I’ve really got to get my shit together. I’ve got a bunch of loops to close, and I need to clear a bunch of fluffy, high-concept horsecrap off my desk to make room for meatier stuff next month. Stuff like time tension clock pool complications and how to unsuck searching and perception so it’s actually a game and some adventure-design stuff too.

Today, I want to wrap up the whole comprehensive approach to challenge design in fantasy adventure tabletop roleplaying games thing that I’ve inexplicably titled The Third Heat. I want to, but I can’t. I need to take a detour before I can finish it. That said, I will be finishing it this week.

You see, as I’ve been pissing and moaning about what is and is not gameplay by strict, academic standards and dumping on open-ended creativity challenges and naked dice rolling, some people have asked about something I haven’t discussed and really didn’t intend to. But they’ve made good enough points that I kind of have to.

So…

Does character build choice count as gameplay? It’s a good question, but the answer is complicated and disappointing.

With that sales pitch, let’s get to it…

Is Character Buildery Gameplay

The question today is whether players building their characters cleverly and strategically meet my overly demanding but also increasingly vague definition of gameplay and, especially, does it count enough to be considered a fourth heat in gameplay challenge construction. Whatever the hell that means.

I am not going to rehash all my caveats about how gameplay is an actual word with an actual meaning, but that meaning is descriptive rather than prescriptive and that it’s qualitative, but none of that means you can just make up your own meaning and how I’m relying on the work of people smarter than me to define it. That all still stands.

The first two parts of this little essay series are still there. Go review them if you have to.

The Third Heat (Part I): Open-Ended Creativity Challenges Aren’t Bad, They’re Brittle

The Third Heat (Part II): Naked Die Rolling Just Isn’t Right

My grand thesis is that, for something to count as gameplay, it has to ask something of the player, and it has to be a fair ask. Basically, if you want to say you’re playing a game, you have to make consequential choices, forming and executing a strategic plan, or drawing a logical conclusion from a pattern of facts and clues. Mostly, I’ve focused on consequential choices, but when I get around to the actual third heat, I’ll have more to say about plans and conclusions and how they’re not just blank-page creative lateral thinking.

Some of my readers have pointed out that character building involves a lot of consequential choices and strategic plans. By choosing one skill over another, you’re determining what approaches you’ll even have access to, and the feats, talents, and abilities you pick can affect your odds of success pretty drastically. Your character creation choices can also provide bonus-granting resources you can use to juice checks that would otherwise be naked die rolls. You might even walk into open-ended creativity challenges with assets and tools that provide enough of a starting point that you’re not just trying to creative a solution out of the ether by overcoming functional fixedness or whatever.

If you have made any of those points, I hereby officially recognize you as Not a Complete Asshat, and I even award you a coveted Angry Cookie. Moreover, if you ever meet me at a convention or event, you may ask for one complimentary Pat On The Head With Accompanying Verbal Acknowledgment That You Did a Good Job.

I am actually being serious here. About all of it. Those are actually good points. But are they good enough to qualify character buildery as a fourth heat in gameplay challenge design?

Unfortunately, the answer is, “kinda sorta but not really.” Character buildery has its place in the game and it’s actually doing more for gameplay than either open-ended creativity challenges or naked die rolls. The problem is that, for several reasons I’m going to expound upon, and one reason I can’t really expound upon, it’s not doing enough in terms of the challenge part of gameplay to affect how you need to build challenges for your game.

And, actually, that’s not really about character buildery, but rather about the specific nature of tabletop roleplaying games as a medium.

Hedging My Bet on Character Buildery as System Design

As I alluded, there’s part of this discussion that’s just hard to, you know, discuss. Tabletop roleplaying games represent a pretty broad medium, and character buildery is something that some systems make a giant thing out of while others barely do anything with. In some systems, your build choices drastically affect how you play your character. Mechanically, I mean. This is all about actual gameplay mechanics. In other systems, the build choices are mostly cosmetic and don’t affect the gameplay much at all. Worse yet, lots of games seem like they make a big thing about character buildery, but none of it is actually very consequential from a gameplay standpoint.

For reasons I’ve explained to death, I tend to use the current edition of one of the world’s roleplaying games as my baseline for discussing game design. It’s the game I run the most, it’s the game most of my readers are running, and it’s the game almost every gamer has at least passed through on their way to their game du jour of today. It’s also the game almost every other game is built on, either by deliberate adaptation, accidental absorption, or deliberate rejection.

I also use fantasy adventure as my baseline for the same reasons.

Character buildery is one of those things that’s very hard to discuss comprehensively across the whole spectrum of tabletop roleplaying gaming, but I don’t think I actually have to. I think, by the end, you’ll see that, no matter how good and consequential the character buildery might be in whatever system you want to discuss, the nature of the medium itself makes it hard to rely on as a component of gameplay challenge construction. That is, except for one weird little x-factor that I hope I don’t forget to discuss when it becomes relevant.

Actually, let me just throw it in here right now so I don’t forget to toss it out and then move on like it’s nothing, leaving all of you demanding an explanation I won’t provide until the next time I’m so behind in my writing that I start looking for fluffy, high-concept horsecrap I can answer with one short essay that turns into four.

So, you know, probably next week.

The one system-level thing that can change how much character buildery gameplay challenge construction, kind of, is whether the system has way too many approach-generating or approach-impacting skills. What the hell does that mean? I’m referring here to skills that open up strategies and approaches that wouldn’t otherwise be available without them. Lockpicking, for example, is approach-generating. Without it, you just can’t bypass locks non-destructively without a key. Intimidation is closer to an approaching-impacting skill. Anyone can make a threat, but the odds of it having a mechanical impact in most systems are generally low enough without the skill, and the stakes of failing are usually so high that, without the skill, most players don’t want to try throwing their weight around.

If a system has way too many approach-generating skills, traits, and abilities, its character buildery might just be consequential enough to count as a fourth heat.

Otherwise, character buildery just ain’t that big a deal.

To explain why, we have to talk about video games.

Oh, Look, Angry Is Talking Video Games Again

To really think through this whole is character buildery consequential enough to count as gameplay question, we need to look at a medium where it usually definitely often sometimes is. That medium is video games.

Of course, it shouldn’t surprise you that I’m looking for answers in video games. When you’re talking game design, you really only have four choices: roleplaying games, video games, board games, and sports. Roleplaying games are what we’re trying to solve, so they don’t have the answer; board games are usually too constrained and abstractly mechanical to give us an answer, and sports give most gamers heart attacks because we’re not exactly sporty people as a community, so video games are all that’s left.

Also, for those of you with Angry Talks Video Games Bing Cards, you can tick off Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Hollow Knight right now. No surprises there. You won’t see any Metroid or Zelda though. Sorry about that.

Anyway…

There are lots of video games, franchises, and genres that feature character buildery as a core part of the experience, but, the way I see it, which is the correct way, you can lump them all into three broad groups: build mastery, build swappery, and path choosery.

Let’s look at each in turn, then see where tabletop roleplaying games should fit into this mess.

… and why they don’t.

Build Mastery: Dance With Who You Brought With You

Lots of skill-based and strategy-based games that have a lot of consequential character buildery feature what I’m calling build mastery. Either you choose a build at the start of the game, or else you make choices throughout the game to select and then deepen your commitment to a particular build. Maybe you choose your armor-and-weapon set, maybe you pick an archetype, maybe you commit to one of three skill trees… it doesn’t matter.

The key is that the builds are different enough to affect how you play the game and that the challenge comes from mastering your build and using it to win. Some of the game’s challenges will suit your build very well. They’ll be pushovers. Others, though, won’t. Those are the challenges that will test your mastery because you’ll have to win even though your build isn’t the best tool for the job.

The original Dark Souls and Bloodborne are really strong examples of build mastery design, and I would even argue that Elden Ring fits here. I know some of you are going to object, and I have an answer, so just hold on. I’ll get to it.

Note that some team-based strategy games and tactical roleplaying games fall into this category as well. Because party or squad composition is the equivalent of a build. If the game lets you choose a roster of characters or build the characters how you like, but then expects you to play primarily with that party against all the challenges, that’s a kind of build mastery. It’s kind of hard to come up with recent examples though, because lots of party-based games these days let you easily swap your roster. Which means they aren’t really about mastering your build to win every challenge, but rather, they’re about…

Build Swappery: Bring the Right Tool for Every Job

It’s become increasingly common in skill-based games that feature consequential character buildery to let the player swap out their build on the fly. And I’m not talking about little tweaks here, like a trinket that reduces fire damage or increases charge attacks, but actually drastically changing the gameplay. That’s what build swappery is. You have a build, it’s consequential, but the game lets you change it drastically to respond to the challenges you face.

The most obvious example right now is the second best game in the Hollow Knight franchise, Silksong. Through equippable trinkets, subweapons, and weapon movesets, you can completely change the way the character plays to deal with specific bosses or challenges. Any party-based or squad-based game that lets you swap your roster for different missions or fights also counts because, in party-based games, your roster is your build. You get that right.

Whereas the challenge in build mastery games is to master your build well enough to beat any challenge with it, in build swappery games, you’re expected to recognize when a different loadout can provide a cleaner, more efficient win rather than smashing every round encounter with your square build.

Which brings me to the complicating factor in this whole analysis…

Build Inertia and Design Intent: Because Buildery is a Spectrum

Blah blah blah standard reminder blah blah qualitative definition blah descriptive not prescriptive blah blahdy blah.

Any game that lets you pick anything about your character technically has character buildery, right? But that doesn’t mean character buildery is a key facet of the gameplay and certainly doesn’t make it a consequential part of the challenge design. If the build differences are small and just tweak the gameplay a bit, it ain’t right to say character buildery is part of the challenge gameplay. It’s something players can use for leaning into preferences or handicapping or for personal expression or to play out a particular fantasy. Those are elements of gameplay, but they aren’t gameplay, and they aren’t challenge.

You get that, right?

I bring that up for two reasons. First, because people took my previous essays to mean that creative problem solving and dice-rolling don’t have places in the gameplay. They totally, absolutely do. So does character building. Second, because this character buildery stuff can’t be so neatly categorized as I’m making it sound.

This character buildery crap never exists in any kind of pure form. For example, folks will rightly point out that Dark Souls and Bloodborne and especially Elden Ring not only allow you to do some build swappery, they actually expect some. That’s true. In fact, let me argue against myself here just to show you I’m not afraid of a fight. When I play Silksong, I don’t swap my build but ever. I occasionally change a subweapon; I’ll sometimes equip a trinket to mitigate a specific boss attack, but in pretty much every fight, I’m Hunter’s Crest and Thread Storm. I don’t build swap. I just don’t. It ain’t a thing I enjoy. Whatever the game starts me with, for the most part, I’ll finish with it. I’ve never played Bloodborne with anything other than the whippy cane or the toothy cleaver. Actually, I prefer the Saw Spear, but that’s so close to a starting weapon that it counts.

It’s pretty rare for a game to either lock you into one build forever or to force you to change your build for every fight, so player preference will always be a factor, but you can still classify games as mostly build mastery or mostly build swappery. It’s down to designer expectation. How is the game made?

For example, there’s this thing I’m gonna call build inertia. It’s basically about how much effort it takes to change a build. Maybe build commitment is a better term. How likely is the player to commit to a build? In the Soulsborne games, changing builds late in the game can be a massive pain in the ass. Weapon upgrades are a big part of how effective your weapons are, and powerful weapons found in the world often have ridiculous stat requirements. If you’ve sunk all your upgrades and stat points into the build you’ve got now, swapping is onerous. It’s doable. Upgrade materials are plentiful enough to make it possible and, if you’re willing to check a wiki or you’re on a second playthrough, you can plan your stats in advance for a late-game weapon. Or even rush to that weapon out of the gate if you’ve gitted gud enuff. Even so, that’s not the same as on-the-fly swapping, though in games where you can maintain, say, two or three good loadouts and hot-swap them, you’re getting into the hazy realm between build mastery and build swappery.

Games that are heavily skill-based can also add a lot of build inertia. One of the reasons I stick with the Hunter’s Crest in Silksong is that I got comfortable with it. It’s the default moveset, and you’re several hours in before you discover you can even change movesets. My muscle memory is all for the Hunter’s Crest. Swapping never felt comfortable.

You can take everything I’ve said and substitute in squad makeup or party roster for tactical games and for party-based roleplaying games. Remember those older party-based RPGs in which your benched party members didn’t advance? That’s build inertia. You were better off picking your favorite party and sticking with it. Meanwhile, RPGs with ensemble casts that make switching quick and easy and penalty-free are basically build swappery. And somewhere in between are the games where there’s build inertia, but a few hours of grinding and some equipment management can let you at least choose a new favorite party to commit to for the rest of the game.

So, yeah, there’s a spectrum, and there are preferences, but there’s also how the game is designed, and none of it’s pure. Most games mix approaches. It ain’t clean. This ain’t about arguing what games go where. Instead, it’s about analyzing whether the consequential character buildery touches gameplay in its special place enough to count as a fourth heat.

Speaking of which, there’s a third type of consequential character buildery yet.

Path Choosery: The Build Becomes the Way

Both build mastery and build swappery are about how character buildery affects the way players engage with the game’s challenges. The challenges themselves don’t really change. Every player faces basically the same challenges, fights, bosses, missions, and quests, and they mostly face them the same way. Each player’s build just changes what execution looks like.

Some games, though, do change the challenges you face based on the build you choose, though there’s an important nuance to this that I’ll get to. Consider immersive sims and many action and adventure roleplaying games. Think Deus Ex, Prey, Fallout, The Outer Worlds, and even Baldur’s Gate and Divinity: Original Sin.

Note that these are all things we’d call proper roleplaying games, right?

Now, some of the challenges don’t change regardless of build. There are build mastery and build swappery elements in all of those games, but the defining feature of path choosery games is that your build has a lot to say about what path you take through the game and what encounters you’ll even have.

In a path choosery game, you often pick a skillset that defines what approaches are even open to you, right? If you spec for infiltration, you can hack computers and pick locks, which means you’ll have access to paths and information other players don’t. If you spec for interaction, you might be able to talk your way into places or access missions unavailable to other players. That’s what I mean by picking your path through the game.

But even challenges common to all paths may not actually be the same challenge. This is where I have to make a fine point. Imagine a game lets you pick between stealth assassinating and guns-blazey fighting. Now there are some thugs in an alley you have to get through. You could argue that, technically, it’s the same encounter and that the challenge has changed, but you’d be wrong in every practical way. The stealth player and the combat player may be dealing with the same surface obstacle in the same location, but they are not playing the same game. They are literally facing completely different gameplay challenges.

Game designers know this, and you know they know it if you’ve ever played a game where the designers didn’t realize that every arena had to be designed twice: once for guns-blazing combat and once for sneaky stealth ganking. Hell, Game Masters know it too. Can you honestly say that the encounter in which the party sneaks past the goblins and the one where they fight the goblins are the same encounter just because it’s the same map and the same stat blocks?

That’s what makes path choosery what it is. The player isn’t making decisions that affect how the game’s unchanging challenges play, they’re literally picking what game they want to play. They’re picking what encounters they want to have. This is key because, when we’re talking about challenge design, path choosery character buildery doesn’t mean you build one challenge and let the players’ builds affect the difficulty, but rather, it means you’re building challenges for each build and then disguising them as one challenge.

Whither Tabletop Roleplaying Games

Now that we all understand the three broad approaches to making character buildery a part of the gameplay, and specifically, a part of challenge design, we can try to figure out where tabletop roleplaying games fall. Except we don’t, because the answer is probably pretty obvious. Except the obvious answer isn’t the only correct answer, and it also doesn’t help us nearly as much as you might think.

Let’s take this one step at a time…

First, we can take build swappery off the table… top roleplaying game. By their nature, tabletop roleplaying games don’t really do build swappery. I’m not saying you can’t swap loadouts easily, and I concede that Vanician spellcasting is basically magical build swappery, but we have to be really precise here about what it means to call build swappery a core part of the challenge gameplay. Most characters really can’t completely change their builds in ways that fundamentally impact how they approach challenges. Even games that let you retrain don’t usually let you completely reinvent your character on the fly. At best, it’s more like picking a new build mastery to build master.

By the way, I don’t think retraining should exist in tabletop roleplaying games. I understand why retraining now appears in games, but I think it’s a bad choice and that it undermines key conceits of tabletop roleplaying games. It’s also just dumb.

But even if you could reinvent your tabletop roleplaying game character on the fly whenever you wanted, you still wouldn’t get to true build swappery because, at its heart, it’s about facing challenges, failing, tweaking your build, and trying again. You need an experimentation-feedback-swapout gameplay cycle to true build swappery. Tabletop roleplaying games don’t feature a lot of respawning to try failed challenges again.

So, that covers build swappery. Before I move on to the obvious answer you’re already screaming, I want to recognize that build mastery actually features heavily in many tabletop roleplaying games. Especially fantasy adventure roleplaying games. Especially the current edition of one of the world’s roleplaying games. The entire combat engine in Dungeons & Dragons and the two-thirds of character buildery that’s all about combat are entirely about build mastery. That’s so simple and obvious, I’m not even going to argue the point. I’m just going to point at it and say, “Duh!”

The problem is that you don’t have to care about that. The one thing you don’t need help with is designing combats in systems like D&D. It’s the easiest thing in the world. The system makes pretty much anything you throw at the players into a good fight as long as the math works. Pick some monsters, draw a map, run the numbers so it’s not an easy-breezy cakewalk or a super-deadly slaughter, and you’re fine.

All right, all right… Don’t get your panties in a craw. I’m being snarky. There is an art to making good combat encounters, and I’ll never say otherwise. But it’s not the same problem as, “How do I build an actual gameplay challenge out of a locked door or a belligerent bouncer?” That’s what we’re looking at here.

So we can ignore build mastery. Yes, it’s there, and yes, it matters, but it’s handled already. It is gameplay, but it’s not gameplay you need to sweat when you design an adventure or encounter. The system’s got you.

Which brings us to the obvious one. Obviously, character builder is consequential gameplay because path choosery. Except that path choosery isn’t gameplay in any way that matters. And, even if it was, tabletop roleplaying games ruin it.

Path Choosery Isn’t Actually Gameplay Enough to Count

There are basically two sides to the whole path choosery character buildery, right?

First, you’ve got this idea that, by picking a build, you’re picking the approaches that are available to you during gameplay, right? Spec lockpicking and you can pick locks, spec interacting, you can schmooze bouncers, and so on. But all that’s doing is opening up possibilities for naked die rolling, and we already talked about how picking which naked die roll to make isn’t gameplay. Remember the door you can pick or break down? That’s not really gameplay in any consequential way.

Second, though, there’s the idea that path choosery is about up different challenges, right? If you’ve specced for stealth, you can sneak past the goblins instead of fighting them. That is definitely true. Kind of. But does that make the character buildery into gameplay? Well, yes, a little bit, but not enough because the actual gameplay comes from you actually executing the sneak. Building a character that can sneak isn’t playing a game; it’s choosing to be allowed to play a sneaking game later. The gameplay is the sneaking game itself.

As an adventure designer, this path choosery shit doesn’t actually help you build gameplay, it just expands the list of gameplays you have to build. You still have to build a sneaking challenge that counts as actual gameplay. One that isn’t an open-ended creativity challenge and isn’t a naked die roll.

Meanwhile, the character buildery has already done everything it’s going to do. The moment the player made the choice to spec into stealth, they opened up the stealth approach, and that’s all they did. Which, actually, is a problem with path choosery-type character buildery in general. Yeah, building the character is gameplay, but it’s gameplay that’s done once the character is built unless you can find a way to build an execution challenge around it. Which, frankly, you should be doing anyway.

As an adventure writer, you should be including various kinds of encounters and encounters that allow for multiple approaches by default. You shouldn’t need the fact that builds exist to tell you that open-ended roleplaying games need to accommodate multiple approaches. Besides, if you ever leave out an approach, the game will still handle it. First, because there are rules for handling everything that exists on the character sheet, and second, because there’s a Game Master with a set of tools for handling such things.

If you design the goblins as a combat encounter, but the players decide to sneak past them, the Game Master will decide if that’s possible and adjudicate the actions and make it happen, cap’n. That’s what Game Masters do.

Which is the first way in which the nature of tabletop roleplaying games ruins the whole path choosery thing.

It’s like this…

Path choosery character building does four things: it lets the player set gameplay preferences, it lets players express their creativity, it lets the player choose a particular fantasy to fulfill, and it makes repeated playthroughs more interesting and varied. Actually, you could also argue that it also provides a foundation for community engagement about the game. Discussing games, watching streams, and checking fan wikis are all a lot more fun if the game gives a different experience to every player.

Creative expression and fantasy are great, and they totally belong in tabletop roleplaying games, but they emerge naturally from being allowed to create a character and from the open-ended gameplay. When I’m trying to decide how to make a locked door into actual gameplay, I ain’t worrying about them. Repeated playthroughs and community engagement aren’t factors that tabletop roleplaying games have to care about. So now, it’s just down to gameplay preferences, right? But because of the nature of roleplaying games, the players can express and adjust their preferences constantly through play. If they mostly prefer talking through the game, they can do that. Meanwhile, I, as an adventure writer, don’t need to care because I understand interaction is one of the core gameplay engagements, so it’s always a possibility I build into my adventures.

So the build choice matters, but not in any way I care about when I’m creating gameplay challenges, and if the game didn’t include character builds at all, the players would still be able to pick their approaches and express their preferences.

But the nature of tabletop roleplaying games isn’t done undermining character buildery yet. You see, tabletop roleplaying games are group endeavors. It isn’t just one player picking one build. You have a mix of five players with five builds and therefore five sets of gameplay preferences. Which means you might as well not have any builds at all. Why? Because, for all practical purposes, you’re going to be satisfying most of the common gameplay preferences most of the time anyway. You’re going to need some interaction for the interactive players, you’re always going to have a stealthy player, you’re going to fill the game with some action, include a few puzzles for the players who like that kind of thing, and you don’t even need to look at the character sheets to know that.

Meanwhile, you can also rest assured that, unless your game has way too many skills, which it should, the players are going to cover everything. They just naturally do. Especially if you let the group talk before they create characters. They work out who’s got lockpicking covered and who will do the healing and who can hunt for food. That’s how players be.

Effectively and practically, what that means is that every party is pretty much coming to the table with a Batman build. Every approach will be available through someone, every path will be viable, and you will have to build a mix of challenges to give the players a little variety.

Because of how tabletop roleplaying games work, the build is always the same. You will have one party who has specced in pretty much everything.

So, is character building gameplay?

Yes. It’s just not gameplay in any way that helps you build a game in the slightest.

Sorry.