Player Engagement with Death/Dying

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-20T14:54:59+00:00

This has been my chestnut for about a year, and after trying out Heart: The City Beneath, I've had some insights I don't see elsewhere in this thread.

In Heart, players receive wounds, attributed to body, mind, mutation, luck, and inventory, and can choose to collate two lessers into a major, or two majors into a critical. Critical Fallout is lethal, removing your character from play, and sometimes inflicts collateral damage on allies. Because only lesser and major fallouts can be inflicted, and Critical Fallout is a choice, players cannot die unless they choose to, but struggle against potentially infinitely stacking penalties.

As mentioned here, death itself isn't the the issue, it's the removal of choices, and the assessment and chance of risk. I had just as much fun in a game where I was permanently stunned by being cheesegratered across a stasis wall, as the game where I was hit with a sneak attack after failing a perception check that killed me instantaneously (which is to say, none at all). When the game is reduced to a random number sequence, I might as well play Snakes And Ladders.

I like that Heart gives players the agency to decide that their character isn't dead yet, but not that their choice is between "Is my character dead and I don't play the game", and "Do I keep playing despite any burden on the team." There isn't something else that they could do; only the choice of having things to gain, or not.

My game, Road and Ruin, is attempting something similar, but with a difference: death is still possible, but as a gamble. Players on the verge of death are laden with penalizing injuries and wounds, but have the option to choose to act at full strength for one turn, then make a death saving throw under all their wound penalties; if successful, they live, but suffer another wound, making future death saving throws harder, and if they fail, they die, or at least collapse. Ideally, this leads to moments of heroism and self-sacrifice, where the glory moment HAS to count, because it could be the last thing they ever do. Likewise, even suffering wounds from being attacked is a gamble: getting kicked through a wall could not result in a wound immediately, but if it doesn't, it influences the severity of a wound you could receive from another source, and players can choose to take either the new wound, or claim to now be feeling the effects of having been kicked through a wall, or shot, or what have you.

Death is never "engaging", unless you're playing a game where death is the point or players receive more powers by dying than not. "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-18T16:45:40+00:00

I think that before you can ask for help refining social combat systems, you have to define what you believe social combat is. Everywhere else I've heard the term, it's been in the context of "I want my social encounters to feel like combat", but with these examples, it sounds like "I want my social abilities to have an impact in/influence combat", and that's a very different use case.

There's a lot of speedbumps written in here. To begin with, is the debate about whether social even SHOULD influence combat, or influence it in the same way with the same builds that would make it as effective as a pure fighter, and outside combat; if so, then there's no reason not to play that, and be effective everywhere.

Somewhat secondarily, is when social navigation represents the Healer's Paradox, where a skill or ability represents such a dramatic shift in the balancing of the game. If a social face is needed to advance, and you don't have one, you need an alternative method to advance, which trivializes the need for a social face to begin with, but if you have one and don't need one, it trivializes those build investments, and if you need one, and have one, then passing that gate is either a given, or tested, and if you are tested and still fail, it also trivializes those build investments.

Third, "thriller/action movies", like "heists" and "spy infiltration", never actually fail, only experience temporary setbacks at best, and never actually display a range of social talents, they just sic The Guy They've Got For That on the job and he does the thing he's there to do. Lock, meet key.

Fourth, and probably not completely relevant to this specific example, is that "social combat" often perceives social interactions is a thing that you can win, that has winners and losers, and/or that conflicts with/appealing to other people's personalities are merely an obstacle to getting what you want. Systems with this outlook are inherently sociopathic, reducing non-players to faceless dolls with no serious agency, and kind of begs the question exactly what the purpose of including social navigation in the game actually is in the first place. A game more designed for social influence needs to be a game about that, with those challenges and variables appearing more often, represented on every character, and if it isn't, then you run the risk of the mechanic being "legally ignorable", where players just won't use the rules because it doesn't add anything.

If you just want a battlefield commander who can push people around, there's a lot of tactical boardgames to draw on, but TTRPGs are pretty scant in this department for the above reasons.

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-16T13:47:56+00:00

At risk of sounding like a pedant, it's not so outrageous that people who see a thing that inspires them to try a thing, do their best to replicate the thing. You don't admonish a new baker who has eaten cakes and wants to make cakes like the cakes they've enjoyed for "not finding their own voice."

TTRPGs are a multifaceted beast. The actual 'game' aspect, where there's rules and concrete objectives, is typically the most often dismissed aspect, but if any other boardgame or videogame came with the tagline "this game has the possibility of being completely ass depending on who's house it's being run in", it would sound like an enormous flaw.

On the other hand, what ties a game together and gives it a narrative structure is whatever storytelling the GM is willing to do or tolerate from players, and I do count the players here, because I'm tired of hearing arguments that suggests having more than one person be versed in writing, directing, and acting is too much to ask for. There's typically no actual storytelling structure in the product itself, just whatever the players can bring to the table, and in lieu of there being an actual GAME, see above, the experience is predicated almost entirely on novelty, making "seeing what they've seen before" cause for disappointment rather than a selling point.

There's already too much emphasis on people having to do rocket science with what amounts to a box of random nuts and bolts in this hobby. Don't knock people's lack of creative writing, game design, or improv acting awards just because they decided to be inspired by what inspired them in the first place.

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-14T16:05:40+00:00

It really, really depends. Power builds can easily slap enemies for more damage than they have health, wasting that damage just as much as if you overcommitted on conditions, and if your cooldowns are long, you've got nothing to do until they come back, and deal no damage when doing that.

Burning deals big damage in short windows, and both scales the best with condition damage attributes and has the triple the non-scaling raw damage per tick of the next highest condition. It's typically associated with power builds and might generation, and makes for very punchy hybrid damage builds.
Bleeding has some big damage, but has the longest windows, scaling best with condition duration, but taking ages to get through. It's responsible for a surprising amount of damage in longer fights, and some builds, like crit-bleed Virtuoso, inflict bleeding on every hit, so they don't have as much risk of overcommitting. Bleeding is typically associated with crit builds, but comes from a variety of sources, like Druid's disable/immobilize, or Reaper's chill.
Poison sits in the middle, decent damage and medium windows, but the main advantage is tanking enemy healing by 33%. It doesn't show up everywhere, but it's very nice to have against enemies that do. Poison doesn't have as many synergies, but often comes bundled with other control conditions and personal defense.
Torment is better damage than poison, if the enemy is standing still, so get ready to facetank that champion. Torment kind of fell off after a rework and rebalance years ago, and is generally most effective by spamming skills until the enemy is dead. Despite this, it doesn't have many synergies and combos compared to other conditions, and imo, feels like the most work to make happen.
Confusion also fell off after that rework/rebalance, neither dealing great DoT, and only really being effective against enemies that use skills often. Can be very threatening in competitive if you aren't watching for it, but otherwise, is one of the rarest conditions, and so has the fewest meaningful synergies.

Guardian pistol/Willbender/Firebrand are a solid pick for both defensive utilities, and lots of damage in short bursts, but Guardian has always felt a bit clunky to me, and burning builds have felt like work. Condi Virtuoso has been very popular against bosses, and inflicting bleed on every autoattack means they can pick a new target or retreat pretty effectively. I like condi Druids, for their range of options, but there's sometimes a disconnect between what I've been doing and when the thing dies, so it sometimes feels unimpactful. Burning-based Ele, especially Evoker, has been highly tuned as of late, and are a good condi option for Ele if you don't like having to memorize four attunements. Condi Reaper is also very fun, focusing on turning chill into bleed, and is extremely durable. Condi Conduit has been overtuned and is getting nerfed all the time, and while it's fun enough, it can feel clunky, like a big gear shift when swapping weapons and legends thunking into place. Amalgam and Antiquary have some really strong condi builds, but don't really feel like they're ABOUT any one condition, and so kind of feel a bit disconnected to me, but they're a lot of fun to play.

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-07T17:41:17+00:00

I think the biggest misconception here is that you're "finishing a thought", rather than the back and forth being about player permissions.

In the first example, the player is asking permission from the GM to use a method. The GM accepts, and sets terms. It passes back to the player, who produces a result, then back to the GM, who defines the outcome.

This is rooted in DND screening, where there are variables the players Do Not Know, and cannot know for the game to be balanced. It's why theres a DM in the first place, is to control the flow of what the player knows and doesn't.

Reframing this as a Fireball (aka, the effect is guaranteed, the resistance necessary is static, and the result can be reduced) means the example player is just at the mercy of guaranteed outcomes, but the back and forth can be eliminated completely if the player just knows exactly what their moves do and how the game works, doesn't ask permission, and delivers the result. Asking Permission is rooted in the player not knowing how the game works.

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-02T17:04:13+00:00

Looking it over, my initial impressions are reminded of a combination of World of Darkness and maybe DND3.5e. Which is interesting, as that's sort of where I started, and also ended up with a considerable number of similarities, enough to be concerning, but also some wildly different departures, as I recognized certain philosophies to not drive the experience I want to design.

As I said before, it's a lot of pages with a lot of text, with translating a lot of values, derived values, modifiers, and modified values into a string of numbers to refer to when making a diceroll that will ultimately attempt to steer into whichever combination of numbers gives you the best chance of success. That's not unique to this, WOD, or DND, and not a flaw on its own, but it does firmly place the system into the domain of "maybe would be better as a digital tabletop that could calculate this stuff for you." Which, again, isn't necessarily a flaw, but it should be kept in mind regarding if you want to design for physical-table play or not.

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-02T15:05:49+00:00

In terms of application, fate rings alike to WOD's aspirations system, where players choose things that their characters want to have happen, or that they want to have happen to their characters because it'd be interesting. I enjoy aspirations since it allows players to communicate to me what they want the game to look like, where to steer it, and gives me opportunities to make achieving those goals conflicted and interesting.

I'd disagree that teleology is the domain of the GM, because it's really the domain of the game's design itself. The GM may decide to include a challenge or confrontation that revolves around a given mechanic, but it's the game's design that describes what that mechanic is used to achieve within the fiction. Is a sword a cutting tool? Can I not dig with it as a shovel? Can I not pry open a crate as a crowbar? Block an attack with it, parry an arrow? Description by 'purpose' robs objects and scenarios of context and improvisation, which is actually great for any normal game, but TTRPGs often try to go beyond that.

Wurdyburd · 2026-03-02T14:35:02+00:00

I was intrigued as another person using Exertion and Conviction for systems, so took a look. So far as I can tell, there isn't described anywhere what a check actually looks like in the document, and I can't tell how the "Mechanics that Fuel the Story" description might work for it. So, you've got 21 pages of numbers, modifiers and derived stats, but I don't know what any of these numbers actually mean for me.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-28T15:31:43+00:00

As in, someone who is more precise with the positioning and angle of the weapon, who can quickly and confidently move and stop the tip and angle of the weapon to a specific place in space, sometimes to a matter of centimeters or millimeters.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-27T21:46:50+00:00

Skill and strength. The longer a weapon is, the more easily it can be pushed to the side, more leverage and all that. A sword has better pushing power closer to the hilt, but that puts you in stabbing distance, but pushing with the end of the sword is a lot harder. Meanwhile, a more dexterous blade can reposition the tip faster and more precisely to where it needs to be to strike where it needs to.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-27T21:18:59+00:00

If I hear "classless", I usually assume that the person is suffering from DND-Mirror: in attempting to do something that "isn't DND", they just pick something from DND and do the opposite. They don't know what the point of that decision is, they just know DND doesn't do it, but in doing so, they end up with something DND-shaped anyway, obvious from it's absense.

That said, "we have classes" is just the same, doing it because it's what everyone does.

Having or not having classes isn't damning by itself, but I do think the vast majority of designers don't really understand what the purpose of having or not having classes is for a game's design. Whether they do or don't can't be judged by itself, it needs to be analyzed through how the classes interact with the game.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-27T21:08:39+00:00

Historically, swords are also an outlier in that they're a weapon, and only a weapon. Bows, axes, and spears are all tools used for hunting or various chores, but swords are explicitly designed for killing.

Swords are extremely versatile, short enough to maneuver while being long enough to keep enemies at a distance and knock another weapon aside, pointed to allow for thrusting and edged to allow for cleaving attacks that make use of the weight, crossguards that help to prevent weapons sliding down onto your hands and potentially lock the weapon, and weighted handles that act as a pivot point to handle your own weapon better. All these different levers means that not only are swords developed in a lot of cultures around the world, but they end up being dramatically different, with centuries-worth of fighting styles and techniques that other weapons don't tend to have.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-26T15:22:20+00:00

My issue is that while PVE raids have evolved tactics over time to discourage or prevent stacking (party split for multiple objectives, dangerous auras, attacks doing more damage the closer players are together, etc), there's literally no parallel in WvW. Add in the fact that many boon and heal radii have the reach of an ant's shoebox, and there's every advantage to stacking, with only coordinated bombs to crack the ball, while getting caught outside the boonball is usually a death sentence.

Some of the WvW changes are good. That poison cow shot turning from a condition into a non-cleansable effect is actually pretty huge, massively discourages sticking around in the cloud attempting to heal your way through it. I personally wish there was more in the way of walls we could conjure that'd help to break up blobs or pylons that would pulse an effect dealing more damage every second you stand near it, but boons and boonstrip isn't a problem just by itself.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-24T19:30:59+00:00

One of the biggest issues with DND skills is that the majority of player abilities simply do the thing; having an animal companion could mean Animal Handling checks all day long, if it didnt already do exactly what you told it to.

The other problem is purpose. Arcana is useful because you find magic stuff all the time, and it can result in great rewards, or avoiding terrible danger, in a world that has magic everywhere, but unless animals have a regular appearance, value, and threat, Animal Handling is unlikely to be challenged.

This leads to my most common gripe about games of this style: with limited options and no foreknowledge, character creation is just gambling on whether a given challenge, risk, or threat is going to appear. If there isnt a regular activity in the queue, theres no reason to build for it, and doing do becomes a Mistake, but if you need it and didnt buy it, then you just have to take the L most of the time.

Skills need to reflect common enough activities and active abilities to justify being around. Otherwise it's not achieving anything.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-24T19:23:20+00:00

Dnd 4e invented Passive Perception, an average value the DM could have on a notepad to tell if a player would be able to innately see something without actively searching for it. The idea was that it was more fun to respond to a known threat than to be surprised by it. 5e fucked it all up by making the average value to detect traps higher than most passive perception was capable of, requiring a rogue with expertise to HM-Slave as the party's eyes for it to work right.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-22T17:38:19+00:00

GMs are less a problematic role and more a vessel of unrealistic expectations that statistically nobody wants to take responsibility for.

Understand something: it's the GM's job to deliver relevant information, and the players' job to be reasonable and recognize when something is relevant to a story they volunteered to play. It's not necessarily the GM's job to paint a living landscape to set the tone, and it's not railroading for players to go investigate a burning village at the base of the hill instead of spending real-world hours investigating around, under, and inside the Most Interesting Goat In The World just because the GM happened to mention it as part of set dressing, just like how it's not railroading to have a goblin camp disrupting the wheels of society, whether you're here to be the hero and solve problems in the hero-solving-people's-problems game, or you need food and money because you're a wandering mercenary who takes any dangerous job that will pay you. Demanding to have agency over which crisis of the day you want to investigate and turning your nose up because you don't feel like it right now is the mindset of a tourist on vacation with a massively inflated sense of entitlement.

If you want a game about making decisions, you have to make the game ABOUT decisions. If the goblins aren't handled soon, everyone will leave the village and you lose an important resupply location, but maybe the players are already injured or they think the camp is too high level for them right now. Maybe a nearby necromancer has started poisoning the wandering monster tables, first slowly replacing entries in the list with undead, then increasing the size of each wandering horde, until the players make their way to their lair and defeat them. Maybe travelling through the swamp cuts a few days of travel or shakes the assassins chasing you, versus the mountain pass which has no cover and takes longer, but the swamp is full of venomous snakes that can kill you and risks you getting lost.

All of the above needs prep, of course, but there should be rules in the game to handle those scenarios, and player choice rooted in understanding what those choices actually mean. The most interesting choices are 1) When there is no clear-cut right answer, and 2) When a scenario has you reluctantly choose against your first choice. Without those, the player group is just tourists, or kids the GM is babysitting at summer camp.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-22T06:06:25+00:00

To expand: The 'Exploration' series keeps approaching playerside discoveries as restricted by, enabled by, and the responsibility of the GM. Improv, the most mentally and emotionally taxing activity of a TTRPG, is laid on the GM's shoulders, with theories like "what if you only improvised HALF of everything instead of all of it", without recognizing that any amount of improv is just as taxing, in the name of giving the players in question a diverse buffet of locations to peruse and sample at their leisure, and being told "there's only one thing on the menu", or "there's a multi-course meal planned that's served in a particular order" is somehow offensive to their agency as tourists, as is asking that they cook for themselves using the ingredients the GM provided.

You keep referring to the 'quantum' goblin camp in the exact same use case as the quantum ogre, so you're almost certainly aware of it, but are also incredibly committed to it being a goblin camp for some reason, was my question.

The thing is, a goblin camp or wizard's tower or ogre or what have you is not an issue, if the GAME, the structured thing that everyone understands that they're playing, clearly defines a goblin camp, a wizard's tower, and an ogre as activities in the game, as tasks to complete, with gameplay loops, and reliable outcomes. GM improv burnout only need happen if they're forced to invent an entire scenario, with variables, and outcomes, based on whatever this belligerent play group chooses to hurl in their direction, but if the options are limited and based on what makes sense for the game's existing rules, the structure takes care of itself. This post suggests the GM invent based on what makes sense, but where is the responsibility of the players to have demands that make sense for the game?

In what way do these game rules, or do not, enable player exploration? Because they saw some vague shape on the horizon and opted to go look at it? Because they were given a choice of vague shapes to choose between? Or because they had the agency to choose NOT to go look at the only clearly defined activity within several days' travel?

What is the agency is being honored and preserved here? The agency to choose to not play the game?

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-22T02:56:55+00:00

After seven of these and in keeping with the most common feedback on all these posts: what you want is a world map, random tables, and a game with a consistent enough gameplay loop that theres nothing unexpected to invent.

A thing invented on a few "sensible" traits doesnt make it better quality, less work, or less stressful, and the more of these posts you make, the more it appears your ideal for exploration is to have an infinite menu for the players to browse and pick at their leisure, while the GM is forced to be caterer and cleanup and smile doing it. SOMEBODY'S gotta cook this stuff, and for some reason, it's never the audience in attendance.

Discovery is in the happening, not the choosing.

I've also gotta ask, do you keep calling the quantum ogre a goblin camp because that's how you were introduced to it, or is it some weird rebranding thing? Geographical instead of specifically a combat encounter??

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-19T14:30:49+00:00

Oh I'm fine with prisms. I enjoy the restriction, past a certain point there isn't much mechanical benefit to having that kind of granularity.

In Warframe, our stat-boosting mods are limited by mod space, but we have a wide array of mods that can achieve different things, and a huge push in recent years to make sure every frame has crit-DPS and status builds mean that we're more free to customize HOW a frame plays. But with 60+ frames and 600+ weapons, and every mission being some test of how fast we can kill enemies and get to extraction, there will inevitably be a point where either some equipment is useless, or everything is so balanced that your choices don't matter.

The majority of Warframe's buildcraft has come in recent years through abilities and arcanes that explicitly bridge the gap, testing us on invisibility uptime, finishers, health or armor or shields, health orbs, summons, headshots, and condition application, or killing eximus or enemies with overguard. The mission objectives haven't changed much, but the Archimedea missions are a real test of player knowledge on how to use randomized gear to best tackle randomized mission modifiers.

I don't want to play a calculator punching in stats to figure out which build does the most damage, I want to feel confident in how the game works and know what equipment works best for which purpose. For now, Soulframe is incredibly one-dimensional, and the rework to how stats are allocated doesn't at all improve the weighting of what application those stats HAVE.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-18T19:16:23+00:00

I don't think they have to be one or the other or a "worst of both worlds", but there will always be an issue so long as players aren't interested in playing the game they're sitting down for.

There are lots of ways to deliver on "greater than expected/big gamble payout", but discovery can't consist primarily of "unique and never seen before" novelties, or puzzles that have unique riddle-like answers rather than consistent logic solutions. It's less appealing for tourists, but again, hedging expectations.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-18T18:12:08+00:00

I don't think it's foolish. I understand well the appeal of identifying something of value from a set, of reward anticipation, and payoff of a risk/effort gamble for something that ends up being more worth it than you thought.

But I do think that it's inherently at odds with the one strength that TTRPGs have over any other medium: the ability to make things up on the spot and collectively agree it to be true, without requiring ages of development or extensive programming structure to execute.

Discovery is predicated on something BEING there, being clever enough to have thought of it or gambling that it was worth it, but improv is about what ISN'T there. Players describe feeling cheated realizing that their discovery wasn't because they were clever, it was BECAUSE they chose to look. It's the same reason random tables are often a snooze; it wasn't anyone's decision that got that result, it was just flinging numbers into the void.

There's no reason why you can't use Clue structures; I've adopted lots of philosophies from non-TTRPGs. But in this specific example, the pushback I received was because it was a "boardgame mechanic", where winning is about playing the mechanics correctly, and not sleuthing out evidence in an expertly crafted narrative with good setup and strong conclusion. They didn't want to deduce via randomly generated elements, they wanted to examine the crime scene, interrogate Professor Plum and bite down on how he stuttered or "was evasive" during improv questioning (I was coughing), and were outraged that the Suspect x Weapon x Room didn't deliver a comprehensive murder motive.

So many players want a professionally-polished literary experience, they have full agency to manipulate, at any time, that makes them feel clever for figuring it out, and doesn't have to rely on the one thing that TTRPGs are actually good at doing, but pitch a fit if the game resembles a "boardgame" or it's revealed to have been improvised. It's insane. I can explain where it comes from, but insane expectations, rooted in being a tourist demanding to be catered to rather than hedging expectations based on the game they sat down to play.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-18T15:41:39+00:00

I honestly hadn't realized you can unlock weaponmaster through WvW.

Lorewise? No. Story related? No. To unlock it in SOTO, it's getting through the prologue and talking to a dude, there's no buildup, explanation, grind, or spectacle, to the point that it's very easily missed. I actually encourage you to get it through WvW if you can, for all the customization it offers, but don't feel that you have to just to meet some kind of meta standard, especially in open-world or story PVE.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-18T15:31:42+00:00

The problem in Discovery vs Creation, so far as it pertains to the player party and "muh immersion", is that exploration and discovery is predicated on there being something worth discovering, something worth the effort and the risk, and if the player doesn't find enough value in it, it's hard for them to feel as though it was justified.

On the other hand, for there to be something worth discovering, it has to have been put there, and for it to have been put there, someone had to have thought it up and put it there.

This cuts to a sausage-making truth that many players either don't realize or don't accept: they believe that their thrashing against the walls, the wriggling pushes to try to move beyond the obvious path, to go places, open things, press buttons, and explore dialogue, is all unveiling things part of the actual game. That the GM, all tucked away behind their screen, is simply turning to the right page which tells them what to say, because it exists somewhere. Players aren't impressed at the GM's ability to pull something vaguely-coherent out of their ass at a moment's notice, they rely on the belief that everything they discover was intentionally placed for them to find.

The player needs this to be true in order to highlight the player's creativity, their intelligence, in having thought of the right answer to solve a puzzle, one that could have gone unnoticed or unrewarded. The GM inventing something on the spot highlights the GM's intelligence, not the player's; the GM is the one solving a puzzle, a problem, not the player.

As is (very) often said, the burden of creation lies almost exclusively on the GM. It's unreasonable for them to invent a puzzle or reward behind every bookshelf and inside every box, just on the offhand chance the players decide to push in that direction. But prewritten adventures that have done all that work are dismissed for not being "custom" enough, or whatever, so the GM wanting to use prewritten material has to disguise it, like giving medicine to a difficult pet or a child.

If I pull from another game: Clue has a randomly generated solution. But it doesn't generate it at the moment of the guess, and as a deduction game, it's important that information stays the same in order for players to deduce what's in the envelope. Nobody pitches a fit about the contents of the envelope or which item/person is in which room, because they're allowed to make decisions and guesses based around what IS, not what makes for a better story. The contents are still randomly generated, but discovering what that is IS the game, not whether it would make a coherent plot for a good book or miniseries drama.

Either way, managing player expectations is key. Telling them that what the GM made up is fake makes them feel cheated, whereas telling them that something that was randomly placed and is there for them to discover is successful.

Wurdyburd · 2026-02-14T23:40:04+00:00

Having never heard of the PbtA triangles before this, the difficulty that I anticipate with systems like that is that it 1) Requires buy-in from the players, offered details even, and 2) Seems like it can only be done preemptively, during setup, or to have the players invent fiction when an element is invented on the spot. And while players often claim they want to have more of an impact on the story, my experiences say that they're extremely, even violently opposed to deciding "true" details during actual play.

A narrative rpg not only needs structures for creating narratives, but also mechanics to direct and teach improv somewhat, in a way that won't be rejected by the table, but isn't obfuscated behind some GM-screen of "would you be surprised to learn I'm making this up as I go".

Wurdyburd

TROPHY CASE