This article’s a pile of Random Bullshit. That’s what I call these bloggy, rambling stream-of-consciousness rants I sometimes publish in place of real, useful Features. It’s just me thinking — and screaming and swearing — about something — or someone. I don’t promise any point or structure or useful conclusion or actionable advice. All I promise are words; lots of words. Of course, sometimes a point, conclusion, or some advice shows up anyway. I’m just that good.

This particular pile of Random Bullshit continues from the last one I shat out — Stop Trying to Make Open World Games — the other day or last week or whatever. So read that first.

When you’re done reading this, check out Q and Angry: The Stop Trying to Make Open-World Games Follow-Up in which I clarify some points and answer questions from my supporters and commenters.

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You Don’t Need to Run an Open-World Game

It’s only been two days since I finished my previous rant on the subject of open-world games. That means, assuming you read this shit on release day — or close to it — it’s probably only been a couple of days since you read it. So I’m gonna pick up where I left off.

I was explaining to all y’all why you shouldn’t try to emulate that game. That video game. You know which one I mean, right? I mean the open-world exploration masterpiece you just finished playing and now think your next roleplaying game campaign and every roleplaying game campaign ever should model because it finally did open-world exploration right for real.

Don’t do that. It’s a bad idea. And it’s impossible. Except it isn’t. Except it is.

Today, I’m gonna tell you why you don’t need to emulate that game to capture the feeling of an open world. In fact, I’m gonna claim that…

You’re probably already running an open-world game without even knowing it.

… But Different

Let me totally green here — super green; green as crystal — if you’re looking to emulate the very specific in-game activity that is wandering aimlessly through a wilderness and stumbling on points of interest to poke with a stick, I can’t help you. I explained last time why I don’t think that’s a thing you can really do in a tabletop roleplaying game. There are ways to fake it and ways to do it, but it won’t be the same, and it’s hard to do well.

But, if you’re more interested in the general, psychological feeling of losing yourself in a world and choosing for yourself where to go and what to do and how to explore — if you’re more interested in giving your players the feeling of excitement, discovery, curiosity, and freedom — and you should be; that’s what matters — I’ll tell you how to get there. In fact, you’re probably there already.

It’s the same feeling, even if it’s different, and…

… It’s Better

Tabletop roleplaying games and video games are different media and, as such, they’re about different things. Roleplaying games are about choices and consequences. That’s what roleplaying actually means. Tabletop roleplaying games put the characters — the main characters — front and center. Even in linear, plot-driven, dungeon-of-the-week, published crap adventures, the players’ characters drive the action in a way they can’t in any other medium.

Obviously, if you want to capture a feeling from a video game in a tabletop roleplaying game — say the freedom and wonder that comes from open-world exploration — you need to make some adjustments for the medium. You have to do things differently. Roleplaying games actually have the advantage here. Sure, they can’t capture the wander the forest and see what you see thing because of their narrative nature, but they nonetheless instill a sense of free and open exploration in their players. And they don’t inherit any of those nasty pacing and balance and complacency issues that open-world video games do by their nature.

It’s a best of both worlds thing. If you properly manage your own expectations and don’t try to copy that game precisely.

Cast Your Mind Back…

Still not convinced? I want you to do a little experiment for me. You don’t even need to sign a waiver of liability or non-disclosure agreement.

I’m making some assumptions about you, dear reader. First, I’m assuming you primarily run roleplaying games as a Game Master. Second, I’m assuming you’ve been the Game Master for a while. Thus, I assume you don’t play roleplaying games very often. As a player, I mean. If you do play, I assume it’s mostly one-shots and short, limited experiences between your own campaigns and game sessions.

Note there’s nothing wrong with any of that. That’s how I do it. It’s the best way. I don’t trust Game Masters who enjoy playing roleplaying games regularly. They ain’t real Game Masters.

The problem, though, is that you can disconnect yourself from the play experience if you ain’t careful. That’s not good because the play experience is precisely the thing that you’re, you know, trying to… do. Make. Whatever. I don’t know how to phrase it but you know what I mean. It can be hard for long-time Game Masters to project themselves into their players’ seats and see the experience as players do. That’s why, by the way, lots of Game Masters struggle with things like puzzles, mysteries, and information management. They forget how hard it is to see from the players’ perspectives.

The solution, by the way, ain’t to play more and I frigging hate when people say that. Fuck playing. People who tell Game Masters they need to play games more to design them right are frigging morons. The solution is to learn to see things from multiple angles. Every profession has to master some form of the Beginner’s Mind trick.

But digress…

If I’m right about you, I want you to cast your mind back to that one, great campaign you did actually play in however long ago run by that one Game Master you love or respect or secretly try to emulate or who made you want to get behind the screen yourself. Assuming you have such a Game Master in your past and such a campaign, of course, and didn’t just start the hobby as a Game Master and stay there forever like I did.

In that wonderful game however long ago, did you feel free to explore the world? Did you feel curiosity and wonder and excitement and all those other wonderful feelings that video game left you feeling? Did you feel like you could go anywhere and do anything and that the Game Master would always be ready? Did you feel like the world didn’t stop at the edge of the map? Like it kept turning even when your character was sleeping? Do you think it might still be turning now even though your character is dead or retired or whatever?

I’ll bet pesos to pizzas that a good many of you are saying yes and I know you’ve just got something in your eye; you’re not crying. Most players — especially players of a certain age — who actually like the games they’re in and don’t spend all their time pissing and moaning about their toxic Game Masters online would say yes. Do you know what? Your players would probably say yes if you asked them. Unless you’re one of the ones they’re bitching about on Reddit. Ask them. It’s good to know either way.

Before you get too deep in the festering bullshit that is my analysis of open worlds and why they don’t work at the roleplaying game table and how they’re all lies, you need to recognize you’ve probably already got exactly what you want at the table. You just don’t know it because, from behind the screen, it’s impossible to see and because it doesn’t feel like you’re doing what you think that game is doing and because the gameplay itself is different.

And that, dumbasses, is probably the nicest thing I have ever said or will ever say to any of you. Savor that shit because it’s never happening again. When you’re done having your moment and you’re ready to move on to the bullshit, read on douchebag.

Freedom is Weird

Putting aside the in-game action of wandering the woods to see what you see, the thing that makes open-world games feel like open-world games is the sense of freedom you’ve got when exploring them, right? You know you can go wherever and do whatever however you want. It’s easy to imagine that’s because you really are free to explore an actual open world. There are hundreds of options open to you and, if you don’t see one you like, you can just start walking until you do.

I’ve been mulling over this open world thing since Breath of the Wild hit shelves and I’ve consumed a metric butt-ton of analyses of open-world games and their design and the psychology behind it all. There’s one analysis in particular that really stuck with me and I think you should check it out.

There’s this YouTube channel called Daryl Talks Games and Mr. D. T. Games does this series called Psych of Play in which he uses video game design to discuss elements of human psychology. That phrasing’s important, by the way, because his videos are not exhaustive analyses of video game design elements as much as they are explaining some of the reasons why certain elements affect human brains a certain way. But that’s neither here nor there.

The point is, Mr. Games did an episode called You Don’t Actually Want Open-World Games and some of his analysis is super-relevant to this discussion. Go watch the video, partly because it’s worth watching and partly because I don’t feel like summarizing the entire damned thing for all y’all. Nor do I care to defend his points, even though he’s right and you’re not. If you take issue with his conclusions, he’s got a comment section. I defend only my own work.

The most important point here isn’t one Daryl explicitly makes though. It’s a conclusion implied by two of his several major points. And that is, absent any evidence to the contrary, humans assume they’re free to choose.

But let’s take this shit one step at a time.

Don’t You Tell Me No

DTG talks a lot about this concept called psychological reactance. That fancy term is just the name for people’s negative responses to rules, constraints, and limits. It’s actually a survival thing. When you — a human person — think you’re freedom’s being taken, you feel threatened and so you respond with one of several human-type threat responses. Of course, this shit varies from person to person. Different human persons suffer different levels of reactance to different infringements and respond in different ways. Some human persons care more than others. Do I really have to explain this shit?

The point is, that human people tend to react negatively to having their freedom of choice restricted. That’s reactance.

This whole reactance thing is — like all aspects of human psychology — strongly affected by perception. If you’ve got a setup that promises a high degree of freedom and then somehow robs participants of that freedom, they’re more likely to experience reactance than if the setup was inherently limiting from the get-go. That’s why people don’t balk at arbitrary rules and limits in board games but freak out if you tie their hands in tabletop roleplaying games. And why people care less about invisible walls in, say, puzzle platformers than they do in open-world roleplaying video games.

Video games have been trying to emulate to the open-ended freedom of tabletop roleplaying games forever just as tabletop roleplaying games try to emulate the open-ended freedom of living in a real world. Or in a magical fantasy world of adventure. That video game you love is just the latest attempt to bottle the freedom that either tabletop roleplaying games promise — such as those that inspired the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls franchises — or real life — such as inspired The Legend of Zelda franchise.

Of course, video games have been fighting their technical limitations from the day William Higinbotham reprogrammed a laboratory oscilloscope to simulate table tennis. Even today, you can’t leave Skyrim Province or go beyond the edge of Hyrule, you can’t do any action that doesn’t have a button, and you can’t pick any dialogue option the writers didn’t write. But, if you never try to leave the Lands Between and you feel perfectly happy with the nice, jerkass, and sarcastic dialogue choices you’re offered, you’ll never notice or care that you don’t actually have complete and total freedom.

Reactance is called reactance because it’s a reaction to a perceived reduction in freedom.

Remember how I told you open-world video games are designed so that you — the player — think you’re making free choices while, in reality, you’re doing what the designers tricked you into doing? This is why. Because it’s impossible to make a truly free and open video game, but as long as you never run into a barrier, you won’t notice or care. Smart game designers even sometimes use your reactance against you. In Elden Ring, there’s this golden, glowing pointer that tells you where to go next, but you’re not supposed to follow it. The designers know most open-world gamers will go everywhere else before they follow the game’s designated path. The few players who do obediently follow the path will get knocked off it when they encounter something they’re not powerful enough to deal with and then explore and build up their power. Elden Ring thus teaches both the contrarians and the obedient quest-doers how to play the game by knowing how human brains work.

If You Find It Yourself, It’s a Choice

The second thing Daryl Talks talks about is how people are much more inclined to follow paths they discover for themselves than ones they’re shown. Discovery and deduction short-circuit reactance.

See, a path you discover or deduce for yourself is, ipso facto, not a designated path you were meant to follow. If you were meant to follow it, it would be obvious. The fact that it was hidden — and that anyone who lacked your genius would miss it — makes it optional. Following it, therefore, is automatically doing something other than what you were meant to do.

Meanwhile, paths you discover or deduce are really attractive because deduction and discovery are achievements. They make you feel good. So this optional path you weren’t meant to follow gets wrapped up with feelings of accomplishment. Following a path you find is both an assertion of freedom and a reward for your brilliance. That’s why it feels so good in video games to spot something from a distance that you’d never have seen if you hadn’t gone this way and only noticed because you’re so attentive or perceptive or whatever. It doesn’t matter that the designers purposely funneled you along that path and then used clever lighting tricks and triangular landforms to make sure you’d notice the path.

That’s why open worlds feel so good to explore. It ain’t the giant-ass map and the ten thousand options. This means you don’t need a giant-ass map and ten thousand options. It also means that having a giant-ass map and ten thousand options won’t make your world feel good to explore if you handle it all wrong. That’s why emulating that game is totally unnecessary and, if you don’t understand how it works under the hood, won’t get you anything.

The Promise of Freedom

As I noted, all this shit comes not from reality but perception. If players think they’re free, they’re free. If they think they’re choosing for themselves and discovering their own path, they’ll feel wonder and curiosity and discovery and all that awesome crap you got playing that video game. And the players are inclined to think they’re free.

Tabletop roleplaying games promise freedom. That’s one of their selling points. Tabletop roleplaying game players assume they’re free just because they’re playing a freeform, open-ended game. As long as you don’t screw with that too much — and agency ain’t nearly as delicate as you think; it can take a few hits without triggering reactance — you don’t have to do anything special to convince the players they’re free.

And that has some other useful implications…

Don’t Bring Me Problems, Bring Me Solutions

A lot is made about open-world video games like that game giving players the creative freedom to deal with challenges in whatever creative ways they can imagine. It’s something Breath of the Wild was lauded for but also something lots of other so-called systemic games like Prey and System Shock had already pulled off pretty well.

In video games, that shit takes a lot of programming and system design to manage. But in tabletop roleplaying games, it’s just an emergent quality of the games themselves.

Say the players get attacked by starving, feral dogs. Instead of fighting, one player tries tossing some meat on the ground so the party can flee while the dogs eat. You — being a not shit Game Master — are gonna resolve that, right? You ain’t gonna say, “No, you can’t do that; this is a combat,” or “Sorry, there’s no rules for feeding starving animals; please choose a combat action from the approved list.”

Note that it doesn’t matter whether the action works or not and it doesn’t matter why it doesn’t work as long as the reason isn’t totally arbitrary. As long as you acknowledge and resolve the action in some reasonable way — by rolling dice or just saying, “The dogs glance at the meat briefly, but then go back to snarling and bristling at you. Apparently, they’re not attacking out of hunger.” — you’ve allowed the players to attempt a creative solution to the problem.

I know lots of you Game Masters freak out when your players don’t get creative with their problems. The truth is, lots of players take feral dogs at face value, roll initiative, and kick their furry little asses and that leaves you wondering if your players actually know they’re allowed to do other stuff. Remember what I told you above, though: players assume they’re free until they hit an arbitrary barrier. If they stay on the path, it just means they’re happy on the path. They’re choosing that. It’s only when they choose to leave the path and you say, “No,” that they’ll experience reactance.

An Offer You Don’t Want to Refuse

Having said that — that if the players try to leave the path, you can’t say no — I’ve got to make it clear that there’s a difference between saying “No,” and saying, “It’ll cost you.” Arbitrary restrictions and invisible walls ain’t the same as incentives, rewards, costs, and consequences. Saying, “You’re not allowed to do that,” will trigger reactance, but making it so players don’t want to leave the path is fair game and won’t cause a problem.

Your players can ignore the swamp dragon dwelling near the village if they don’t feel like doing the whole dragon-slaying thing — or if they’re a bunch of pussies — but they’ve got to be okay with whatever the dragon does to the village when they leave. That’s part of what roleplaying games are. They’re about choices and consequences. Players know that. They have to accept it. They may not always like it, but it’s the price of admission for a roleplaying game, reactance or no.

Honestly, this crap makes it harder to build truly open-ended open-world exploration. Roleplaying games need their choices and consequences. Designing a good roleplaying game adventure means considering the outcomes and ensuring the player’s choices — including their choice not to participate — impact the world. For that reason, players feel less free in tabletop roleplaying games to opt out of adventures and so, throwing lots of options at them can make them miserable.

The truth is, most players are pretty happy to follow an in-game path and, because of that shit I said last time about teamwork, the game runs better if they do. Most players actually don’t get all reactant about having clear goals, good reasons to chase those goals, and consequences for opting out. As long as they know you — the Game Master — would allow them to say no, it doesn’t matter if they never do.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge Discord Angreon @jakinbandw who recognized this consequence of the differences between video games and tabletop roleplaying games and brought it up in the Discord chat despite a bunch of folks telling them they were wrong and bad and should feel bad. You had it right. Kudos.

It’s All Linear Anyway

Did you ever notice how open-world video games — and most roleplaying video games too — make a lot of noise about all their different branches and paths and options. Hell, they use that shit as a selling point. They want players to know going in they’ve got a lot of freedom to pick their own path through the game. Now you know why; they want the players to start with an assumption of freedom. And they reinforce that shit not just through advertising but by telegraphing their branching paths — in stupidly obvious, heavy-handed ways sometimes — in their games. They’re further revealed on repeat playthroughs or whenever filthy save scummers reload their saves to try something else or through an active, online community discussing their own personal experiences.

Tabletop roleplaying games can’t use most of those tricks. There are no repeat playthroughs and no reloading saves or respawning on death because tabletop roleplaying game adventures and campaigns are one-and-done, permanent affairs. Online community members can compare their playthroughs of published games, but not homebrewed campaigns. Fortunately, tabletop roleplaying games don’t need to make any of that noise. Everyone already knows tabletop roleplaying games provide infinite freedom, right?

When you’re actually good at something, you don’t need to brag about it.

But tabletop roleplaying games are also powered by choice, consequences, continuity, and permanence. Every player knows — or should know and must accept — that tabletop roleplaying games have both an infinity of paths and only one, single path. At the start of the game, there’s an infinite possibility space. That’s the nature of roleplaying games. But the path you — the player — take through the game is also the only path there is. That path is the one that evolved, organically, from your choices and the outcomes of those choices and how you dealt with the consequences.

Homebrewing is Open-Worlding Without the Problems

Before I wrap this up — however the hell I’m going to wrap up this mess — before I wrap this up, I want to mention that tabletop roleplaying games in general and homebrewed tabletop roleplaying game campaigns especially have another major advantage over video games. Homebrewed tabletop roleplaying games don’t suffer from the three major problems open-world video games have yet to overcome.

Of course, I’m assuming you’re doing the standard homebrew thing where you write one adventure or session at a time as your players play the game. You lay down content just one step ahead of your party as I described in my Angry’s Open World Game series.

Because you’re designing content as you need it and because you can adjust it between sessions or even on the fly, you need never have any pacing or balance issues. You can ensure the game is always paced well and that every challenge aligns with the characters’ statistics to provide the players with a fair challenge. Don’t leave a comment; I’ve already explained why you’re a dumbass if your game doesn’t level with your players. And now you also know why pointing at Skyrim and Breath of the Wild and saying, “They tried to level up with the player’s character and it sucked” won’t get you anywhere. Dumbass.

There’s also no complacency issue because, first, you don’t have to fill the space on your giant-ass map with a bunch of filler content. Second, you’re not going to build any boring content; any content in your game is going to be fun to engage with. Third, circumventing and avoiding encounters in tabletop roleplaying games is a challenge in itself. At least, if you’re smart, you’ll make it one.

Ironically, the more you try to emulate the open-world experience — in that game or in general — the more you’re inviting pacing, balance, and complacency issues into your game. Why the hell would ever want to do that? Especially if, as I’ve already explained, you don’t have to.

Just Do What You Do

So what’s my point here?

If you put aside all the analysis of open-world video games and how they do and don’t translate to tabletop roleplaying games and the differences between the media and how those differences affect what you can and can’t do — and you shouldn’t put that aside; I gave you a really solid, insightful analysis — if you put all that shit aside, you’re just left with one, simple point: don’t try to imitate your favorite video game, just run the game you’re already running and trust that you’re already running a great experience. Trust that all the feelings your favorite video game gave you are probably present in your roleplaying game campaign even if you can’t see how that could possibly be.

If you want a stronger point — and you’re okay with an ugly point that’ll leave you feeling dirty — recognize that giving your players lots of choices and freedom is actually not going to help you deliver the best possible free and open roleplaying game experience. The best experience is going to come from designing a good, solid, single adventure and letting the players think they chose it for themselves. Because, really, that’s mostly what the folks who designed that game did to you. And if you are going to give your players choices, how you present them is far more important than that they exist and how many there are.

I realize lots of you ain’t ready to hear that. I’ve still got plenty of folks in my community who never miss a chance to tell me that they run the best game ever by actually giving their players actual freedom and all this game design shit is wrong and bad and toxic. Those are the folks who don’t want anything to do with the True Scenario Designery series. The ones I’m talking to every time I remind everyone that I ain’t defending the Game Design Über Alles philosophy anymore.

If that’s you and you like making a giant-ass map and watching your players hex crawl from point of interest to point of interest, good on ya. Go to town and have fun. There are years of good advice on this site that’ll help you do just that. The rest of you, though, can stop trying to copy what you think video games are doing based on your play experiences and take the course.

And that, actually, brings me to the real point of these ten-thousand words of analysis: I don’t give a shit how much you loved Elden Ring; please stop asking me how to copy it. You shouldn’t, you can’t, and you don’t need to.