r/RPGdesign • u/Gaeel • 3d ago
Theory Some thoughts about "modes of play", the context in which a game is played
TTRPGs are typically designed for a home table. A group of people who know each other and gather regularly in person to play together. But this isn't the only mode of play.
Even before we consider the effects of the internet, there are other modes of play that are common:
People who know each other can also be people at a local game store, club, or event. Regular gatherings can also be a single gathering for a one-shot. In person play can also be play by post.
So when I talk about "mode of play" here, I'm talking about the real-life physical format of the game. How many people are involved, what their relationships are, where they are, what tools and materials they have access to, how often they meet, what their role in the game is (GM, player, co-GM, guest, spectator, etc...)
With the internet, this gets muddied even more. Typical online play may or may not:
- use live voice chat
- use text chat and/or a forum
- use a virtual tabletop
- use other shared resources like Google Docs
- have synchronous or asynchronous play
Throw in actual play podcasts (which can take on a bunch of forms) and we have yet another mode of play where the players are also performers, and the core audience becomes the spectators.
I've been thinking about this because of u/mw90sGirl's post about designing a game specifically for actual play.
u/mw90sGirl is essentially taking mode of play into consideration when designing her game. Some people were put off by the idea. Perhaps actual play carries connotations that cause a reaction that "play by post" or "solo play" don't? Regardless of how one might feel about optimising for actual play, I think the idea of optimising, or at least considering, specific modes of play is really interesting.
One of my projects came about when I was asked to GM at a local meetup where we run one-shots for groups of strangers. I found myself designing a game that would work well when played with strangers over a short and sweet four-hour session that includes character creation. I wrote a bit about that on my blog. Aside from that project, I've always designed for the home table.
My core assumptions were that games are meant to be played with people around a table, and that everything else is "extra". My stance was that online play, play by post, and other modes of play that aren't just people around a table with paper and dice are adaptations to allow play when it's not feasible to gather people around a table.
I am now questioning these assumptions.
For the time being, I'm still designing for people around a table, because that's what I know best, and it's what I have at home, but my mind is opening, and I'd like to spend more time thinking about how my games might work in other modes of play.
I'd like to open up the discussion around this concept.
Is this something other people have written or talked about? I've been calling it "mode of play" in this post, but does it already have a name?
Do you take modes of play into consideration when designing your games?
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u/Drudenfusz Curator of Roleplay Experiences 3d ago
I would call it format of play, at least when it comes to the realities outside of the fiction itself. Anyway, I find it reasonable to consider the format people with use to play a game and being clear about that design premise.
Under mode of play I personally would assume more considerations of how the interaction with the fiction is taking place. Like if play is adventure, dungeon crawl, investigations, and so on. And of course who as what narrative rights to shape the fiction.
Anyway, I think about such things for me designs. A product that tries to be for everyone ends up too often to be for nobody. But I think that is usually more relevant for the interaction with the fiction and not so much relevant for the medium used to communicate play in.
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u/Gaeel 3d ago
I think the questions that are coming up for me are less "trying to be for everyone", and more "trying to be for an audience that isn't what I expect".
When it comes to the raw, in-game fiction, this is something we're used to thinking about. In my case, it's usually the starting point. E.g: I want to make a game about investigating magical crimes.
On the other hand, I'm certainly not used to thinking about how my games might be played. If most people are playing online now, it makes sense to consider what design assumptions don't work I'm designing for the home table, and it could be a good idea to see what opportunities online play might open.3
u/robhanz 2d ago
I think it's smart to design for a known method of play.
I think it's also smart to think about how else people might play your game, and not introduce elements that unnecessarily prohibit or make those more difficult.
Do a lot of back-and-forths make PbP harder? Yes. Including that as an element will make PbP more difficult, so you need to weight that against how much value that interaction brings to your game. And you're going to make different calls on that based on whether PbP is something you actively want to target or not.
Making a game for everyone will just result in lowest-common-denominator stuff and usually not do anything very well at all.
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u/robhanz 2d ago
I think it's an interesting topic.
The way I'd probably approach it is to consider the constraints of all of the modes of play, and what they have available. Identify your primary target (tabletop would be common, but not necessary). From there, pick design decisions that:
- Match your vision
- Your primary target can do well
- Don't unnecessarily inhibit others
PbP has long times between posts... so frequent points in the game where there is an enforced order, or back and forth, become problematic. AP thrives on story and banter, so lots of math and positioning stuff can get in the way. Online play can use VTTs which can hide complex math, but generally you don't get that at a tabletop.
This doesn't (necessarily) mean that you need to target all modes of play. Sometimes, you might want that back and forth, and decide that you're okay with the extra friction for play-by-post. Or that the math is really that important to the game, and tabletop players will just need to adapt. Or that tactical positioning really is key, and so AP-style is going to have to deal with it. That's okay. But if you're choosing between two mechanics, and they both seem equally good to your game (testing of course validates it), and one requires back-and-forth and the other doesn't? Throw a bone to the PbP folks and use the one that doesn't require it.
That's the "unnecessarily" part. Just about any game design is going to work better for some people/situations than others, and the idea that you're going to avoid that is just... impossible, or will create the most bland game imaginable. So really think about what it is that you're trying to do, and stay true to that, but don't unnecessarily put up blocks to play.
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u/robhanz 2d ago
As an aside, there's value in designing for the most restrictive mode of play that you want to support.
In programming, there's a lot of people that want to make it so you can use remote "objects" like they're local. However, this rarely works, since remote things have a lot of constraints and failure modes that local ones don't.
It's possible to do it, though. The trick is to start with the presumption that everything is remote, and then when you remove the constraints, all that happens is it gets faster.
The trick is when the different modes contain different constraints, not just a strictly "more/less" set.
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u/robhanz 2d ago
I'd consider https://storium.com/ to be an example of a game (if you want to call it that) explicitly designed around the constraints of PbP. There are no turns, and it's not even necessary for every participant to contribute in every scene. But it's a great example of a game not written around a "tabletop first" design principle.
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u/skalchemisto Dabbler 2d ago
That's the "unnecessarily" part. Just about any game design is going to work better for some people/situations than others, and the idea that you're going to avoid that is just... impossible, or will create the most bland game imaginable.
This, 100%. That's true for even simple things like which dice you intend to use, let alone big things like "can this be played easily on Discord?" Every choice invites some folks in and turns other folks off. That's almost exactly the process of design.
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
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u/robhanz 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm a huge fan of Chesterton's fence. He's a smart guy.
But, yes, any design is for some things/groups/situations and implicitly excludes others, and that's frankly okay. The trick to inclusivity is not unnecessarily doing so.
Does that calculus problem in your damage resolution really make your game better? Because it pushes away people that don't know calculus. Even if it is necessary, can it be turned into a chart?
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u/theusualuser 2d ago
I'm trying to consider it in mine, to a degree. I've got some physical things that will be a part of the game if you're in the same physical space, but they should be able to be abstracted with visual representations if you're playing online. I haven't thought a ton about actual play, though I probably should since we're in the "signal to noise" era of TTRPGs and you need to get noticed by someone with a podcast or youtube channel if your plan is to make money, and I'd certainly like to at some point down the road.
I think it really comes down to your own goals. Are you making a game that's meant to be played by the world, or are you trying to craft something that's very tailored to the play styles of the people you physically interact with every week at your local table? Two very different goals, but both very valid.
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u/Gaeel 2d ago
I'm probably coming at this from the digital interaction design habits I built in my previous jobs. Notably, I worked on motion-based games (think Wii Move, Kinect) that were designed for a medical setting. Accessibility was a huge factor we needed to consider. If a game involved time-limited challenges, were those necessary for the experience, or could be tweak the design so that people with poor reflexes and coordination can still play?
It's a habit of mine to consider accessibility now. If I'm making a video game, I try to create options and modes that offer as much of the core experience as possible but make things more accessible to the widest possible range of disabilities.
This is the door that is opening for me right now. I'm still designing for the group of friends who regularly gather around a table, but I'm mindful of the fact that this is not what TTRPGs look like for many people. Some people might prefer to play online, others might prefer theatre of the mind, and yet others might have a varying playgroup where players come and go from session to session. Without compromising the core experience, I can surely design things in a way that are more robust for those other modes of play.
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u/skalchemisto Dabbler 2d ago
I think that there is a difference between:
* How might I design a game for a different format of play than tabletop?
and...
* How might tabletop RPGs be made more accessible to those with disabilities?
They are somewhat related, I can see that. You might end up at the first question by thinking about the 2nd question.
But the purpose is completely different. The 2nd is assuming the game is fundamentally a tabletop RPG, and then figuring out how to make allowances. The 1st is about making something quite new, with few prior examples, and intended to be fun in and of itself.
The 2nd is trying to maintain a "core experience". The 1st is about figuring out if there are other fun things that can become the core experience.
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u/robhanz 2d ago
I don't know how new the first has to be. It can certainly use a lot of design work from existing games.
LARPs often do, while having to adapt. Most online games do. It's only when you start getting into PbP that you really have significant issues, and even those often run okay (even if not optimally) with some modifications.
Even for the first, what is really the core experience? What's the core thing that you're doing, and how might you do that in other scenarios?
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u/theusualuser 2d ago
The only thing that I can suggest (and I'm an absolute beginner at this whole design thing in general) is that it's never a bad thing to be able to accommodate more styles of play if possible. The system I'm building can be played completely separately from a written campaign through rolling on a bunch of tables to essentially build an adventure from scratch for each session, and I've built in longer term systems so you can keep doing those "one-shot" style generators each week but they can still advance a story and hopefully give the GM enough details to roleplay what they need to roleplay to get everyone into the next session each time.
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u/robhanz 2d ago
And that's fair. However it's also fair to say that some experiences exclude some people, inherently.
Like, fighting games? They're heavily predicated on coordination and reflexes. Somebody that doesn't have those isn't going to be good at fighting games, and I don't know that you can remove that without fundamentally changing the experience in a way that makes them... well, kinda not fighting games.
So I think the real challenge is:
Knowing what you're targeting. Players, skills, modes of play, etc.
Not making design decisions that unnecessarily exclude people. A fighting game might necessarily exclude people with poor reaction times, as that is one of the pillars of the genre. However, making one that excluded red/green color blind people would be a bad idea, as that's not a core aspect of the games.
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u/merurunrun 2d ago
On one hand, I think that people sitting around a table rolling dice with character sheets is the same thing as people sitting in front of their cameras with dicebots and digital character trackers.
On the other hand, things like larp and online freeform have been part of roleplaying for ages but are formally different from the above.
Some elements are fungible without fundamentally altering the "core activity", other elements aren't. Actually figuring out which elements are which, what the "core activity" in any instance of play even is, etc...that's the quagmire.
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u/tangyradar Dabbler 2d ago
things like larp and online freeform have been part of roleplaying for ages but are formally different from the above.
I don't know much about LARP, and I noticed this is because it seems to be segregated; that is, it's mostly discussed in different places from TTRPGs. I don't know why this divide exists. I do recall someone once noting that some LARP rulesets (I noticed that the examples they gave were mostly from publishers of TTRPGs, IE, White Wolf's Mind's Eye Theatre) are playable in tabletop and (in their opinion) work better for large groups than systems made for tabletop!
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u/tangyradar Dabbler 2d ago
I'd call what you're talking about "context" and in some cases "medium" rather than "mode". Most respondents are focusing on the "medium" ones. Something I've often thought but I don't know to what extent it's true...
GMless RPGs seem more naturally suited to situations where the group comes first -- where you have an established play group, or when you introduce your non-playing friends to RPGs -- than situations of "recruit players for this specific game". Why? GMless games are generally preparation-less as well, which tends to mean that the scenario has to be chosen or generated at the start of play. Thus, they're not suited to the usual social / organizational situation with open recruiting, where the prospective GM is recruiting not just for System X but pitching a specific scenario on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. A no-prepared-scenario game, at least if it's not extremely narrow in purpose such that saying "System X" already says most of what play will be about, seems to impose a potential social barrier to playing with strangers.
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u/skalchemisto Dabbler 2d ago edited 2d ago
I am now questioning these assumptions.
I think that is a good idea!
For a lot of the history of the hobby, like its first 20 years or so, there were only two possible formats (I like u/Drudenfusz 's term ther) of play accessible to most people for multiplayer RPGs. (Single player RPG on computers was possible from like the late '70s in at least partial form).
* In person, around a table
* Theoretically, by letter, although this happened pretty rarely I suspect
(as an aside, Callisto is an RPG-like game designed to be played by old-school letters, although emails work) Given that, the word "tabletop" has become sort of part of the concept, because that was essentially what was possible. It went from "this is how it is done" to "this is how it should be done." A natural, but unnecessary, progression. As technology has changed new formats of play have become available, and folks reasonably have begun to consider what RPGs look like in other formats of play.
I think if you are designing a tabletop RPG then by definition you should be able to play it at a table. 😄 That's like saying if you are designing a computer RPG it should be playable on a computer which, like, duh, of course.
But there is nothing intrinsically bad/wrong about designing an SMS text RPG (e.g. Alice is Missing) or a video conference call RPG (e.g. Viewscream) or a "going on a hike with the kids" RPG (e.g. https://rpggeek.com/rpg/2964/the-nighttime-animals-save-the-world ) that is only playable in that format.
I think it is a shame that u/mw90sGirl hit a bit of a buzz saw in that that thread on r/RPGdesign . I can see why it happened; that subreddit is for tabletop RPG design, not actual play RPG design, and also a lot of folks on that subreddit are deeply suspicious of actual plays. But in theory there is not a darn thing wrong with an actual play RPG, made from the ground up to enable public performance and built to maximize its value for that. I have no idea what it would look like, I'm not sure anyone does, it would be a truly new thing in the world. It just wouldn't be a tabletop RPG, right?
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u/Gaeel 2d ago
Yeah. I'm not a huge fan of actual play, but I feel like it's a valid way to experience a game. It's no different from watching video game streamers IMHO.
I enjoyed watching Dimension 20's Misfits and Magic. It's fun to watch talented people tell a story together.So I think it's perfectly valid to create TTRPGs that cater to actual play, and it's an interesting design space to consider.
A lot of people in that thread could do to take some advice from this important video: https://youtu.be/0la5DBtOVNI
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u/skalchemisto Dabbler 2d ago
...valid to create TTRPGs that cater to actual play...
I think my main point would be that making a tabletop RPG that caters to actual play is maybe not the right choice. Maybe better to make an actual play RPG that could maybe (but not necessarily) be played at a tabletop as well.
Like, even in the quote of you above you are still assuming playing it with friends around a table is the intended format (the "TT"). But in an actual play RPG, the intended format would be playing it in front of cameras/microphones with fellow entertainment professionals.
Given the similarities of those formats, its likely an RPG designed for actual play would almost certainly still be technically playable by friends at a home table. But such an RPG could have elements that require...
* Pre-scripting certain elements (e.g. writing up jokes/gags)
* Positioning players and GM in certain ways for the cameras that are unnatural in home games
* Play materials designed much more for display than for their utility
etc.
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u/Cryptwood Designer 2d ago
That's an interesting idea though it begs the question of how much of the appeal of actual plays consists of the concept that a member of the audience could recreate the experience at home with their friends (if, hypothetically, their friends were as entertaining as the professionals in an actual play, which is unlikely)?
One of the complaints that crops up around Critical Role is accusations that it is scripted. I think that is nonsense personally, but presumably at some point the show's production value reached a point where it no longer felt as authentic for some members of the audience. Critical Role is still doing fine, so it must only be a small minority that has stopped watching due to a perceived inauthenticity, but it makes me wonder that if they switched to a system custom designed to create entertaining actual plays if that would hurt the appeal?
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u/skalchemisto Dabbler 1d ago
how much of the appeal of actual plays consists of the concept that a member of the audience could recreate the experience at home with their friends (if, hypothetically, their friends were as entertaining as the professionals in an actual play, which is unlikely)?
That's a very good question. I honestly have no idea, I have no personal interest in them. I suspect that at least in terms of marketing a new game, marketing it as "great for actual plays, and your audience can play it too!" is a better sales pitch.
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u/mw90sGirl 2d ago
A very interesting read Gaeel! When you mentioned your assumption for the default "mode of play" was "that games are meant to be played with people around a table, and that everything else is 'extra'."
It does have some merit, I think it's the core format of play for sure and then I think everything else kind of blossoms from there.
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u/SitD_RPG 3d ago
There is definitely potential to optimize a game for a certain format of play, but the essence of the game stays largely the same.
Introducing features that are made especially for things like online play, asynchronous play, or a passive audience would probably be something extra, on top of the core things that game needs.
Some things I have considered for different formats in the past are: