Invention is a word that most people understand. Inventing is the process of creating something new, and thanks to the patent office we even have broadly accepted standards for what constitutes an invention (novel, unique, non-obvious). Innovation is a bit more difficult to put a finger on, in no small part due to its continual dilution as a popular buzzword. Broadly, though, innovation is the combination of invention and value creation, the ability to make new things useful. I’ve actually talked about the invention/innovation dichotomy before, when I opined on how Most Games Don’t Matter. Indeed, a lot of the gap between invention and innovation in the tabletop RPG world is the gap between the hundreds if not thousands of games that come to market and those which actually make a market impact. That said, I don’t need to retread the grounds of how oversaturated the RPG market is. I want to discuss the innovation that does occur and what it actually means to bring that innovation to market.

Many games have brought innovation into the hobby at varying degrees of scale. Mechanical innovation started almost immediately after D&D was released; Traveller invented the lifepath while RuneQuest brought percentile mechanics into play, both before 1980. In terms of play culture innovation, Vampire: the Masquerade completely shifted the paradigm. By combining both, PbtA created another paradigm shift by cementing RPG theory into a mechanically rich worked example. Innovations aren’t just restricted to entire systems, though; Advantage and Disadvantage, a fundamental upgrade in the modifier game for D&D 5e, has its origins in the game Over the Edge, designed 22 years earlier.

While my earlier discussion of invention and innovation was intended to frame the literal deluge of TTRPGs being developed, today I want to discuss a little more about how these innovations actually reach through to the mainstream. Innovation has slowed in the TTRPG world, and to be clear that’s to be expected; the number of rulesets, approaches, and mechanics which already exist is vast compared to 1979 or 1980, and that means that for a whole bunch of issues that players have with their game of choice a solution already exists somewhere. While it’s not necessarily a bad thing that the games space is maturing, I would argue that it’s settling into a much smaller normal than it needs to. When we look for future TTRPG innovations, we should be looking for opportunities to blow the hobby wide open and attract an entirely new audience of players.

Innovation in the Hobby

When you’re looking at innovation in the RPG hobby you can either take a narrow view or broad one. The narrow view is one that looks strictly at mechanics, at how the actual games we play have evolved and in that way attracted new audiences and created new ways to play. The broad view is one that looks at everything surrounding the RPG, all possible changes around play culture, game dissemination, and ancillary activities which have changed and expanded the hobby’s audience. Anyone with a passing familiarity of the hobby’s recent history knows what I’m talking about when I’m saying ‘the broad view’, and it’s somewhat self-evident that those exogenous developments are, at least recently, the biggest and most significant changes in the TTRPG hobby. So please humor me a bit as I look at the narrow view first.

As someone who really enjoys pulling apart systems and mechanics, likes doing statistical analyses and assessing rules for intentionality, the question of how rules will change the RPG hobby is a painful one. Because while rules have driven changes in the hobby, driven expansion of the hobby, my frank assessment is that they never will again. Let me be clear what this means. This does not mean that how games and rulesets are designed will not change or improve, nor does it mean that new rules won’t be necessary to enable new modes of play. What I mean is that simply writing new mechanics and new ways of doing things will never change the face of the hobby again, at least not without some equally responsible outside shock.

There are, roughly speaking, two objectives built into RPG rules. Those two objectives are to play, and to tell stories. Playing comes in the form of providing complexity and challenge, while telling stories comes in the form of providing narrative agents, like characters, setting, and conflict. Where some theoretical frameworks tend to fall apart is in thinking that given mechanics are specifically aimed at one or the other. GURPS and other simulation-driven games are about providing mechanics in service of both objectives, both making an engine that serves as a backdrop for interesting challenges as well as an engine that provides an internally consistent world that will react in a narratively consistent way. All roleplaying games serve these dual objectives, even if serving that objective is done by offering few if any mechanics and leaving the story-telling or challenge-framing completely at the feet of the players. When I say rules will never drive an expansion of the hobby again, it’s built on the assumption that in the first fifty years of RPGs we’ve been able to at least read the assignment and understand what the approaches are to fulfill these objectives. “Trad” ostensibly is built around more focus on challenge/play rules, “storygaming” is built around more focus on story/narrative rules, and “OSR” is built around economy of rules and placing both the challenge aspect and the narrative aspect at the feet of the GM (or the module writer who talks the most highly of himself, gendering fully intended). Then, for those who want more mechanics for both challenge and narrative, there’s Burning Wheel.

While the Trad/Storygame/OSR trichotomy is as shaky as GNS (if not more so), it still serves to prove my point: Nobody is going to invent a new way of using dice that will suddenly change the way we play games. Nothing in the structure of an RPG is going to suddenly burst forth into a completely new way of playing. Understanding that board games already have XP mechanics and that LARP has existed for either as long or longer than tabletop RPGs, we’re not going to see a mechanically-driven innovation in the RPG space. As if to drive this point home, the biggest innovations we have seen recently have not only had nothing to do with the games being played but have served to send people enthusiastically into the grips of RPGs circa 1974.

I am aware that D&D 5e doesn’t exactly play like the original, but when you’re considering the impact of Actual Play, so much of what’s drawn people in to shows like Dimension 20 and Critical Role is that the fiction and procedures are built on tropes that people understand. I’m not literally talking about D&D-brand fantasy settings, either: The cultural weight of natural 20s and natural 1s makes the flow of the game easier to understand, and certainly Dimension 20 in particular has taken advantage of that even as they walk away from the moribund fantasy settings that we’ve all been seeing…well, for the last fifty years. And while that can be good or bad, or whatever you think about D&D’s cultural position, it still makes it clear that when it comes to the growth of the hobby and its influence, rules absolutely do not matter. It does make me wish for a different next wave of gamers, though; while rules don’t matter for getting drawn into a show or podcast, they do matter at the table, and the gatekeeping against new players coming from Actual Play is very real.

Innovation in the Hobby’s Future

So what will be the next sea change? Every hobby innovation which has an outsized impact is one which reduces friction. In poker, moving online brought the game to thousands of new players. In RPGs, new games with focused rules reduced the friction of bringing your favorite genres to the table. Closer to the present, Actual Play removed much of the friction of being able to see and engage with a gaming table, either as audience member or participant. The next major innovation is going to similarly remove more friction.

I’ll tell you what isn’t the next major innovation: Virtual Tabletops. Now, I have no quarrel with VTTs, but my broad experience is that they make the game harder, not easier, to run. While the featureset of something like Roll20 is huge, actually using Roll20 requires either moving up a learning curve (a steep one for a hobby that doesn’t require it) and then putting in more effort on the front end than just writing things down on graph paper. In a way, VTTs fit into the broader ecosystem in the same way as games like GURPS: they let you do more if you’re interested in going further. This ends up being a limitation of most plans to use more technology in TTRPGs; you either fail to actually remove friction and make play easier, or you digitize things too much and, instead of disrupting the roleplaying game, reinvent the video game.

Disruptive innovation comes from letting you do things that weren’t even on the table, and ultimately that’s why doing your game prep on a computer and fancier looking will never be disruptive. For disruption we’d need to move in the opposite direction; we’d literally need to make games simpler than scribbling on pieces of paper and rolling dice. That’s probably not going to happen, at least not literally, but there are other places where we can simplify and remove friction that could very well change the game (sorry). Consider solo roleplaying. While solo play has existed pretty much since the beginning, solo-specific games and rules have gained a lot of popularity this decade, and they do represent an innovation worth talking about. The friction a solo RPG removes is the friction of finding a group, and that’s huge for a lot of people. One reason that they haven’t been disruptive is that a solo TTRPG experience ends up competing with many other solo activities and not providing some of the elements which are unique to the RPG experience when conducted with a typical group. Still, the friction of forming such a group is worth noting, and solo games satisfy the need to remove it.

Thanks to this concept of ‘removing friction’ I’ve identified the next disruptive innovation in TTRPGs, and it’s one that may seem so obvious that you’ll think I’m joking when I say it. If we’re to see a huge influx of new players as the result of a new RPG innovation, that innovation will be the one that solves scheduling. I’m not kidding. Actual Play is exploding, solo RPGs are ascendant, and some of the biggest video game releases of the last few years are straight-up RPGs (the bestselling game of 2024 so far, Helldivers 2, is even built around an ongoing campaign). If something came about to make a TTRPG even slightly easier to put together compared to passive media, video games, or playing with yourself, then more people would do it.

As scheduling is unironically one of the biggest obstacles to getting people to play games, play more games, and try new games, it’s more than likely that social innovation will be a factor in the future of RPGs, and this is both exciting and hard to predict. It is truly remarkable how young some social phenomena are; American football in the way we currently understand it (in terms of being primarily consumed on TV instead of live matches) dates back to the 1960s, just a bit older than TTRPGs themselves. A hell of a lot can change in 60 years (and while I don’t think TTRPGs will supplant football, I can dream). We’ve seen a significant shift in the sophistication and ubiquity of videoconferencing in a way that has begun to remove barriers to remote gaming. There are board game cafes which serve to begin to bring tabletop gaming into more social environments (though RPGs are still less popular in these environments for aforementioned scheduling reasons). And, of course, there are the potential changes that we can’t even anticipate. When you combine how young the average gamer is with how recently this current wave started, the possibilities become difficult to fully comprehend.

Tabletop RPGs themselves are just a particularly recent innovation in the broader world of imaginative play. There will always continue to be new games, new and interesting rules, new genres, and yes, new systems. And while we will continue to innovate, to make the hobby more accessible and invite more people in, the biggest disruption that we seek will likely be one that continues in slow motion for some time. Role-playing games serve to disrupt the taboo against adults using their imaginations, against “flights of fancy”, against playing pretend. What every RPG history has shown us is that the base creative impulses that we seek to feed when playing games have always existed; Kieron Gillen and Jon Peterson have both illustrated the throughline from the paracosms of the Bronte sisters to the games we play today. While fantastic works have continued to become more popular, the tabletop roleplaying game will continue to be a platonic ideal for helping all of us unlock our imaginations. In a truly incredible world we may even be able to disrupt the RPG itself, and see our flights of fancy made manifest in exactly the way we choose. Only time will tell.

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