Constructive alienation in RPGs

Note: This is a translation and revision of a comment I made on an Israeli RPG theory group, asking about what rolling dice was for.

When discussing the character sheet game, I said that my personal bias was against elaborate character sheets and mechanics, in favor of exploring the imaginary world. On the other hand, when sketching out systems for watercrawling, I said that I do seek frameworks that capture parts of the world mechanically, even allowing for some procedural content generation. So which is it? Do or don't I like mechanics? Am I looking for more or fewer rules?

What I want is for mechanics and rules to do certain things for me. As a player, I want to immerse myself in the imaginary world, and have what mechanics I do use answer questions that I can't just think my way around, like whether my character can climb that wall or pilot this spaceship, or whether my character was able to keep its cover under the scrutiny of a counter-intelligence agent. As a gamemaster, I want the system to adjudicate situations fairly, and to allow me to fairly present parts of the world to the players.

By "fairness" I mean filtering some of the bias from my decision-making. If I don't have mechanics or rules to fall back on, all I have for rulings is what makes sense to me in the moment. Do I really, in the moment, feel like adding another run-in with the law, or do I just want the party to make it to the safehouse, for the next step in the adventure, which I just know will be really cool? Do I think this non-player character that the party is interrogating is going to budge under threat of death, or is she all in with the criminal underground? What gender is the captain of the freighter the party is meeting?

If I use an encounter table, then yes, maybe sometimes the party runs into more trouble than it had been expecting. If I allow the interrogating player to convert the death threat into a roll against the NPC's mental fortitude, then maybe this lets them drive a wedge into the criminal underground when my judgment said that it was premature. If I roll the gender of the captain on a table, then maybe it leads to romantic opportunities I wasn't considering, and that in the moment aren't all that important to me. But so what? This system allows the players to surprise me, and rewards all of us for improvising with a new situation that even I, the GM, did not have full control over in the moment. It is hubris of me to think that the judgment I have at the table, directly adjudicating decisions as they come up, is better than combining the will of the players with the sometimes unpredictable results of dice rolls engaging with a system representing the richer world that I have spent time synthesizing from my ideas and past player actions.

Aside from non-specific biases about how it would be interesting for me personally for any individual session to continue, some of my biases could have to do with what I feel about the different players. While they may be implicit, the players will pick up on them with time, and may not feel comfortable confronting me about them. This can have dire long-term consequences.

The fact that I have relinquished some control over the world to a known random distribution due to player action, inasmuch as it allows me to examine some of my biases about the world, as well as to avoid implicit bias between the players leaking into decisions about the world, leads to more trust from the players, which, as I argued in my discussion of the Monty Hall problem, is vital for allowing them to feel confident in engaging rationally with the imaginary challenges I am putting in front of them.

This is what I call constructive alienation: having done the work to build systems for generating content for the world, and for adjudicating some of the actions performed upon it, I put it at a remove, and we transition from a state of "the players don't know what will happen next because they can't read my mind and my biases" to "the players don't know what will happen next in a context that they have gotten some information about, because I don't know either - it depends on a dice roll that hasn't been made yet". It's a step I take towards the players in order to create a shared experience of a world I created with them.

There is still a lot of in-the-moment improvisation involved on my end, of course. The system can't, and shouldn't, capture all that happens - a lot of the fun in tabletop RPGs is in the open-endness. But falling back to system rather than to arbitrary decision makes for a more textured and collaborative imaginary world, and for deeper experiences therein.