

The “core” of any TTRPG: may also be called the external premise or out-of-character experience that a game is trying to present. Roleplaying games all attempt to bringing specific player fantasies to life.

In locating the player fantasy that they want their players to immerse themselves in, a game designer provides the “box” of their game, first locating its Body, then articulating the game designer’s Principles, and elaborating on these Principles by determining the Premise, building the World, and providing necessary limitations on the kinds of stories that are best told by their work through its Design - thus informing its Tensions. The Fantasy also allows the designer to build a sense for what they want their players to Touch, and gives them an idea of the Form their game shall take.

Blades in the Dark (John Harper) attempts to manifest the Fantasy of playing scoundrels in the hellish city of Doskvol. Externally, every aspect of its Design is focused on this by providing systems for Scores, dealing with Factions that are usually in conflict with the players’ scoundrels, giving scoundrels stress meters, bolting in a means to reach for dangerous power through the Devil’s Bargain, and managing any fallout that the scoundrels may experience from their decisions.

World

Answers the question: “what is this game about?”

Every TTRPG presents a PLACE more than anything else, and we note that for purposes of our discussion that we count “nowhere” as a place. Some examples of “nowhere” being a place would be tabletop roleplaying games that speak to “You”, the player, and have you engage with the so-called “real world” rather than a fictional setting. A typical case of this would be in lyric or ritual games. Jewish designer Adira Slattery and Filipino designer Maria Mison have some excellent ones on their itch accounts. You may find Adira’s here, and Maria’s here.

For ttrpgs that deal in a fictional place, we ask three questions:

• What is the imagined world that the game is presenting?

• What does this imagined world ask of its players?

• How does this imagined world serve the game’s Fantasy?

These questions delve into the “internal” or “in-character” world of the game. The premise actively reinforces a game’s necessary limitations with respect to its Tensions, its Body, and the stories that players can tell in their pursuit of their Fantasies. Furthermore, the shape or structure that the World is meant to take is refined even more by the game’s Body, and its Design.

Some TTRPGs have a fixed World or Worlds within its ecosystem, with the most commercial example being Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (Wizards of the Coast). D&D 5E’s canonical setting is the fantasy world of Faerun, which asks its players to play as heroes combating various evils. Other source books under D&D’s purview tackle other fantasy worlds, and D&D’s Design then develops or revises its core rules to suit the Worlds in question. In all cases, huge part of the game’s Fantasy is built around fighting monsters, and finding fame and fortune through heroic deeds.

Other TTRPGs do not have a fixed World, but a unifying set of concepts that give shape to potential scenarios that players can either generate for themselves, or choose a scenario of choice from a spread that is often provided by the designer. Best Left Buried self-describes as “a rules-light, fantasy horror roleplaying game – where the monsters are scary, and you are scared”. While the original design team has provided multiple scenarios - and, at times, entire setting books - that can be used in tandem with Best Left Buried’s design, players are free to develop their own imagined World for their group.

Body (Audience & Players)

Answers the question: “Who is this game written for?”

A TTRPG can be enjoyed either in the act of play itself or the act of reading it. Many people will read a TTRPG without ever playing it, and their experience can be as valid as the experiences of people who will read the TTRPG and play it.

As with all creative endeavors, TTRPGs were designed with a specific Audience in mind. Even when one says “I designed this for myself”, an audience is present in the aforementioned “self”.

A designer cannot limit who reads their work and engages with it in acts of play, but a designer can decide for themselves who they had in mind when they were designing their work. It then becomes the work of the reader or critic to who the designer was thinking of, in order to evaluate the game with as much an approximation of critical analysis as possible.

As for Players: whether it is a solo journaling game or a LARP meant for a group of ten or more people, the cap on which a game places on its total number of participants offers a theoretical constraint that binds its whole Design together.

Tension

Answers the question: “What situations are facilitated by this game?”

An imagined source of oddness, dissonance, conflict, problems, or challenges always exists in a TTRPG regardless of the game, which creates Tension of two-fold nature: internal/in-character and external/out-of-character. An exception, something out of the ordinary, a break from the norm as defined by the game’s premise, occurred – hence the need for the avatars of the game’s players to engage.

Tension feels like a more encompassing term to use rather than to presume that all ttrpgs must be grounded in conflict, that the only time play in a TTRPG is interesting is if there is something “wrong”, or when a player character must solve an issue or overcome a challenge. Even tension as a word has implications that may not be perfect for generalized purposes.

The Tensions in Lancer (Massif Press) are overt. 15,000 years into our future, humanity has spread across all corners of the galaxy. As with the exploration of any new frontiers, wars have broken out, genocide has happened, corporate greed has ruined planets… the list goes on and on. The mech pilots that Players create can hail from a number of factions, and these factions further facilitate Tension in that their interests may not always align with the personal drives of the pilots.

Conversely, the Tension present in Aaron Lim’s An Altogether Different River is less overt. It revolves around the different feelings and experiences of a homecoming, both on the part of the people returning home and on the people who were left behind. There aren’t always problems to solve; there are no demons to exorcise, monsters to kill. But the emotional situations that arise from the game in itself can be as riveting as a Lancer engagement.

Design (Rules/System)

Answers the question: “What can players do and not do?”

We may consider Fantasy, Premise, and Tension the meat of a TTRPG while the bones are its Design. Design encompasses all the content of a ttrpg that is directed towards resolving the game’s Tension(s), both internal/in-character and external/in-character. The constraints, boundaries, and necessary limitations of the Design tie Premise, Body, and Intent together, and work to fully manifest the game’s Fantasy and World.

We’re shying away from using Rules & System as anything but convenient signboards or alternative terms/definitions for Design. To insist on defining this element as Rules or System would be putting gross limitations on the increasing diversity of TTRPGs.

The necessary limitations imposed by a game’s Design are ideally done in service of its Fantasy. In Hunter: the Reckoning (Renegade Studios), players become mortal Hunters of the supernatural. As it is “a game of desperate measures”, and the World works to emphasize the supernatural as mysterious, frightening, and dangerous, Hunter’s Design has extensive rules on investigation and combat. Hunters have physical, mental, and emotional limitations that are put to the test, and a principle source of external Tension that Hunter players experience is through the game’s dice mechanics. The randomness of the dice can be curbed through a Hunter’s Attributes and Skills, in that the higher a Hunter’s Attribute or Skill points are, the likelier they are to succeed in a dice roll. And, of course, the narrative often shifts according to how dice rolls played out at the table.

Form

Answers the questions: “What does the game look like?” and “How does the game present itself?”

Form is one of two elements that deal with the physicality of the work itself. Is the TTRPG presented as a manual or a rulebook? If so, does it have illustrations? What purpose do these illustrations serve? What about its layout? Are there sections dedicated to fictional entries in the rulebook? How are those fictional entries written, and what do they reveal about the game’s World?

Form gives grounded, tangible, “real” shape to the Fantasy of the game, and is meant to communicate the various aspects of the game’s Design. Tools or game aids such as character sheets, online apps, cards, dice, and tokens are all part of the Form. Art direction, typography, and graphic design can do the triple work of presenting the game’s Design in a comprehensible manner to the Body, expressing the game’s Fantasy, and leaning into the game’s Principles.

This should be obvious already, but the Forms that TTRPGs take shape in should not be constrained to traditionally understood mediums like the rulebook or manual, or using traditional tools like dice. This Discord Has Ghosts In It (Adam Vass & Will Jobst) requires the use of the Discord app. i’m sorry did you say street magic (Caro Asercion) has players building a City together through the drawing of cards from a specialized deck. Many TTRPGs designers create small games with the express intent of constricting the Form of the game on a single business card.

Notably, a game’s Form is not always able to fully manifest a designer’s Intent. It is the one element in a TTRPG that is completely restrained by external factors: economic considerations on the part of the designer or design team, technological limits, production issues, and so on. When considering a game’s Form in formal analysis, a critic must do their due diligence in keeping abreast of the context of the game’s development cycle.

Touch

Answers the question: “What are the kinetic experiences players experience through the game?”

Touch is the second element that deals with the physicality of a TTRPG work, touching specifically upon the kinetic experience of engaging in play through a TTRPG. Rolling dice and shuffling the cards are physical actions, often accompanied by various emotions: excitement, anticipation, apprehension, fear, frustration, joy. Similarly, the physical action of collecting tokens in a game that relies on a token economy could do three things at once: providing a visual aid to the player (“Okay, I’ve got five tokens!”), representing a fictional resource in the so-called real world (“Hmm, I think I’ve got a lot of energy left for this fight…” ), and providing a tactile sense of achievement (“All those decisions I made this session were worth it!”).

Dread (The Impossible Dream) is a notable example of a game that leans heavily into Touch for its Design. Self-described as “a toolbox for exploring dread as an emotion”, the game takes the Form of a Jenga Tower accompanied by its rulebook. Tension is facilitated by the structural integrity - or lack thereof - of the Jenga Tower on the table. The story twists and turns according to whether or not a player is able to successfully pull a block out of the Tower without it collapsing.

Similar to Form, a game’s Touch is not always successful in manifesting a designer’s Intent: it is rather reliant on the individual contexts possessed by a game’s theoretical Body. However, something specific to the purview of Touch is that there may be unintended kinetic experiences that the game designer did not account for. Touch may also present an accessibility barrier, especially if the design of a game’s tools do not account for the lived experiences of disabled or neurodivergent players.

Principles

Answers the question: “What is this game REALLY saying about the real world?”

We attempt to break away from the limiting idea that all games must have a theme, for even critical frameworks for understanding stories have pointed out that to insist upon a theme can be Eurocentric and exclusionary. Instead, perhaps we can operate around the idea that every game has one reality, or a shortlist of realities, that underpin the entirety of the work, and are exemplified by the different aspects of all its elements. For example, we can surmise that some of the Principles of Thirsty Sword Lesbians (April Kit Walsh, Evil Hat Publishing) include:

• The world is queer.

• There is intimacy in violence as there is in romance.

• Violence itself is transformative, not destructive.

There is no limit to the number of Principles a game can have, and there is no need to seek out a so-called “central” Principle.

Aspects of the game’s Form can become manifestations of a game’s Principles. Layout, art direction, illustration, copy, and the like are all useful in illuminating Principles for the critic. Contextually, a designer can also use their aesthetics of choice to tacitly guide the Body towards how they wish their game to be engaged with – thus leaning into their Intent.

Intent

Answers the question: “Why did the designer do things this way?”

Whether it is something as simple as “I want to make a game where you roll a lot of different dice” to “I wish to make a game that extends the conversation on postcolonialism in Southeast Asia”, designers engage in the act of creating their game with particular Intent. How “well” or “poorly” a game embodied the designer’s Intent can lead to fascinating critical discussions, and may even be a good source of critique.

No game designer creates a game bereft of Intent. Even as you are “fucking around and finding out”, your engagement in the act of creation is calculated. Intent, together with the Fantasy, is the skin encompassing the meat and bones of the work.

By “wanting to make a game where you roll a lot of different dice”, you will define the content of your Design and the Tension of your game around the usage of multiple kinds of dice. In “wishing to make a game that extends the conversation on postcolonialism in Southeast Asia”, you may zero in on a Southeast Asian Body, and ground your World (or aspects thereof, or reflections thereof) on the region itself.

Leaning a little bit into the example above, an excellent realization of designer Intent can be found in Gubat Banwa (Makapatag). In service of a Fantasy revolving around the drama of fantastical martial artists engaged in the drama that comes with warring factions, Makapatag’s Design insists upon a unique language that engages with poetics more deeply reflective of Southeast Asian cultures - breaking away, for example, from standardized strategy or TTRPG game terms like “turns” or “rounds”. The World is unapologetically inspired by his vision of a Fantasy Southeast Asia, which does not recognize a precolonial/post-colonial divide by merit of being “purely” fictional.

So. What do you think?

“The Elements of TTRPGs” received a lot of great feedback from its attendees. Several folks who only got to read the document reached out as well to say that they found the document helpful with interrogating their own designs, or engaging with the work of their peers.

I’d be deeply interested in any conversations that come about as a result of the framework Shao and I presented - and I don’t just mean wholehearted agreement. I cannot state this enough: the point of building any theoretical framework or critical theory is to create a space for more discursive conversations to happen. Furthermore, I know for a fact that these elements are not perfect representations of all the bits and bobs that go into our games. TTRPGs evolve month by month, year by year - and the discursive language we use in analyzing them must necessarily change.

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For those of you who are looking forward to my (long overdue) notes on the usage of violence in TTRPGs: be not afraid, I have been brewing on how to do this for a while. It will happen, and if the stars align, it’ll be up on my Substack sometime this year.