Moreau Vazh wrote an excellent post on their blog Taskerland, entitled “System Matters, Explicit Mechanics Less So”. Framing the debate on rules density historically, the post points out that gaming groups end up behaving in patterns similarly seen in many groups of people who have come together to do something creative. Of course, given that the norms of roleplaying are a great deal younger than, say, the social conventions of playing music in a group (an activity which is highly delineated and has many, many titles associated with said groups), there’s still a lot of push and pull in terms of figuring out how everyone actually wants to roleplay. Many of the norms we do have were developed either from prior art (often wargames) or came up simply because they were written into D&D back in 1974 (or perhaps a few years later, depending on the actual rule). Either way, these norms are still evolving, and as Vazh correctly points out, the hobby spends way more time agonizing over mechanics than attempting to understand the social dynamics which lead to game preferences and styles of play. And this leads to the core thesis of the Taskerland post, that ‘system’ is so wrapped up in the social norms and conflict resolution approaches of a group that the way a group plays games often transcends mechanics.

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This is finally a thesis to the whole ‘system matters’ discourse that fully lands for me. When I consider my long-running gaming group and how we play, those approaches transcend the game we’re playing. If anything has actually changed the group’s mode of play, it has been time; over twenty years we have both refined personal preferences around things like genre and mechanical engagement but also grown and matured as people and are able to better articulate what we want to contribute to an ongoing game. Now, there are still things that mechanics bring to the table, but this does mean that rules density is a preference which meshes with the rest of how a group wants to operate. It also means that there is a degree of analytical hazard in, say, playing a game to review it and not understanding how your group’s innate preferences color your experience. Anyway.

The massive impact of social dynamics on how we play games also explains why the “first RPG”, D&D, has retained a significant amount of market and mindshare. When you consider how much framing the game gives to players regarding what kind of character they’ll have, what kind of story will be told, and what will happen along the way, it begins to make sense why so many people stay within that schema. And even if you consider the broader hobby, the norm-setting done by D&D is even more pervasive; as much as it was an artifact of wargames, the fact that the vast majority of RPGs have one GM and then a group of multiple players is something that was barely questioned in the mainstream hobby for at least two decades (and then it was another two decades before there was more popularity for the ‘exceptions that proved the rule’ like Ars Magica).

Whether you’re playing D&D or not, this means that understanding if a game will work for your group must be couched in understanding your group. Even the friction created by a ponderous ruleset or poorly laid-out book will engage with preferences of the group, especially when weighing those issues against other merits of the game.

A good group, or a good game for a group

I feel the need to emphasize that differing preferences for conflict resolution don’t imply that, for example, lighter rulesets are for more ‘evolved’ groups; the Taskerland post does note an ideal of mutually constructing a fictive reality with no rules, but this ideal sits within the impossibility of essentially psychic understanding of each other’s fiction. As such, there are rules. We as people prefer different levels of structure and conflict support, and those preferences don’t have differing merit. Consider setting. There are games on the market that range from having a fully realized and concretely established setting to those where the setting is created from a few pre-existing touchstones. There is also a range of responsibilities for the setting creation and adjudication, from having none (it’s all in the book) to having it all fall on one person (typically the GM) to having it shared equally among all players.

I will say one driving factor for preferences is familiarity, and that can often override other, undiscovered preferences in favor of what one already understands. I personally had this experience introducing my group to Apocalypse World, where the familiarity of traditional RPGs not sharing authorial control with the players almost caused the first session to fall apart the moment I, well, shared authorial control with my players. This doesn’t mean my players preferred not having authorial control; if anything the experience with Apocalypse World and other PbtA games helped the group discover exactly what their preference was and then apply that to future games, be they PbtA or not.

And this is where you start to see the ‘system’ of my gaming group showing through; the specific mechanics of Apocalypse World were somewhat less important than the fact that the game document gave us (both me as the GM and my players) ‘permission’ to play in the way Apocalypse World wants to be played. And ultimately this is why I still vacillate on how important game mechanics are. On one hand, in my personal experience, the details of mechanics don’t fundamentally change how my group plays. While some games (like Electric Bastionland and Mothership) have induced at least one player to note that they prefer games with more mechanical support, the fact is that I now see the same rough approach to play and the same campaign structure settling into place every time any of us run a game, whether the system was Cyberpunk, Masks, Legend of the Five Rings, or even Burning Wheel.

On the other hand, every single group preference and dynamic was developed by playing tons of games and engaging with tons of different mechanics. I concluded my Burning Wheel game in the latter half of 2024, and even though my group originally started in 2005 there was still refinement and understanding of our gaming goals that came out of playing Burning Wheel. Additionally, there are games which, when melded with our group’s quirks and preferences, create transcendent experiences. We’ve discussed DIE at length, and last year we had a similarly astounding experience with Back Again From the Broken Land. Both of these games are procedure-heavy, and both games use structures that are atypical for traditional games. And while there’s nothing stopping you from taking those lessons to other games (I in fact used a modified version of DIE character creation to start our group’s most recent campaign in a completely different game), there are so many implied norms and forms to gaming that will stop you from discovering different ways to play or mechanics to engage with unless you go play a bunch of different games. Which, of course, means this discussion is now about D&D.

The implications of group dynamics on the dominance of D&D

Dungeons and Dragons is a narrow game. I’ve said it many times before, and it hasn’t gotten less true even as the game has evolved. That narrowness serves a purpose, though. When you consider what a D&D campaign ‘is’, you end up with a single core theme that runs through most groups and at least the last thirty years of D&D editions. Broadly, a game of D&D will involve playing heroes that consistently grow in power as they face threats which also grow in power (and often complexity) and in turn the heroes will eventually be tasked with saving the world, universe, or reality as we know it. Are there exceptions to this? Of course. But, when combined with the significant prescription in both mechanics and character creation, this broad schema enables any player to understand what it means to ‘play D&D’. This is, of course, powerful. I don’t intend to go full Joseph Campbell on ‘why’ the D&D story became the most popular, but in addition to having resonant theming, D&D was also first.

The consistency that modern D&D offers provides a layer of insurance and comfort to prospective players looking for groups. You of course don’t know if the players in a new group are going to play the way you want to play or be able to actually resolve conflicts like adults, but you do generally know that you’re going to play a hero, you’re going to gain experience points fighting monsters, and when you level up you need only to look in the book to know what abilities your hero gains next. Considering this from a ‘social insurance’ perspective, it suddenly makes a lot more sense that some D&D players get very upset by DMs doing things like disallowing certain races or classes. If the group hasn’t played together long enough to establish norms of play, the books are the norm of play, and some will see reducing their list of options as an unacceptable breach of that norm. As much as that is not how my group operates (and I probably wouldn’t last long in a group that did operate that way), it makes more sense to me now as a natural emphasis of rules providing a neutral basis for conflict resolution for those who don’t have enough experience working with each other to do it through another avenue.

A gaming group is a collection of people who have decided to seek imaginative synergy through rules and each other. Without wrong answers (for the most part) regarding what you dream up, getting people on the same page does take a bit of work. Most of RPG theory can be boiled down to asking if a rule or set of rules is helping or hindering the creation of that imaginative synergy, but we keep running into the fact that the ideas and motivations of the people actually doing it can have a much bigger impact than words on a page. I’m not usually one to interrogate a piece of writing through my own writing on the same topic, but I’ve found this consideration of the social ‘system’ put together by gaming groups to be both spot on and also a cogent explanation of something that I have felt but not been able to easily articulate. Of course, the focus on mechanics in most RPG discourse is because mechanics are a constant. After publication, the book is the book, and that’s a static object you can scrutinize and analyze. Gaming groups are not static objects, and depend so much on individual personalities, extant conflict resolution skills, and past history (sometimes it feels like one of my group’s most important rules documents is our quote log).

Of course this also makes the critical consideration of games more difficult. On one hand, games may just be collections of mechanics that, in part or in whole, get added to the collective library of play of a gaming group. On the other, games may be art, and the experience of play is not something to be discerned as good or bad. In either case, how the hell do you write a review? It’s something I am continuing to consider. I’m also considering if, given the importance of group dynamics, if there is something to critically approach about how groups play together. My group isn’t perfect, and I’m also neither a sociologist nor a psychologist. Still, it seems like there’s something there that can be discussed. I’m going to continue thinking and writing on the topic, and continue to read what other thinkers in the space have written. If you haven’t already, go check out Taskerland.

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