This Feature is part of my ongoing True Scenario Designery course. If you’ve not been following it from the start, the convenient True Scenario Designery Course Index is a convenient way to start at the start. Do that.

Win, Lose, or Draw

Welcome back, dumbasses and dumbettes…

In my last four lessons — no, I’m never giving up the delusion that I’m more than an asshole blogging about how to pretend to be an elf good — in my last four lessons, I showed you what makes a game a game and how to think about designing games.

I’m starting a new module today — because this is the equivalent of a college course, not a blog — wherein I’m taking you on a deep dive into a few specific aspects of game design. The bad news is that we’re still not past all that conceptual how games work shit yet; we probably never will be. The good news is that once we’re through this module, you’ll actually be equipped to fully plan and outline a basic gameplay scenario. It won’t be great, but it’ll be complete.

This module’s about Winning and Losing. At least that’s my claim today. It’s really not. It’s just that Winning and Losing, conceptually, provide a good starting point and a good thread to tie all the crap I want to talk about together. That said, it really is about Winning and Losing, but you’re not ready for it because you don’t really get Winning and Losing. Trust me; you don’t.

It ain’t your fault, though, that you don’t get Winning and Losing. Partly, it’s the dumbass system designers who don’t know how to talk about Winning and Losing. Partly, it’s all the old grognards who’ve trained the current generation and who, thanks to listening to dumbass system designers, don’t know how to talk about Winning and Losing and don’t even think Game Design is a thing. Partly, it’s all these people who’ve entered the community who, for one batshit insane reason or another, reject the idea that roleplaying games are even games. But mostly it’s because you’re ignorant. You’ve got to take some of the blame here.

True Scenario Designers know that Winning and Losing are, in fact, things. They’re kinda complicated things when it comes to tabletop roleplaying games — as opposed to any other kind of game you might play — but they are things. It’s actually really helpful to start by talking about why Winning and Losing are so complicated in tabletop roleplaying games and that plays right into why it’s so hard for roleplaying gamers to talk about Winning and Losing.

That’s today’s topic. It ain’t, “What are Winning and Losing, conceptually,” but rather, “Why is it so damned hard for roleplaying gamers to talk about Winning and Losing like frigging adults.” That’ll give us a springboard from which we can dive into the abyss that is Winning and Losing in Roleplaying Games.

Pop Quiz Hotshot

Before you go any further, I want you to stop and ponder a question. I already threw this into my Discord server and it was like throwing piranha in the kiddie pool, lots of bubbles and lots of screaming. Now it’s your turn to scream.

Is it okay for you — a Scenario Designer — to design an adventure the players can’t win? Is it okay to design an adventure the players can’t lose?

Think about it. Try to come up with an answer. Hell, scroll down and put an answer in the comment section. A brief answer. It’s my comment section, not your blog, and this is an online college-level course, not a discussion forum. Once you’ve come up with an answer — whether you post it or not — then read on MacDuff. You won’t find the correct answer, but — if you really ponder the question seriously — you’ll have a headache as you read through an interesting and mostly unrelated discussion.

You will eventually be able to answer that question in a few weeks, though. Correctly, even.

Why Can’t We Talk About Winning and Losing Roleplaying Games Like Adults

Most roleplaying gamers that’ve read any rulebook ever — so, like, a quarter of you losers — most roleplaying gamers eventually read a spiel in some rulebook or another about Winning Roleplaying Games. System Designers love writing shit about how roleplaying games are special and different and how you really can’t win them the way you win other games or how everyone wins just by telling a good story or having fun or whatever. You know the dumbass little essay I’m talking about, right? It’s usually part of the introductory chapter of the rulebook and comes right after the designers utterly fail to explain the ludicrously simple concept of roleplaying.

Actually — and I can’t believe I’m about to compliment motherfracking WotC here — actually, the D&D 2024 Player’s Handbook skips over all that crap and jumps right into just explaining how to play the frigging game. Honestly, the D&D 2024 PHB provides a shockingly, surprisingly decent introduction to the game.

Why does this shit happen, though? Why do System Designers — and Scenario Designers and Game Masters and gamers in general — spend so much time talking about the metagame? Board game designers don’t fill their rulebooks with essays about gameplay as a concept and why games are fun and whether Winning is real or not? Why can’t we do that?

And before you point your dirty-ass finger my way, keep in mind, that I ain’t writing a rulebook right now. I’m writing this shit because you want to learn how to design adventures and scenarios. You’re paying me to teach you that shit. But you don’t need any of this to just play or run Dungeons & Dragons. So back the hell off before I drop you like a hit single.

Anyway… why is it like this? Why are System Designers like this? Why are the rest of us?

People Expect Games to Be Games

Games — as I’ve noted — are very specific kinds of experiences. Even though most people can’t explain and don’t even consciously know why games are different from other experiences and activities, there are, nonetheless, differences. Most of them manifest in specific psychological, neurological responses to the experience that ain’t worth going into. Especially given I’ve talked about them a thousand times already and you’ve had plenty of time to get off this train if you didn’t like where it was going.

The point is that, if you call something a game, normal, sane people expect a particular kind of experience. That’s true even if they can’t articulate, explain, or even identify their expectations. People learn what games feel like by playing games. Fortunately, very smart people whose job it is to design games have identified a lot of the common elements that drive the gameplay experience. That shit I told you about goals and challenges and rules and context? This is where all that comes from.

One thing people near-universally expect from games — as evidenced by the fact that it’s the first thing everyone asks about when you teach a new game — is that there’s some way to win. Likewise, everyone knows that if there’s a way to win something, there’s also a way to lose.

Games are things you can win and they’re things you can lose. Everyone knows that. You can play games without sweating the Winning and Losing thing if you want to, but note that most people actually have special ways of calling that out. People say things like, “Let’s just play for fun,” or, “How about a casual game,” or, “This is just a friendly game.” People use those terms to say, “Yes, we’re playing a game and games are things you can win or lose, but for various reasons, I’d prefer not to focus on winning and just enjoy the gameplay experience on its own merits.”

If people didn’t know games were things you try to win, you wouldn’t need to specify that shit, would you?

Note, by the way, that some people — actually many if you do the math — don’t enjoy games without the Winning and Losing parts. Many people will either turn down the invitation not to keep score or else they’ll just secretly keep score for their own satisfaction. That’s because challenging oneself is a major intrinsic motivation in the gameplay experience. Without Winning and Losing, there’s no challenge.

System Designers are Dumbasses

When you label something game, people expect a thing they can win and a thing they can lose. The problem is roleplaying game system designers are kind of sucky game designers. They don’t really get what they’re doing. They struggle with the idea that roleplaying games aren’t games but are, rather, game creation engines. The games are the modules people publish and the adventures people write and play.

I’ve covered this shit before about a million times so it better not be news to any of you.

Now, if you’re a System Designer and you are smart enough to recognize people expect games to be winnable and losable but you’re not smart enough to recognize that you’re not making a game, you’re making a game creation engine, you end up really confused. Because when you look at your game, you can’t see anything that looks like Winning or Losing. Maybe Character Death looks kind of like losing, but that’s a discussion for a whole other course.

“Aha,” you think, “I am clearly writing some kind of special game in which Winning and Losing are simply not things. Or perhaps I am wrong about what Winning and Losing are and perhaps intrinsic, psychological motivations to play count as winning. Either way, I have written the word game on the box and people will be looking for ways to win, so I must explain how this game is special and how winning is not a thing. Unless I am actually not writing a complete game, but rather a collection of game parts that must be assembled and completed and to which someone must add certain gameplay elements before it becomes a game. But that is a ludicrous notion.”

Am I being unkind? Yes. Hyperbolic? Definitely. But that’s what you people pay me for. However, out of a sense of fairness, I will note, again, that D&D 2024 seems to have dropped a lot of this crap. Maybe Crawford got kicked in the head by a mule and his brain started working.

Unfortunately, this confusion has diffused itself into the gamer community. See, roleplaying games are very much a generational thing where each previous generation of gamers trains the next — because it ain’t like WotC and Paizo are actually training anyone — so after years of confusion about the nature of roleplaying games and the relationship between game creation engines and actual games, there’s a lot of weird and wrong ideas about Winning and Losing floating around out there.

The People Who Wish Games Weren’t Games

I mentioned above — somewhere… I think — I mentioned above that some folks gravitate toward roleplaying games for off-label uses. First, there’s the old-school grognards who insist they’re running holodeck simulations and refuse to accept that modern advances in game design might improve the experience for their poor, misbegotten players. Then, there’s the folks who are after the performative and storytelling aspects and don’t give a single, solitary crap about the whole game part of the roleplaying gaming experience.

To be absolutely, abundantly clear — so that you can hate me for the right reasons — I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using a roleplaying game as a collaborative storytelling performance art or whatever. Once you buy the game, you’re allowed to do whatever the hell you want with it. Even if you do something I personally hate.

That said, I’m not writing this site for you. I write for people who, like me, actually want games to be games and want to design and run the best possible gameplay experiences for their players. I personally think the complete package that roleplaying games offer — the unique blend of storytelling, simulation, performance, and challenge— is a much fuller, richer, more satisfying experience than focusing on any one of those aspects. So I don’t care much what the performers and collaborative storytellers and the old-school simulationists have to say.

Meanwhile, because I want roleplaying games to continue to offer me the experience I want from roleplaying games, I tell companies that if they want my money, they need to provide the experience I’m looking for and not kowtow to the performance artists and collaborative storytellers — or the grognards — by designing products that cater to them at the expense of the complete gameplay experience.

That is my right. That is what you are welcome to hate for me. But don’t waste your time insulting me by calling me a gatekeeper. I think gatekeeping is a good thing and don’t take it as an insult. You dumbass.

But I digress…

My point is that there are a lot of voices in this conversation that don’t care whether roleplaying games are games. They call themselves roleplaying gamers, but they don’t realize there are motivational differences and that it would actually benefit absolutely everyone if we split some labels and identities here so everyone can find — and design — the products that cater to their own needs. But that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, so it remains very hard to talk about Winning and Losing in roleplaying games.

The Game That Keeps On Gaming

Now, it ain’t just dumb System Designers and gamers who hate games who make it so hard to talk about Winning and Losing as gameplay concepts in roleplaying games. Roleplaying games really are unique in the gaming space. There are certain things that set roleplaying games apart from other games that make it hard to think properly about Winning and Losing.

Roleplaying games are built on permanence and continuity. In the parlance of accounting — which is completely nonsensical to use here — roleplaying games are going concerns. Roleplaying games never end. As long as you want to keep playing, there’s always more game to play, and every game follows from the last.

Most people instinctively think of Winning and Losing as final outcomes. They only matter at the end of the game when you tally the score. So what’s that mean when there’s always more game to play? How can you talk about Winning and Losing?

Complicating this is the concept of Character Death — which, by the way, has become my least favorite frigging gaming topic to discuss ever. Character Death seemingly provides a permanent, final ending, at least for a single character and sometimes for an entire party or an entire campaign. Character Death also looks a lot like Losing. Truthfully, Character Death is Losing. It’s as simple as that. But it’s the only thing in the entire game — or the game engine — that even looks like Losing.

To most people, Winning is the opposite of Losing. Shocking, I know. So if you have this thing called Character Death that is most definitely Losing, the opposite of Character Death must be Winning, right? That just makes sense. But what’s the opposite of Character Death? It’s just still being alive and playing the game, right? So as long as your character’s alive and kicking, you’re Winning. But that’s not really a final endpoint.

Further complicating this whole, tortured mess of reasoning — because, don’t get me wrong, this is all very tortured and wrong — further complicating this mess is the fact that Character Death isn’t necessarily a final end for the player or even the party. Roleplaying game campaigns can continue past Character Death and even keep going after a Total Party Kill. Game Masters can make that shit happen. So Character Death doesn’t even really work as Losing because it is not automatically a final end to the game.

By the way, all this tortured logic is also why people say dumbass, nonsensical things like, “Roleplaying games need ways to Lose that aren’t Character Death.” But that’s a story for another time.

Undissonancing Your Cognates

Obviously, when it comes to tabletop roleplaying games, the very simple concepts of Winning and Losing get really complicated. However, one thing that’ll eventually be clear to all y’all is that Winning and Losing aren’t simple even when they’re simple, but that’s a story for another time.

The point is, if you really, truly think about how Winning and Losing fit into roleplaying games, you quickly realize that shit just doesn’t jive. Something doesn’t fit. That question I asked you at the start of the lesson should be easy to answer, right? Your gut probably gave you a simple, obvious, correct answer. Your gut was very likely wrong, unfortunately, but I’ll get to another time too.

If you really took the time to think beyond your gut answer, you likely tied yourself in knots trying to reason through it all. I know my Discord supporters totally did; I saw the discussion and it was a mess.

The obvious conclusion is that roleplaying games are special and unique and maybe Winning and Losing aren’t really useful concepts in roleplaying games… do you see what you’re doing right now? You’re doing just what generations of designers did in editions past in their players’ handbooks and core rulebooks when they tried to resolve the cognitive dissonance of it all. Make no mistake, this is about cognitive dissonance. It’s about trying to hold two apparently conflicting, contradictory ideas in your head. On the one hand, you know games have goals and present challenges, and therefore, Winning and Losing must exist. On the other, everything you know about roleplaying games suggests Winning and Losing can’t exist.

Make no mistake: Winning and Losing exist in roleplaying games. I ain’t gonna tell you we need some magical, different, better concept than Winning and Losing because Winning and Losing aren’t the right things to think about. They are. I want you to think about Winning and Losing. They’re useful, necessary, and central concepts to the gameplay experience.

What you need is a more complete, more complex understanding of Winning and Losing as concepts. You actually already — probably — have that understanding buried in your head. You’re just not seeing it yet.

Likewise, you also need to understand a few more things about how roleplaying games work. Consider, for example, how much your perspective shifted once you accepted that roleplaying games are game engines and that scenarios — modules and adventures — are the actual games. You need to add to that other, deeper understandings of other things. For example, while roleplaying games are ongoing and continuous, they’re also discrete. They’re like light, existing as both particle and wave. They’re also kinda fractal. Interestingly, that weird duality of continuous and discrete must exist precisely because games need Winning and Losing as concepts and that’s how you fit them in. This is why, by the way, those continuous player fuckaround-style campaigns where the players are just doing shit and the Game Master’s just reacting and improvising the next thing that happens provide such sucky gameplay experiences.

The bad news is that you’ve got to wait for my next lesson to glimpse the true beautiful complexity behind Winning and Losing. The good news is that I’m desperately playing catchup and the end of the month is just days away, so you won’t be waiting long.

Meanwhile, have you familiarized yourself yet with Magic: the Gathering? It’s gonna come up next time.