Another Ask Angry? Literally one after another? Yeah. Get off my ass. There’s madness in my methods.

I don’t really want to waste a lot of time introducing this crap. I’ve been sitting on this Ask Angry question for a while, as I might explain below. I’m going to answer it and then, toward the end, segue into a little discussion about Mere Adventure Building versus True Scenario Design. That’ll open the way to my showing my poor, neglecting Mere Adventure Buildery fans some love because I’ve been neglecting them lately. See, I kinda want to talk about how the Dungeons & Dragons (2024) Dungeon Master’s Guide is actually a pretty okay resource for Mere Adventure Building advice, except for one really stupid-ass omission. Then, I want to talk about that same omission in terms of the secret Kraid kill in Metroid: Dread and what it can teach my True Scenario Designery students about resting, structure, and the adventuring day in Dungeons & Dragons.

See? Madness. Method.

That’s all gonna take a few discussions that I mean to trickle out as October comes to a close. Hopefully. Shit’s really rough. But don’t worry about me; I’ll be fine. Or I’ll die. Either way, my problems are temporary.

Anyway, with the plan — such as it is — firmly laid out, let’s jump into the first part of this insanity…

Blaise asks…

In tabletop roleplaying games, what is the relationship between the game (G) and the narrative (RP)? Does the game make the narrative, or are they more like parallel things that are both kinda just there? Is it a symbiotic relationship where they help each other?

As noted in my Long, Rambling Introduction™, I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. Sorry, Blaise, it ain’t that it’s a bad question. Actually, it’s a great question: you cut right to the point, which I love, and you gave me permission to call you Blaise. I’m so jazzed, I’m not even going to make a Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) joke at your expense even though I really want to. I don’t get a lot of opportunities to reference Sonic ’06 and I really do love it.

Yeah, that’s right. Last time, I slagged on Silksong and now I’m praising Sonic ‘06 and yet, I’m still asking y’all to trust that I know game design better than all of you.

That said, don’t get your panties in a jimmy. I am mostly enjoying playing Silksong, and I don’t think Sonic ’06 is actually better. It’s just that Silksong’s kinda janky, you know? I can see the game design skills Team Cherry would eventually refine when they built their masterwork, Hollow Knight, but it’s always hard to go back to a designer’s more primitive, seminal work. It’s instructive, though. Playing Silksong, you can really see how much Team Cherry improved between putting out that experimental little mess and Hollow Knight.

But I digress. Sorry about that, Blaise.

I’ve tried to address the relationship between the game part of roleplaying games and the story part before. Mostly obliquely. Mostly as a sidebar to other discussions. That goes, too, for the simulation part. But I’ve never quite managed to nail that shit. People were always left asking me the exact same questions. That’s why I’ve been sitting on this question, Blaise. I was trying to figure out why the hell I can’t just explain this shit.

Then, it hit me. The problem is a bunch of assumptions, misunderstandings, misused words, and gamer baggage. Some of it is even on my side. I actually realized that all those years I spent railing against GNS and The Big Forge Model of Roleplaying Gaming or whatever the hell its called is due to a misunderstanding on my part. Kind of. I mean, I still think it’s a bad model and I think it’s way too limited to be useful, but I recognize I had some things wrong. Well, actually, I was right, but I should have recognized everyone else had them wrong. Because it was kind of obvious.

But I digress. Again. Sorry.

Let me start by picking a tiny-ass little nit that’s actually way bigger than it is. The whole thing about splitting the ‘RPG’ acronym into an ‘RP’ and a ‘G’? We gotta stop doing that. I’ve done it too, but it’s training our brains bad. Remember, how you talk shapes how you think.

The term ‘roleplaying game’ or ‘RPG’ isn’t actually a meaningful, descriptive term. It’s just the name of a medium.

See? I warned you this was going to seem like a tiny-ass nit to pick. But it’s important. Board games are a medium. They don’t technically need boards, and boards aren’t the thing that make board games board games, right? Video games are a medium. Yes, they all involve the generation of moving images displayed on a screen, but, again, that doesn’t really say anything useful about the medium. It’s the same for roleplaying games. They’re a medium. Roleplaying is involved. But is that the be-all and end-all? No. Is roleplaying even the most important part? I’d argue not. Many games that aren’t roleplaying games ask you to assume the role of a character in a fictional setting. When I play Sonic the Hedgehog, I take on the role of a speedy blue hedgehog. In Silksong, I play as a thoroughly unlikable needle-wielding insect named Silksong. In Magic: the Gathering, I’m a wizard gladiator except when I’m a Disney Princess or Legolas because Magic has totally lost the fucking plot. In HEAT: Pedal to the Metal, I’m a racecar driver.

I’m not starting here to be a semantic jackass or to troll Silksong fans — that’s just a fun bonus for me — but because we roleplaying gamers do have a tendency to think of roleplaying and gameplay as two distinct, separable halves of the roleplaying gaming experience. That’s a stupid instinct. That’s like splitting video games into games and the stuff that appears on a screen.

We actually have lots of false dichotomies in this hobby of ours, and I don’t think they do us any good. In fact, I think they do us a lot of bad. For example, we talk about game mechanics versus flavor, right? There’s crunch and there’s fluff. A monster’s stat block is just a bunch of abstract mechanics. Change how you describe them narratively, and they can represent anything else. That’s how reskinning works, right? Maybe I need stats for a thieving little halfling bastard, but all I’ve got handy is a goblin skulk or whatever. Maybe I want to play a human raised by dwarves, so I use dwarf stats and a dwarf background, but describe him like Carrot Ironfounderson. Simple as that, right?

Neither The Angry GM, Angry Games, Inc., nor any of its partners, subsidiaries, or affiliates endorse or condone the use of reskinning in any way, shape, or form. If you or someone you love has a reskinning problem, help is available in your area. You don’t have to live like this.

So, we gamers separate our fluff from our crunch. We separate our story from our gameplay. We separate our roleplaying from our game.

There’s a whole theory about roleplaying gaming and shared, creative intent behind such games based on separating gamer preferences into gaming, narrative, and simulation. Originally, it was called the GNS Model. Its intent wasn’t actually to provide a comprehensive description of gamer motivations, but rather to facilitate forming social contracts within gaming groups based on prioritizing preferences for certain aspects of the gameplay experience. The problem is, despite its good intentions, it’s still tainted by the idea of separable preferences that can be arranged in priority order. Which just ain’t how it works.

See, there’s an entire field of study around the psychological reasons why people play games and how gameplay affects the human psyche. I’m a big fan of it, for obvious reasons, and I’ve gone pretty deep into the weeds on this shit in the past. I’m going to try to avoid that today. I’m probably gonna fail.

To some extent, you can indeed classify people by their preferences for certain aspects of a gameplay experience. The problem is, it ain’t as clean or as cut-and-dry as this shit makes it seem, and there’s also a lot of different ways of slicing up gamer preferences. This ain’t like a Big Five Personality Trait thing, and treating it as such will usually land you in trouble. It is possible to talk about games in terms of their game parts, their story parts, their simulation parts, their creative expression parts, their social interaction parts, their sensory pleasure parts, and so on, and cetera, and nauseam, and, in the past, I’ve talked about several different so-called Gamer Motivation Models that do just that.

It’s just not as useful as you might think, and we run into some problems very quickly.

One problem that I, personally, keep running into without realizing it — which is something I basically only realized while I was outlining this answer — is that I’m not using the word ‘game’ the same way all the rest of my fellow gamers do.

I use the word ‘game’ like a designer or an academic or a psychologist. In other words, I use it correctly. A game is an activity that has a goal, structured rules, and presents its participants with a challenge. Basketball is a game. The goal is to put the ball in the basket. That’s why it’s called basketball. The rules are that you can’t carry the ball in your hands, that the basket is far away and high up in the air, and you’re not allowed to use a ladder or punch anyone. The challenge is that throwing is hard and that I’m uncoordinated and that if I move around for more than one minute, I can’t breathe and my left arm starts to hurt.

You get what I’m saying.

When I talk about games and game design, I’m talking about activities with goals, rules, and challenges. Roleplaying games are particular kinds of games that are primarily played out as a narrative discussion in which one participant describes hypothetical situations and the remaining participants attempt to navigate those situations via a single character avatar blah blah blahdy blah. The goal in a roleplaying game is defined by the scenario. The players might be tasked with rescuing a princess from a dragon, killing Satan, reclaiming an ancestral kingdom, or gathering wealth and power by plundering the ruins of ancient empires. Whatever. The rules in a roleplaying game come partly from the rulebooks and partly from the Game Master, who is a part of the game and not a player. The challenges are every uncertain thing the players have to overcome to reach their goals.

From that standpoint, it’s batshit crazy to separate the roleplaying or simulation or story parts from the game itself. The game is the activity. It’s a game because it involves a goal, structured rules, and challenges. The players play the game by roleplaying, though the extent to which they have to roleplay can vary greatly. Beer-and-pretzels kick-in-the-door gamers are still playing roleplaying games. Likewise, as the players play the game, a story unfolds. The players explore a world that behaves, to some extent, as it would if it were a real world filled with real people. Hence, as the players play the game, they enter a simulated, fantastical otherworld.

The extent to which each of those different aspects of the gameplay experience affects each player’s individual engagement with and enjoyment of the experience. Psychologically speaking, we call those things gamer motivations and gather them into lists called Gamer Motivation Models. One of my favorite models — the MDA Model — take a shot — calls out such motivations as Narrative — the desire to participate in a story — and Fantasy — the desire to immerse yourself in an imaginary world as if it were a real place. That shit arises from the play experience, though. You can’t separate them from the activity. That’s like separating out the experience of tasting chocolate from the act of eating a piece of cake.

But…

Most gamers don’t know any of this shit, and so most gamers are pretty careless with their words. One word gamers are really careless with is the word ‘game’. When normal gamers use the word ‘game’, they’re not describing a particular kind of activity. They’re describing what I — and other people who actually know what the hell they’re talking about — would call Challenge or Mastery. That is, they’re describing the desire to test oneself against something or someone. That’s another gamer motivation. Gamers want to challenge their skills or master a task or otherwise just win at something. I literally never realized this miscommunication was happening, and I’ve had so many fights because of it.

By the way, don’t conflate Challenge and Mastery with difficulty. Challenge is a desire to overcome something, prove your skills, and win. Everyone likes to overcome and win. Well, ‘likes’ is the wrong word. Everyone is wired to want to overcome shit and win at shit. But that’s not important. The actual amount of testing and struggling people want in a game varies by preference. Just like some people get really into roleplaying while others don’t so much, some people like Hollow Knight and Cuphead, and other people play turn-based, boring-ass bullshit like Claire the Obscure’s 66th Expedition or whatever the hell that nonsense is called. I don’t know; I play real games.

I actually think, Blaise, that you’re kinda doing the same thing in your question. I have a feeling that, when you say, “What’s the relationship between the game part of the roleplaying game and the roleplaying part,” you’re referring to the difference between the parts that involve fighting or figuring your way through challenges and the parts where you pretend to be your character and put on a show for your friends. Or something like that. I also think there may be a little bit of false dichotomy happening, too. Because, for some reason, people never seem to realize that choosing in combat between saving your friend with a healing spell or trying to kill a monster quickly enough to end a fight is actually a significant expression of character personality and an act of roleplaying. Hell, it says more about your character than you playing out a perfectly normal shopping trip in character.

Which kind of gets to a bigger point here. While it’s true that the Mastery component and the Story component and the Fantasy component and all the rest are all disparate flavors that emerge from the cake that is a roleplaying game, they’re not actually as easy to separate as it might appear, and they all sort of mix together. In fact, that’s one of the things that makes gaming such a unique psychological experience.

If you’re driven by a single motivation, say a desire to experience or participate in a Narrative, you’re actually better off with a non-game activity. You might be happier reading a book or watching a movie or you might want to write your own story. If all you want is Social Interaction, throw a dinner party. Hell, even if you’re driven by two different motivations, like Narrative and Social Interaction, you might be better off with a structured activity that doesn’t quite manage to be a game. Like one of those Exquisite Corpse activities where everyone passes the same story around, adding a little to it at a time. I know people call that a game, but it really isn’t, and it doesn’t do what games do.

People drawn to gaming — and to some extent, all humans have a psychological need to play games — people drawn to gaming have more complex mixtures of motivations. The trouble is that people don’t really know how their own brains work. People can say they hate being challenged, for example, and you might respond by removing all the challenges from your game. Then, you discover people are still unhappy or disengaged. Maybe more so. So you ask them what else you can do. You keep making changes, they keep being unhappy, and no one knows what’s wrong.

Every Game Master eventually goes through that experience of responding to player requests that sound totally reasonable, only to watch the game still fall apart. It’s infuriating. Game Mastering sucks.

The bigger point, though, is not about how gaming satisfies lots of different needs at once, but rather how new flavors emerge that are better than their individual ingredients. Participating in a Narrative that Challenges you to become a hero is completely different from either participating in a Narrative or overcoming a Challenge. It’s better than both. Done properly, all these motivations become different tastes that taste better together. Do it wrong, though, and everything’s fighting everything.

That’s why, much as I love this psychology bullshit out of personal interest, I don’t actually like to talk about isolated motives in design. Hell, if you’re designing an adventure, I think you should put most of this psychology crap right out of your head.

That’s also why, when someone tells me they always prioritize a single gaming motivation, I know I’m dealing with a complete fuckwit. If someone says, “Roleplaying games are collaborative storytelling experiences first and foremost,” or, “At my table, Player Agency isn’t the first thing, it’s the only thing,” I run away in case whatever brain disease they’ve got is contagious.

That’s also also why I get into so many fights with people who think that game design gets in the way of anything. That’s a stupid-ass thing to say unless, of course, you think game design is strictly about artificially contrived challenges that test mastery instead of about the whole gameplay experience and the myriad psychological pleasures it can provide. It’s about finding the perfect flavor profile of gaming flavors for whatever meal you’re trying to serve.

And the correct answer is never, “Everyone likes chocolate best in my group, so I will serve a big bowl of cocoa powder.”

This should be the end of the story, but it’s not. Because there’s kind of a plot hole here. At least, there’s something that looks like a plot hole.

Remember how I said that a game is, at minimum, an activity with a goal and rules that presents challenges? That definition is nonnegotiable. If your activity ain’t doing that — and doing that first — you’ve wandered out of the realm of gameplay. Which means all the wonderful magic that games do, psychologically, just doesn’t happen.

A game without goals is just people fucking around and playing pretend. If you want to do that, fine, but don’t call it a game. It’s an improv session or something. Goals are necessary because they provide context around which players can easily make rational, logical choices. Goals give direction that puts all decisions in context. Moreover, goals give disparate groups a unifying purpose. They’re kind of a social glue that lets humans play together. Take the goals out of the roleplaying game and you end up with some people struggling to make decisions and others playing at cross purposes.

It doesn’t matter, by the way, what the goals are — provided they exist within the context of the game and aren’t bullshit play motivation like “have fun” — and it doesn’t matter who provides the goals either. The module can explicitly assign a goal, the Game Master can imply a goal, or the players can agree on a goal. It’s all good. As long as there’s a goal, you have the direction and social cohesion that games need to function.

There’s other shit goals do too, but I’ve got to start wrapping up here.

A game without rules is just kids on a playground screaming, “I brought my forcefield dog,” and, “Well, I brought my dinosaur who eats forcefield dogs.” On the one hand, people are naturally fairness-oriented, and rules provide a fair, level playing field. On the other hand, lots of people are competitive by nature or, at the very least, averse to losing, even if it’s just losing status. Rules and structure make games safe and fair, curb natural human one-upmanship, and help prevent or resolve conflicts.

They also provide constraints that ease decision-making and help define challenges, but again, I’m trying to wrap up here.

The big thing here, though, is challenges. People have a core need for competence and self-efficacy. Overcoming challenges fulfills that need. Moreover, your human brain is wired to get more pleasure from doing difficult things than from doing easy things. Hell, doing effortless things is barely rewarding at all; unearned rewards get unsatisfying quickly. People literally build up a tolerance to their own sense of accomplishment and become addicted to their own brain juice if they’re not overcoming enough adversity to earn their sense of accomplishment. Beyond that, overcoming challenges is tied to personal status and self-worth, and working together to overcome obstacles boosts feelings of connection and camaraderie. There’s actually a whole subfield of game design and gamer psychology that has to do with how humans engage with challenges. It’s called flow theory. It’s neat. And it’s central to the play experience.

So, what’s the plot hole? It’s this…

Above, I said that Challenge — also called Mastery — is just one of many flavors of gameplay pleasure that different gamers seek in different amounts. Now I’m saying that you can’t take the challenges out of the game without ruining it. Moreover, I’m telling you that it’s the game’s challenges that, more than anything else, determine whether the gameplay experience works or not.

In other words, the most important thing game designers do is designing and presenting challenges. By the way, that includes people who write their own roleplaying game adventures. That’s game design.

To put this more generally, game design — and adventure design — is about designing goals, rules, and challenges first and designing everything else second. Those three things determine whether the game can possibly work on a fundamental level. All the preference crap about Fantasy Immersion and Narrative gets laid atop the foundational skeleton of goals, rules, and challenges.

No amount of paint and spackle and carpet will help a build stay up if the foundation’s cracked and broken.

You can tell me all you want about how story-focused or simulationist you are in your homebrew design; if you ain’t designing the goals, rules, and challenges for the game you’re trying to run first and best, you’re not putting out your best work. That’s why, by the way, most good roleplaying games teach you how to build and present microchallenges — be they combats, interactions, chases, infiltrations, or whatever — and string them into sequences that add up to a goal. If you can do that much, you’ve got a game that’s good enough for your Goonies.

See, game systems already give you the rules and structures. If the designers are even a little capable, those rules and structures are already built to deliver the right mix of gaming flavors for the intended gameplay experience, and, all joking aside, most designers are at least that capable. Even the ones at Wizards of the Coast. Just don’t tell them I said that.

My point is that good designers design their systems to satisfy the types of gamers who want to play the types of games the system’s designed to deliver. Some systems are goal-and-challenge oriented, like Dungeons & Dragons. Others are more character-and-narrative focused, like Fate. Some are hybrid systems, like Blades in the Dark.

Given that, as long as you’re building the sort of adventures your system’s made, all you have to do to make an adventure is provide some goals, build some challenges, and then fill in the game around them with characters and settings and stories and shit.

That, by the way, is what I call Mere Adventure Building, and that term is not an insult. I bring this up because I’ve had a few misunderstandings recently, and I want to clear them up.

I coined the term ‘Mere Adventure Builder’ as part of my True Scenario Designery series to distinguish between the homebrewers who wanted to master the skills needed to elevate their adventure building to full-on game design art and those who were perfectly happy using their systems to build adventures that made their players happy. Truth be told, I do a lot of Mere Adventure Building myself for my home games. Everything doesn’t have to be a work of art. Besides, once you learn the True Scenario Design tools, even the Adventures you Merely Build come out really good.

My point is, I ain’t slagging on anyone when I call them Mere Adventure Builders. I love Mere Adventure Builders. They’re workaday, salt-of-the-Earth types who are willing to spend hours building games to give their players joy. They’re people who consider this hobby a hobby. Or they’re people who are still learning the adventure-making craft. Most homebrewers are Mere Adventure Builders, and they should be every system designer’s target audience. Well, half the target audience.

The people I deride are the people who don’t believe — and don’t really understand — the shit I explained above. They’re the people who yell that roleplaying games are collaborative storytelling experiences and that’s how it should be. They’re the people who scream that anything other than an open-world sandbox is a railroad or that any kind of careful, curated game design totally destroys the verisimilitude of the simulated fantasy world and kills player agency, too. Because people really do talk like that. I shit you not.

I don’t call those people Mere Adventure Builders. I don’t call them anything at all. I’m afraid that if I call them, they’ll come over and start talking. I sure as hell don’t want that.

But I’m well beyond answering your question now, Blaise, and well into setting up the next feature in my mad plan. So come back soon and I’ll tell you how the latest Dungeon Master’s Guide is totally great for Mere Adventure Building except for one omission that totally ruins everything.

It’s not the omission you think.