A roleplaying game is an event where players take on agreed-upon roles within an agreed-upon premise to accomplish an agreed-upon objective. Those roles make it roleplaying (somewhat tautological, I know), and both the objective and the premise make it a game. That objective and that premise are defined in combination by the players of the game and the ruleset they have chosen, and that objective and that premise are more foundational to assessing a roleplaying game than either the players or the ruleset.
If we zoom all the way out, pull an RPG out of standards or assumptions that were built by culture or history or design preference, this is what we’re left with. Players play roles to make it roleplaying, and to make it a game they accomplish some sort of objective whose parameters are defined by the premise of the game. It’s not the most exciting description, but it can arguably encompass everything currently called an RPG these days, and some things which are not (the wonderfully cliche “Madden is a roleplaying game where you play the role of a football coach”). It also presents a framework which better defines what really ‘matters’ when it comes to your game. Even when Ron Edwards wrote System Does Matter way back when, the preamble of the essay was a concession that, as we’ve heard a million times before, a good GM can usually manage the friction that exists between personal playstyles, game mechanics, and the game’s premise. It’s that last one that really does the heavy lifting, though. A game with a strong, self-evident premise will be easier to run, more fun to play, and have more impact on the players when it’s done. Once you define what a game’s premise is, it becomes fairly clear that a strong premise makes for a strong game. That said, the implicit expectation of where a game’s premise comes from has changed wildly over the years, perhaps explaining why the whole system does/does not matter divide causes so much heartburn.
Games with strong premises
A game with a strong premise broadcasts to its players exactly what they are expected to do, both mechanically and diegetically. What exactly is doing the broadcasting can vary. Consider the campaign Seamus ran for our shared group in Star Trek Adventures. Star Trek Adventures as a set of mechanics is…fine. I’ve heard the second edition is better, and I don’t have any problem imagining there was plenty to fix. However. Most of our group had grown up on Star Trek, and “you are a Star Trek bridge crew” is, assuming everyone’s at least within the same generation of series (our group is the TNG/DS9/Voyager generation), an incredibly strong premise. Everyone who’s seen the series can immediately understand the assignment, from what sort of crewmembers they can create to what sort of missions we’ll be sent on to who else is expected to be on the ship. All the rulebook has to do to be excellent is simply not mess up the existing expectations that the players have; it doesn’t need to provide that much structure and it definitely doesn’t need to provide excessive setting material. I’ve already read the Star Trek Encyclopedia for fun, and that’s way longer than any of the sourcebooks.
The important thing here is that our game of Star Trek Adventures had a strong premise. You could argue that Star Trek Adventures as a game system also helps provide a strong premise, but I don’t think our positive results make that argument defensible. What would be more useful in making that argument would be to hand the rulebook to someone who had never seen Star Trek, and see if the game would be able to broadcast its intent without that context. Even if it failed, though, one could argue who the audience for a licensed Star Trek game truly is, and therefore what the actual objectives of the game system should be. The issue with that argument is that you don’t need to stick to licensed settings to see game systems which are highly dependent on outside knowledge to reinforce their premises.
When I discuss Dungeons and Dragons in terms of its strength of premise, it’s not as simple as saying that players will bring in their own knowledge from fantasy. In the last fifty years, Dungeons and Dragons has utterly transformed pop fantasy; as a fantasy property it started in roleplaying games but has since metastasized and spread throughout the entire fictional body. The influence of D&D on books, movies, and video games is so profound that many of both the setting and mechanical assumptions within the game are easily parsed and taken for granted even by people who have never played before. This, in essence, explains the development of D&D 5e; the popularity and conception of the game was so profound that the system would be more popular if it simply did not interfere with the preconceived premises of D&D as they already existed. It is arguably why 5e is so non-specific, and why D&D will likely never be specific or have a specific gameplay premise in the way, say, 4e did ever again.
This also means that most other games have to do significantly more than D&D to illustrate their premise to their audience. Some succeed, like Mork Borg and Mothership. Others, arguably many others, fail.
Games with weak premises
As a reviewer I often find myself asking “why does this rulebook exist?” The answer to that question has gotten narrower and narrower over the years, as the range of known quantities in the RPG sphere has expanded and improved in quality. Arguably, the rulesets and game materials which fail to answer this question (but still succeed in the hobby space) are those which fully commit to piggybacking off of an existing game or property. In the case of ‘existing game’ it’s almost always D&D; while there’s a market for additional material (and to be clear that’s not what I’m talking about), “like D&D but” is rarely a winning premise. At the very least, marketing a new ruleset based on compatibility with an old one immediately demands a comparison, and as much as I don’t particularly like Wizards of the Coast the comparison isn’t flattering to most of the derivatives.
There is also the Star Trek Adventures approach, using a license to wrap your mechanics around a built-in premise in the hope that you’ll provide something gamers want. Sometimes, this works; there’s the aforementioned Star Trek Adventures, FFG’s very successful Star Wars games, and a whole host of other licensed games that are arguably quite good. I think the approach of ‘adopting the premise’ is perhaps less consistent, though. For Star Trek Adventures, the bridge crew is centered and that’s a beautiful alignment of premise and game logistics. For other licenses…it’s tricky. There are other licensed properties that align nicely to a party of 3-5 competent heroes that share screentime, but there are many, many properties which do not work with this, or even fight it. That doesn’t necessarily mean the ruleset won’t work…it just means you need to tweak the premise. There are several successful Doctor Who RPGs, and if you know the show this should initially produce at least a little skepticism. Doctor Who is about the Doctor, and though you could kind of form a party around them (especially in more recent seasons), the imbalance seems nearly antithetical to how you run a typical game. That is not to say the Doctor Who RPG is bad, only to highlight that it required real work to build a premise that was different from the show and still worked. I still say the Modiphius Fallout RPG fails in part because it merely presented a bunch of material from Fallout 4 in tabletop form, paying no attention to the fact that the game centers around a single person and assuming that the group who picked it up would fill in the blanks. And while I can point to how that failure of establishing a premise led to failures in execution of the game, the fact is that many GMs and other buyers of these rulesets are both willing and fully able to ignore this issue.
Meta-premises marketed towards GMs
Over the history of the tabletop RPG, expectations of premise within a ruleset or other product have ebbed and flowed. At the beginning, expectations were more like wargames; rulesets were like miniatures and dice in that they enabled one to run a game, not necessarily presented a singular game experience. As time has gone on, more of the market has taken cues from board games, where the game as a product included the premise and was expected to provide a singular experience, with expansion coming later from either supplemental material or the community. This shift, I’d argue, is less about a strong premise being necessary for a good game, and more about who the ruleset’s premise is actually being marketed toward. Enter the meta-premise.
The simplest example of a game with a strong meta-premise is GURPS. While GURPS mathematically has a mechanical sweet spot, it succeeds at being generic enough that there is absolutely no definitive premise to what sort of game you’d play. When GURPS is described as being “front-loaded”, that in large part is referring to the fact that a GURPS GM must write their game premise by themselves and then either write all the mechanical guard rails themselves or leave it to the players to puzzle out creating characters that align with the GM’s premise. GURPS has a ‘meta-premise’, though, a premise marketed towards the GM, of being a flexible, extensible, and intuitive game creation tool. ‘Intuitive’ is key because it’s the reason GURPS won out over the Hero System: Long lists of traits and options are easier to use and more intuitive than math.
Although a generic system is a straightforward example, the ‘meta-premise’ is a fixture in how games are marketed, especially those trying to find share in a crowded market. As noted above D&D’s long history and cultural influence give it a particularly strong underlying premise, but other games aiming to be ‘a game like D&D’ are not necessarily differentiating themselves simply with that. However, when you consider how large the D&D market is, and how relatively narrow the D&D play experience is in contrast, there’s obviously room to present a meta-premise along the lines of ‘this game fixes x about D&D’. Daggerheart presented a more narrative meta-premise, Draw Steel presented a more 4e-like meta-premise with its grid combat, and Tales of the Valiant didn’t present a coherent meta-premise which is why it has not sold as well as the other two. The important thing about a meta-premise is it presents a framing about how you can build and run your game as opposed to presenting a framing about what your game will be.
While a game with a strong premise will usually work better, it’s not clear to me that either a strong premise from the ruleset or a strong premise from the GM or adventure writer is better. Of course, that’s why the narrative/indie and OSR camps ostensibly disagree with each other despite agreeing on so many things once you put the vocabulary aside. That said, I do tend to think that rulesets with strong, singular premises will drive game design forward moreso than old-style expansive rulesets. The reason, though, is not quality so much as differentiation of preconceptions.
We must accept that many elements of our games are implied by our previous experiences. Even when you look at rulesets that pushed the hobby forward, the innovations contained within are often bounded and grounded by familiarity, calls back to D&D, Traveller, and the other old guard of RPG mechanics which allow players to pick up the system and understand what it’s trying to do. The only way to both break out of “old habits” of RPG design assumptions and to present something new and different is to present rules with a strong premise which clearly communicate what players are going to be doing when playing the game. The fact that there is discourse around designers writing a “What is an RPG?” section at the front of their books is simply because we assume that you cannot teach someone to play your game without calling back to the hobby at large and other games which came before you. Board games do not have “What is a board game?” sections in their rules, and I don’t think at this point in the hobby’s evolution it’s too radical to point out that including such a thing is only going to be deference to design conservatism, not an actually helpful bit of writing.
All RPG rulesets strike a balance between establishing their own strong premise, giving a GM or facilitator room to narrow the premise on their own, and using outside assumptions to guide what players should do. It’s this third one designers should be careful of, especially if falling back on old conventions isn’t going to help focus or expand their game. There’s nothing wrong with, say, using ‘WASD’ as your first-person video game’s default control scheme; similarly there’s nothing wrong with assuming you’re going to build characters using attributes like Strength or Intelligence. But in both cases there’s a reason that’s how it was done before, and I’d venture the WASD example does a better job at improving those first-person video games than the attributes do for most TTRPGs. As much as I don’t think a strong premise implies more or different mechanics, it does mean that you cast a critical eye towards what all the rules, procedures, and structures of your new game actually do, and how many you’re including for a reason as opposed to simply because it’s a well-trod path or it’s familiar. Premise matters, because having a strong premise be central to the design of your game makes it easier to make both something new and exciting as well as exactly the game that you want to play.
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