"Autonomous" TTRPG design
Posted 10/7/2024
disclaimer: i just started spitting up some nonsense about this idea on my private twitter and then realized I should probably make it a blog post instead and so I might just be talking out of my ass and I've not actually done any "real" research into the idea and i'm just speaking entirely theoretically. so i'll probably find someone who spoke about this smarter and better and contradicting me completely later. but that's fine.
if i said "autonomous ttrpg systems" by sheer definition you probably would understand what I'm saying but also I don't think that anyone would want to really use the term to describe any part of their design. Like I would consider solo ttrpgs to fall under the idea of "autonomous design" where the ttrpg text or game materials facilitate the game for the player in lieu of a game master, however it feels like an implicit aspect of the genre but not something that someone would actually specifically state as a part of their design.
non-solo ttrpgs feel like (at least in public consciousness) antithetical to autonomous design, regardless if they they are made with GMs in mind or are GM-less. The GM or all players are responsible for narration, rules arbitration, decision making, plot development, etc. Basically, the rules of any of these games become dependent on who is leading it, whether to follow them or to let the moment go for a better story beat or experience, what have you. GM-less games seem to fall less into the autonomous realm since they are more based around player autonomy, what someone decides to do with the story or move the story along in the ways that are available to them are through their direct control, not dictated by some other system.
and before I get too far here, a direct comparison I want to make is that to video games. Video games are autonomous systems, where the game itself arbitrates the rules and decides what happens next to the player. The difference between interacting with a GM and a video game is if the rules demand you can either go left or right, the systems of the video game will limit your options to those two choices, while sitting across from a GM might allow for the choice to be north, south, or something else entirely and the GM can decide if that is a valid action to take. Of course one can always argue that "not choosing" in the way of a video game is also a choice but that means not playing the game, thus not progressing the story forward. in a ttrpg, there is technically always a route forward, but that is through a human being, not a computer program. (im not bringing up AI/AI quests in games because I think that it's bullshit and the idea of an "infinite" number of ways to interact with a game is antithetical to game design as a whole. fucking quote me on that.)
in dungeons and dragons, there are technically autonomous systems however. Rather than the DM having to come up with what an NPC or monster does on the fly, every creature comes with a statblock. Each statblock says what this creature can do and sometimes will include what a creature does in specific circumstances.
I'll use this statblock for the octopus for an example on that, under it's reactions it squirts some ink in the area if a creature ends its turn near it. The GM can just check the statblock, realize a trigger happened, and execute the result.
so then what if there was entirely a game of just "reaction" type things that can happen? It would require a huge book and a huge amount of page turning for each specific creature, and even then there would be a limit on how many things a ttrpg designer could feasibly predict that a player would do in any given situation. That's what ttrpgs are all about!
so then how would you design an "autonomous" system in a ttrpg? you would have to take a lot of moves and inspiration from video game design rather than ttrpg design: limit the amount of choices someone could make, limit the level of interaction with objects, limit what the game is even about.
could that not just be an OSR perhaps then? I've been taking a lot of inspiration from OSR design as of late and I've read the books but not yet played "Four Against Darkness" by Andrea Sfiligoi and it's a solo-capable GMless ttrpg where the book and enemy statblocks arbitrate what happens, but that comes at the cost of any narrative influence, limiting what you're doing to either dungeon delving or dying in a dungeon, and instead the focus is on the mechanical interaction of what you're doing rather than "why" you're doing it.
i dunno. i've been fooling around with some ideas. i had a an OSR inspired ttrpg that i decided to shelve because the systems kind of got too out of control and thinking about this has me thinking of ways i could improve that game and try to introduce something autonomous into its mechanics to support GM-less play. because let me be real, as a chronic GM, i want to be able to play the game too sometimes but i'm the only one that bothers to read the rules :v
anyway, if you have any thoughts about this, want to yell at me for saying something incorrect, or want to send me some resources toward this fact, please send me an email at orchidrabbitrr@gmail.com. i'd love to hear what other people think of this and if its something worth trying to pursue or something to be warned against doing lol.
thanks for reading~!