Winning at D&D

How do we design for games you can't win?

When designing a game, you need to have a clear idea of your baseline play experience. In D&D 5e combat, you expect a fight to last three rounds. Call of Cthulhu expects you to hear about a mysterious event, uncover its connection to the Cthulhu mythos, and foil the mythos, likely at the cost of a few characters’ lives.

In traditional game design, you need to understand how that baseline varies. What does good play look like? What about bad play? What factors affect the outcome?

In a traditional game, good play typically means victory. A better played game might yield a larger margin of victory. Play poorly, and you lose.

The most enjoyable games are between evenly matched opponents and bounce back and forth in a tight contest. The very last moments of the game decide the outcome, and everyone wants to play again.

It’s impossible to design a game where that always happens, but a good game design produces it often enough that players are willing to stick to it.

So what does that mean for TTRPGs?

Campaign-based TTRPGs struggle with these concepts. Does poor play mean a TPK? Does good play turn the climactic battle against the villain into a laugher? How does genre affect this? I’ve played plenty of Call of Cthulhu games where the characters all died and we had a great time. I’ve played many sessions of D&D where the players romped over the monsters, and we were all bored to tears.

We need to look at the question from a different angle. There are plenty of activities that don’t involve winning or losing. We don’t “win” at painting, writing, or reading, but groups gather to share that activity. We don’t win conversations (unless we’re sociopaths), but we have good and bad ones. We even talk about having a hard talk, or trying to read a difficult book, but if I manage to slog through Gravity’s Rainbow I don’t brag about defeating Thomas Pynchon.

I don’t think TTRPGs are games in the traditional sense. We play them in the same way that we play with a toy or play with an idea, but we don’t play them to overcome obstacles and win.

If that is true, then why do we have rules?

TTRPG rules serve two purposes.

First, they create a shared language that allows the participants to talk about the imaginary, shared space they play in and the characters they assume. The form of TTRPGs casts players as characters who, in the fictional reality, have actionable identities. The gunslinger character is the fastest gun in town. The suave spy can talk her way out of anything. Seeing Cthulhu emerge from R’lyeh snaps your psyche in half. The rules of play support those expectations by rooting them outside of in-session player agency.

Second, they help ensure that play at the table proceeds smoothly and fairly. Everyone gets a chance to play. The dice provide randomness at a level that suits the group’s preferences. The conversation around the table flows and builds up momentum in the appropriate moments.

That means that a good TTRPG rules set supports those elements. It provides a clear, easy-to-use shared language. It offers methods of play that ensure equitable opportunities to speak and be heard.

To design a TTRPG is to design a language and the conversational format within which that language exists. You’re not building a game. You’re building a communication system.