The Promised Land
More thoughts on Promise in TTRPGs
My game Community Radio is going to launch on Feb 7 on Kickstarter! Want to play a light one-shot game inspired by media like Welcome to Nightvale, Northern Exposure and Pontypool? Then you want to play Community Radio.
Sign up to be notified when our Kickstarter launches!
I’ve had some really great discussions and chats with people about Promise, Consistency and Economy in TTRPGs. By my standards this registers as unmitigated success, because the only reason the terms exist is to foster great discussions with others about this hobby that we all love. Feel free to ask questions and give feedback!
As, err, promised…I’m going to go into each of the terms of Promise, Consistency and Economy in more detail in the next few posts. I’ll clarify points that these discussions have shown me I was initially unclear, and discuss what I think makes for best practices. Today I provide some further clarifications and thoughts on Promise.
To restate what I am talking about when I discuss Promise:
Promise is the contract between the game and its audience about what experiences it aims to help players create.
Promise should evoke
You can see a game’s Promise as a binding contract. That is not wrong but that is not all the game’s Promise does. A Promise must inspire and evoke to be truly successful. A strong setting or unique player roles often make up for deficiencies in a game’s Consistency or Economy, but a game without some evocative element rarely overcomes that, even with solid design.
Promise isn’t defined through just play
Evaluating a game's success involves examining how well it keeps its Promise. Does it provide the mechanics and narrative support to tell the promised stories? Players and GMs often compensate for a game's shortcomings. They fill in holes or ignore other mechanical shortcomings using their own play patterns and house rules. I think this is great and to be encouraged, but it shows that the best way to talk about a game’s process is through its text and the genre norms it partakes of and not through individual examples of play.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t also play TTRPGs and experience them (I don’t want to live in that world!); ideally we use the text to understand what we are being promised and confirm that through play experience.
Promise isn’t premise
Fun fact: my first drafts of the lexicon used Premise instead of Promise. It makes sense initially, but I found it focused almost solely on designer intent. It ignores the context in which the TTRPG was produced, which plays just as large a part in what we expect and understand from a game as what the designer intends.
I feel that Promise speaks to that larger world, encapsulating both premise and context. A designer is not beholden to all of the genre expectations and norms adjacent to their setting, but aligning expectations with players means that a designer is required to be clear on where their game might differ from what is expected. This can be done without comparative language (“My game is not like other games where you play adventurers in a dungeon”) by being clear and upfront about what your game is about, declaring the tropes your game is subverting up front (“In this game you play the monsters inhabiting a dungeon”).
Breaking Promises
“If we only judge a TTRPG by the promises it makes, don’t all games keep their promise?”
This question has been posed to me several times. It’s a good question! I find that it’s quite common for games to fail to meet the Consistency and Economy that they promised.
An example I will use (with an extreme amount of love; I cherish this game) is the original Vampire: the Masquerade. It promised amazing character drama and storytelling, but mechanically and structurally had little support for it. You could certainly have the games that it promised (I have), but it depended a lot on how the specific group wanted to structure the game (aka low Consistency). For a story-based game, the Economy was poor; combat in particular was a long slog of duelling dice pools and multiple stages. I feel that the game’s mechanics didn’t live up to the Promise.
At the same time, the Promise was so evocative from a setting and player role (“We get to play modern day vampires!”) and from a conceptual level (I’m hard-pressed to think of any game that even pretended to care about a character’s internal state at that time) that Vampire changed TTRPGs when it was released, making room for games that could eventually meet those promises.
I could talk about this specific game for a long time (feel free to ping me for a longer discussion), but my point is this: a TTRPG can definitely break its Promise in several ways and still be impactful and enjoyable.