Sam’s Three-Question Taxonomy
When I sit down to read a new RPG book or play at a new RPG table, I’ve got three questions in mind. Basically all of my behavior at the table is downstream of these three and their answers.
### I. Is my goal to solve problems, or to tell a good story?
Both of these are a little reductive in their phrasing, but bear with me.
Problem-solving is about winning, or trying to win. Striving. Struggling. Pushing as hard as I can to achieve my goal, whatever that goal might be and whatever the method to achieve it. Slay the dragon, rescue the hot prince, catch the murderer, get the loot, solve the mystery.
In standard dungeon dragon, I solve problems mostly through resource attrition management and micro grid tactics. In _LANCER ,_ it’s about crafting a hyper-efficient mech build. In _Blades in the Dark,_ it’s about juggling Stress and resistance rolls in clever ways. Very often, problem-solving means wielding the endogenous (read: “game-y”) rules to play in highly efficient, optimal ways: high damage numbers, most often, but also maybe reaching top speeds, maximal clock-filling, or gigantic loot values.
But, problem-solving can also be more diegetic (read: “world-y”). Rather than the problem of “getting this bad guy’s HP down to zero before he kills me,” I might be trying to solve the problem of “getting through the room full of noxious gas with only a wet rag, a bellows, and a large toad.” Or scaling a very large cliff with very little rope. Or perhaps piecing together a series of clues, signs, and suspects’ statements to solve a mystery. Problems that are less abstracted, less numeric, less focused on systemic optimization than being clever in the relatively unsystematized diegetic world.
Regardless, problem-solving is about chasing victory, usually with that victory being based upon conditions in the imaginary world—dragons, princes, etc. I play to the best of my abilities, as efficiently and effectively as I can.
By contrast, storytelling is about drama, tension, narrative. “Good” and “story” are obviously both highly variable terms, which mutate a lot depending on context. But regardless, I aim not to outright solve some problem, but rather to craft a compelling set of events for myself and the other players. High drama, heartfelt emotion, unexpected twists, inverted tropes, satisfying arcs. The works.
In the myriad PbtAs out there, storytelling revolves around wielding my playbook’s set of rules—my strengths and weaknesses, my advancement paths, my conditions and failstates—to fulfill the set of tropes the playbook suggests. In _Thousand Year Old Vampire_ or _Alone Among the Stars,_ it’s about taking randomized prompts and suggestions and using them to literally write a compelling storyline. In _Fiasco,_ it’s about fast-paced roleplaying structured into beats and scenes. And in _Microscope, i’m sorry did you say street magic,_ or _A Land Once Magic,_ it’s about creating a world with others, taking some prompts from the book and each other and using them to collaboratively create times and places imbued with meaning.
In the story-focused mode, I’m not really trying to win, per se. I regularly make decisions that, in the context of the diegetic world, put my character and allies in a _worse_ position, because those worsening positions fuel the drama. This takes a lot of different forms depending on the particular game—especially moving from games where I play one character to games more about literally telling a story, let alone the genre and tone of the story itself—but the point is that I’m not aiming to win or achieve my goals efficiently, but rather to craft an engaging and compelling narrative. And in doing so, I as the player often act in ways opposed to the goals of my character, taking big risks, getting into trouble, and making unwise decisions. After all, it’s far more fun to watch our littles dudes have a bad day than a good one.
Now, you might be saying: “Sam! Surely these aren’t actually in opposition! Surely a game can exist where the most optimal solution is also the one that crafts the best story!” To which I say, sure, you know, maybe. It’s definitely possible sometimes. And, as just a matter of course, play oriented around problem-solving will eventually result in a story, just as any other sort of RPG play will; likewise, play oriented around storytelling will also very likely involve some degree of problems to be solved, because facing challenges is baked into nearly all forms of stories.
But, at every single table I’ve ever run or played at, somebody eventually has to make the call to go one way or the other, towards drama or towards efficiency. The question is not about whether or not storytelling or problem-solving exist at all, since both exist at almost every table, but rather which takes priority. And so I want to know, up front, which of these two I’m playing towards.
(For the game studies dorks among you, note that either of these can make for solid Suitsian pre-lusory goals, in that I can fail to achieve either one. Problem-solving looks a lot more like a classic agonistic “game goal” than storytelling, and each treats the endogenous and diegetic frames’ rules very differently in terms of lusory means and constitutive rules, but both can serve to make a game.)
When I’m faced with the dry but effective choice or the foolish but dramatic choice, which should I take?
### II. Can players (not characters) directly author the imaginary world?
And if so, how often, and how much?
This sounds kind of technical, but it’s actually very normal in lots and lots of RPG circles: sometimes, you as the player get to decide. You directly choose what the Secret of the Duke’s Tomb is, or you decide how this NPC is feeling, or you decide whether or not you’ve visited North Haven before, or whatever. A point where suddenly you, as the player, step outside your character to determine some fact, some truth, about the imaginary world in which you play.
I like to think of this one as a scale, ranging from “always” (like _Microscope_ or _For the Queen_) to “often” (like _The Quiet Year_ or _Fiasco_) to “sometimes” (like _Dogs in the Vineyard_ or _Bluebeard’s Bride_) to “rarely” (like Genesys _Star Wars_ or any other trad project with bennies) to “never” (like most OSRish stuff and wargames).
Often, world-authoring is hooked into some kind of rule, effect, or condition: _Blades in the Dark_ makes you burn Load or Stress; _Dogs in the Vineyard_ makes you win a Conflict; _Edge of the Empire_ makes you use a Force Point; _Wanderhome_ makes you spend a token; in certain PbtAs, it’s linked to specific moves, like _Bluebeard’s Bride’s_ “Shiver with Fear.” In nearly all of these, there are limits on how far this player-authorial power can go. Exactly where to draw the line on the _always <-> never_ scale is a little bit blurry, but it’s clear that some games and tables do this kind of direct authoring more than others.
In light of Question I, it’s worth noting that these kinds of direct edits carry very different cultural connotations and expectations with regards to power and winning: in _Triangle Agency,_ it’s expected that you’ll make requests of the Agency to create conveniently-unlocked doors or useful traffic jams; in _For the Queen,_ though, your authorial powers exist to craft a more compelling and effective story. Imagine a game where you get the option to create a custom item as a part of your character’s backstory: taking the instant +3 Greatsword of Dragonslaying is, in some circles, considered being a bad sport. In general, the trend is such that as players gain more authorial power, they’re expected to take a more storytelling-forward position rather than simply trying to crush their enemies. (Exceptions apply, obviously.)
Most RPGs, in terms of both books written and sessions played, land somewhere in the middle. Nearly all games allow some amount of backstory-writing, just as nearly all games eventually take a stance against conjuring whole new worlds out of thin air. As you hit the fringes, you start occasionally seeing accusations of “not being an RPG”—in the _always_ camp, this is the “It’s just collaborative writing or improv!” claim; in the _never_ camp, it’s the “This is just a wargame or board game!” argument. While not every rulebook directly writes this player authorial power into its rules (more on that later), it’s still a common expectation, at least a bit.
(Game studies dorks, this is just “Do you get to break Markus Montola’s Character Rule?” Montola argues that, if yes, you’re no longer roleplaying—in most RPG circles, however, I’ve found that particular argument to be, shall we say, something of a non-starter.)
As a player, am I locked to my character, or do I get the power to edit the world directly?
### III. When the written rules disagree with the imaginary world, which takes precedence?
Now, in a perfect world, this never happens. One day, I’m sure, some plucky game designer will write the perfect ruleset that can exactly simulate the entirety of the imaginary world with the rules in the book, one-to-one, and we’ll never have to think about this question again. But until then, it’s worth considering.
The classic example here is what I call the “Tied-Up Orc Scenario.” The combat’s just ended, and you’ve got the last orc tied up. You’re trying to pump him for information but you botch the intimidate check, so you opt to just knife him. With the orc powerless to resist, you slash his throat. What happens?
At some tables, the orc takes 1d4 damage, since a dagger deals 1d4 damage. Assuming a reasonably meaty orc, it might take five or six turns of throat-slashing, even with advantage, to finish him off. But at other tables, you just slit his throat and it’s over, typically without even a roll.
I see this as a conflict of rulesets: the more-visible endogenous rules found in the book, which state that daggers deal 1d4 damage and orcs have about 15 hitpoints, and the less-visible diegetic rules known by the table, which state that a dagger is perfectly capable of cutting a tied-up orc’s neck skin and that orcs die when their throats are opened. While this is a rather violent example drawn from dungeon dragon, I’m sure you can think of others: times where the written rules say that wine barrels sell for so much, or that it takes so long to cross the mountains, or that so-and-so characters always despise the people from such-and-such a place—but you, at the table, know that those rules don’t really match the world you’re playing in.
This kind of conflict, this tension between the written rules and the imaginary world, is everywhere in RPGs. While it in theory exists in board games, too, board games have the ironclad cultural norms of saying “No, you cannot rob the bank in _Monopoly,”_ as well as a dearth of referees to adjudicate such off-book actions. Going even further, videogames don’t even give you the choice. In practice, board games and videogames are often praised for achieving close parity between the two, for creating crunchier mechanisms and rules that closely match the imagined world—what, in some circles, might be called”ludonarrative resonance.”
But in RPGs, we as players can appeal to the logic and understood nature of the world, and often, this diegetic understanding can supercede the written rules. At most tables, the decision to err one way or the other falls to the GM in the form of a ruling. Traditional RPG rulesets understand that this conflict is very common, and so deliberately craft their rulesets to be flexible and adaptable to a variety of in-universe situations, even unexpected and unpredictable ones. There are no rules for , say, specifically leaping from the back of a charging elephant onto the pursuing camelry and spearing the rider in the same move, so we make a Strength check and add the falling damage to the attack roll, or something. The GM makes a ruling, you figure it out.
But! This isn’t always the case. Many rulesets insist on following the rules, even when sometimes they make a little less sense, typically by suggesting that players rewrite or resituate their imaginary world to better suit the determined rules outcome—itself a concern related to Questions I and II. While lots of exceptions apply and very few tables go wholly one way or the other, in general, I find that more story-forward games tend to favor their written rules, more OSR-leaning projects tend to favor the imaginary world, and trad games split the difference to fall somewhere in the middle.
(Game studies dorks: this is just endogenous vs diegetic rules again, from Fine and later Montola.)
But the question stands: when the rulebook and the world disagree, which is true?
### An important caveat
So far, nearly all of my examples have described published rulebooks, broadly assuming that players follow those rules. But! This is not the case. Individual tables and play groups can always change their answers to these questions, regardless of what the rulebook says. Often, this isn’t considered cheating, or even explicitly changing the rules, but just, like, regular mild variation in play.
Dungeon dragon, as the generic brand, sees all sorts. Over the years I’ve played at many tables with many different flavors of player, and so I can tell you that each brings extremely different answers to these questions. I’ve “played D&D” where we spend most of our time exploring one town’s history, fleshing out our characters’ backstories and their connections to the people as we delve deep into emotion and feeling, just as I’ve “played D&D” where we stuff our boots full of wool to stave off the frostbite and trenchfoot as we wade knee-deep through icy water to haul a buddy with a broken femur back to safety. And, critically, both of these considered themselves to be—and possibly were?—still playing “the same game.”
Of course, some designers take hard stances one way or the other. It’s quite common these days to reach the end of the rules in a new RPG book and be greeted with dozens of pages of essays, opining this way or that on the “correct” way to play the game that the designer has, in their mind, created with a specific intention in mind. Many designers, whether they know it or not, explicitly craft their rules so as to steer all tables that buy their book to play in the intended mode. In some cases, this might even work! While it’s relatively easy to bolt on story-ful character backstory questions to an OSR ruleset (just ask my _OVER/UNDER_ players), it’s quite difficult to play a gritty, simulationist version of, say, _For the Queen._
But in nearly all cases, it’s very easy to nudge the answer to any of these three questions one way or the other. Often, this happens at the same table on a session-by-session, beat-by-beat, or even player-by-player basis. It’s quite normal, for example, to be playing with big emotions and focusing on the drama while at the tavern, only to suddenly hard-switch and enter hyper-optimization mode as soon as the dragon appears and initiative is rolled. Likewise after the party finishes a couple sessions of hexcrawling and reaches a new town, it’s not uncommon do a quick round of question-and-answer to determine past connections—who’s been here before, who’s got a friendly cousin in town, who maybe had a run-in with the law, that kind of thing. Some tables go even further and start bolting rulesets together, using, say, _A Quiet Year_ to build the town they’ll play a campaign of _Apocalypse World_ in, but borrowing the combat rules from _FIST_ for the ensuing brawls.
While designers and rulebooks often attempt to make definitive statements with regards to their answers to these questions, players at the table can always change how they play.
### Now, let’s taxonomize!
To start, let’s look at each of the eight broad categories and think about which games—mostly relying on the written rulebooks, as it’s harder to get data on tables themselves—fit where. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to skip the “mostlys,” “oftens,” and “nearly alls.” Just imagine I’m qualifying each of these, and that your particular carve-out is, of course, excepted.
> _Problem-solving, non-authorial, rules-favoring_
Classic trad games! Dungeon dragon, _Shadowrun, GURPS,_ all the rest. You play one character and that’s it, you’re here to beat bad guys and solve puzzles, and you do it by skillfully wielding the rules. This is, traditionally, where powergamers and erstwhile rules lawyers are at their happiest—a place where they can learn the rules, then deploy them to crush their opponents.
> _Problem-solving, non-authorial, world-favoring_
OSR games and their successors! There’s a million individual rulesets that are all slightly different, but none of them matter because the world can override them at any time. The problems get simpler but weirder, the monsters require increasingly-complicated schemes to defeat, and stuff like the precise thickness of dungeons’ doors and walls starts to matter. For the less hack-and-slash among you, this is also where very pared-back mystery games fall: puzzles you need to solve on your own merit, with your own brain. You still strive to win, but you do it via the world, rather than the rulebook. (This style is, if it wasn’t obvious, my favorite way to play.)
> _Story-telling, non-authorial, rules-favoring_
Newer trad, some neotrad, and a few storygames! _Vampire,_ in my mind, is the big early one here, but lots and lots of tables and games have been playing this way for decades, particularly because the line between this and more classic trad can be so blurry. You still play just your one character and you still gotta follow the rules, but here the point is not to defeat your enemies but to tell a cool, dramatic story. Often, this fits the “paper dolls” mode, where you spend a lot of time selecting your powers and abilities to craft a character that matches the individual you envision. Other times, this is the “narrow” sort of storygames, your _Monsterhearts_ or _Dreads,_ where you’re there to feel big feelings and the rules help push you towards those feelings, but you aren’t regularly outright rewriting the world. (For what it’s worth, this is also where I think a lot of videogame RPGs fit—many _Baldur’s Gate 3_ players, in my mind, are in this category.)
> _Story-telling, non-authorial, world-favoring_
There’s not a strict name for this category I can point to as easily (NSR? “simulationist storytelling?” OG _Apocalypse World_ and no other PbtAs?) but it’s very common anyways. Usually, it’s phrased as something like “D&D but our GM is like really into their worldbuilding and lets us try lots of weird stuff as long as it makes sense.” Players are still locked to their character, but those characters exist in a world that exists beyond their stats and feats, and everyone’s playing to tell a unique story. In my experience, this is the camp that many new dungeon dragon tables end up in before they branch out to new rulesets—they’re highly invested, their world is very developed, and often the rulebook ends up by the wayside.
> _Problem-solving, authorial, rules-favoring_
The rest of neotrad! These are the games where players are allotted limited but significant ability to alter the world, and are encouraged to use that power to solve problems inside the worl. Shining examples include _Daggerheart, Blades in the Dark,_ and _Triangle Agency._ Obviously, players dip back and forth between problem-solving and storytelling, but each of these amply supports players who want to win, and they do it by tactically rewriting the world in their favor under limitations imposed by the rules. Certain oddball competitive player-vs-player storygames—thinking here of Paul Riddle’s _Undying,_ for example—also sometimes hit this category.
> _Problem-solving, authorial, world-favoring_
The real wildcard. Generally speaking, if you have the ability to rewrite the world, the constraints of the world are not all that serious, and so any in-world diegetic problems can be solved quickly. If my goal is to slay the dragon, and I can directly write “The dragon lies dead,” where’s the game? Accordingly, I can’t really think of any examples here, making this a mostly empty category. The only example that readily comes to mind are little children’s playground games that involve successive one-upping of force fields and force field-busting lasers, but otherwise I have no idea about this one.
> _Story-telling, authorial, rules-favoring_
Worldbuilding games, solo games, and the rest of storygames! _Fiasco, Microscope, For the Queen, The Quiet Year, Wanderhome, Along Among the Stars, Thousand Year Old Vampire, Brindlewood Bay,_ the list goes on and on. These are the games where you and your friends craft characters and worlds and tell compelling stories in them, together, guided by the rules in the book. Those rules are relatively fixed and are designed to be followed, but the whole of the diegetic frame—the whole of the imaginary world—is up for grabs.
> _Story-telling, authorial, world-favoring_
There are, I think, two basic answers to what fits into this category. One is the “evolved storygame,” the campaign where you get deep into the sauce, know how to play with each other, and stop needing the rules. (For whatever reason, I find this is a particularly common outcome for Belonging Outside Belonging games I play, like _Dream Askew_ —after a session or two, we ditch the rules and just vibe.) Two, more controversially, is improv and/or collaborative writing. When you sit down to do an improvised scene or write a story together, you have the goal of producing a good yarn and the power to change anything in the world, but are often more constrained by the world and your past story beats than you are any set of rules. Is this an RPG? Maybe, maybe not. But I think it’s the logical outcome of this category.
Taken together, you can imagine these eight broad categories as a cube divided along each of its three axes: _story-telling vs problem-solving_ as the left-right x-axis, _authorial vs non-authorial_ as the up-down y-axis, and _rules-favoring vs world-favoring_ as the forward-back z-axis. Here’s my attempt to draw what this might look like:
Not perfect, obviously, but I think you get the idea. Now, simply take this chart, map all your favorite games in the good category and all the ones you hate in the bad category, and win the eternal internet RPG debate club forevermore.
### Attempted conclusions
First and foremost, I should say that the main reason I frame these as questions to ask is to _help_ play. When I sit down at a new table, I try to ask these or close variations of them as soon as I can, because I’ve found they really help me—and others at the table, sometimes—get to grips with what we’re actually trying to do. I obviously have my own individual preferences, but I can shift for a session or three if I understand the game we’re playing. As Bernie De Koven writes: “Clarity. Clarity. We can’t play unless we are clear that that’s what we’re doing.”
On some level, this is just reinventing the classic DMG “types of players” section from first principles. If you consider the actors, storytellers, powergamers, optimizers, instigators, explorers, and socializers of the world, it’s relatively straightforward to slot them into these camps, one way or another. (That said, when I am one day King of Dungeons & Dragons, I’ll be sure to include these three questions in the DMG, rather than just a list of types.)
Can a brilliant GM unite all of these together? Probably. If you’re an expert GM that knows your players inside and out, there’s a good chance that you can thread the needle exactly, creating a tailored game for specifically just your table (even if you never write down the rules to that game), such that they can perfectly balance problem-solving and story-telling, authorship and limits, the rules and the world. I don’t doubt it.
After making the chart, one takeaway I noticed (which I alluded to earlier) is that it’s easier to move some directions than others. It’s very easy, for example, to play to tell a good story—you can even do it in _Settlers of Catan,_ or chess, or any other game that suggests an imaginary world—but it’s tricky to try to problem-solve in a ruleset geared for character drama. Oftentimes, this is because it’s trivially easy: _Apocalypse World’s_ “Seize by Force” move can be used to settle a wrestling match over a gun or a war for an entire holding, all with one roll. If your goal is strive and strategize, the straight-to-the-point efficacy of many story-leaning rulesets’ player abilities, abilities designed to cut out the boring details and get to the latest story beat, undercut the struggle.
Likewise, it’s trivial to open up any old ruleset to authorial power, especially when compared to the challenge of taking that power away once enshrined in the rules. I can always turn to my players mid-session of _Mausritter_ and ask them to define characters in mouse-town, but it’s much tougher to tell my _Brindlewood Bay_ players that no, actually, they’re not allowed to define the solution to the mystery, they need to start doing deductive logic. Furthermore, once you’ve granted players the power to alter the world, it means that a GM can no longer rely on that world as a source of authority: when players can change the diegetic rules, that diegesis ceases to bind. (The same is sort of sometimes true in reverse—many veteran OSR players learn to ignore their rulebooks entirely and just focus on the dungeon—but it’s very possible and common to play without authorial player power and still stick strictly to the rules.) If you’ll indulge me putting on my crank cap for a moment, I suspect this is part of the reason why certain circles and scenes get more testy and defensive of their styles—it’s relatively easy to make _Mothership_ into a storygame without, on paper, changing many of the rules, but much trickier to turn _Triangle Agency_ into a hexcrawl (not that that’s going to stop me from trying).
That diegetic-rules-cancellation effect also helps to explain the relative popularity of adventures and adventure-like content on a scene-by-scene basis. Games with high authorial power have little-to-no-use for an adventure, since the diegetic world contained in that adventure is, by design, so plastic and pliant. (If you can edit the world, it’s very easy to render all of an adventure’s content totally void, whether you meant to or not.) Games with low authorial power further fragment along the world-vs-rules line: a rules-favoring game can use an adventure, sure, but typically those adventures are more about the encounters, the setpieces, the scripted design of fun rules-situated challenges. A world-favoring adventure, by contrast, needs to emphasize the diegetic world _as it exists,_ since its players might not even be using a rulebook at all, instead simply relying on their understanding of the imaginary places in their own right. In the past five years, the projects and scenes that have seen a real explosion of third-party content— _Mothership, Mausritter, MÖRK BORG, OSE_ and so on—typically fit this paradigm, because the style and culture that’s built around them is one that favors diegetic worlds over written rules. If your rules matter more than your world, typically all you can make is more rules.
The flipside, of course, is actual play. APs are, by and large, dominated by games that feature players frequently directly authoring the imaginary world, and strongly emphasize storytelling over problem-solving. There are exceptions, of course, but even in the more trad-leaning APs—your _Critical Roles,_ etc.—they often lean heavily into rich player backstories and deeply involved storytelling techniques. Anecdotally, all of my AP friends here in New York are far, far more focused on games that lean towards storytelling and player-authoring than the grit and grime of the crawl. Even when they play more OSR-ish games, most AP shows tend to end up resorting to collaborative storytelling techniques anyway. And, as you might imagine, tables that care more about slaying dragons efficiently and getting maximal loot tend to tell less widely-appealing stories than tables that set out to tell a fun and engaging tale, further reinforcing the paradigm.
Overall, while this small taxonomy obviously ignores and waives huge design questions—there’s nothing here about heavy crunchy rules vs fluffy light rules or the level of abstraction and zoomed-out-edness of those rules, let alone the actual tone, theme, and contents of the game itself—I do think it points towards real divides. You might not see them at your particular table or in your particular scene, but across the many circles of RPGs (and RPG discourse), I find that these three questions end up forming the breakpoints.
In my many years of playing, most of the unhappiness I’ve experienced or seen experienced at RPG tables comes from a mismatch somewhere in these three. Obviously, many tables and player groups can and do manage to balance some amount of variation within a scene, session, or campaign. But, no matter their style, I find that the more aware players are of theirs and others’ goals and preferences, the easier it is to get along. Only as we start to understand the game as it exists at our particular table can we begin to play well, and only as we understand each other can we begin to play well together.
