System as theory addendum - prediction

I got serious pushback on the system as theory post, the thrust of which was that I failed to establish that tabletop role-playing games systems are like scientific theories, because I didn't show how they provide predictions. 

My immediate response was very defensive: that I should probably go and revise the post significantly if it could so easily be misconstrued to mean that I'm talking about scientific theories in the sense of being able to perform exact predictions to begin with. I only brought up physics to expound on my academically-fueled view of theory, in terms of utility rather than truth, and then to apply it to theory in media studies, which I saw mostly as a tool for comparisons. I didn't use the term "prediction" at all.

But with more thought came a realization that maybe it is fruitful to think of prediction in systems as theories of play. If my system is Dungeons & Dragons, then I can predict that the games that I play will involve hit points, experience points, weapons, magic, monsters, dungeons, and all of those artifacts that comprise the interactable building blocks of the game, and that I as player and/or dungeon master will use them or be used by them in certain ways. And if it is, indeed, a session of D&D, these predictions will likely come to pass, and I will be able to make some determinations as to the quality of the participants and the way the whole thing went.

If, on the other hand, I take these D&D-laden predictions to a game of Blades in the Dark, they will run counter to what I actually experience. The classes - sorry, playbooks - won't really correspond to anything I'm familiar with, nor will the ability scores and skills - sorry, Action Ratings. What's this Harm? Is that like HP? But that should increase with level! Where are levels, and what are these separate experience tracks? Are you really only getting a handful of points each session? Why do I have contacts on my sheet? Wait, we're rolling to figure out how an adventure starts? I want to plan! Flashbacks? You mean, whenever I run into a situation I don't like I just get to make things up so it's actually fine? Where are the combat rounds? Why is the DM - sorry, GM - not rolling attacks for the enemies? Why is the GM constantly asking me questions about the world that they're supposed to answer if they know what they're doing? This is not in the ballpark of what I was expecting, of what my theory of play predicts that a session will look like.

This experience, and the way it diverges from my predictions of how a game would play, could then lead me in several directions. The simplest reaction would be to withdraw to my existing theory, chalking it up to a bad group, or bad DM, or a bad set of circumstances for this particular session. On the other hand, it might push me to revise my theory, expanding it to include forms of play like D&D and Blades as special cases.

But if we take the prediction aspect seriously, it might not even come to that. Because if somebody tells me a little bit about how a Blades session goes, it's going to be so different from anything I would expect from a successful D&D session that I might just not ever try it at all. And I think that's at the heart of why the rising tide of D&D 5th Edition is not lifting all TTRPG boats.

In my case, I was lucky: my first exposure to TTRPGs was in the 1990s, when the local gaming magazine presented D&D (then Advanced D&D 2nd Edition, for the most part) as just one of many existing TTRPGs, ranging from Rolemaster to Shadowrun. Even though most of my experiences were with AD&D 2E, my theory of play didn't hold it as the end-all and be-all of that thing we did.

Unfortunately, as D&D 5E has been presented and marketed, at least in the anglophone West, it's very easy for newcomers to the hobby to not really be exposed to other systems as real alternatives in a wider context of play. This is made worse by the Open Gaming License, which allows a certain variety of other games which nevertheless point back to D&D as their baseline, the original game with the highest production values. I think that's a real barrier to a lot of alternative games, large and small. It's also cheating the people playing D&D 5E, especially DMs, out of a wider variety of experiences, and maybe "system as theory" helps explain why they don't see it that way. I do think there's more to it than that in the specifics of the system's mechanics and (lack of) DM support, but that's for a future post.

System as theory

My academic background is in physics, so I have certain preconceptions about the term "theory". However, according to a couple of years of non-academic reading and watching of videos about media studies and critical theory, at least one form of theory in media is as a framework for comparison. The idea is that any individual artistic creation is unique, and no two can be compared on their own terms. Some form of abstraction or simplification needs to be performed in order to compare them, highlighting some aspects while downplaying others. On some level this is close to the use of theories and models in experimental physics, if you substitute "experiment" for "artistic creation". A theory or model will allow you to interpret consistencies and inconsistencies between different runs of the same experiment, or several variations of an experiment.

Classical mechanics as a theory encourages you to build models relating to masses moving in Euclidean space and interacting through forces. You can then perform experiments to explore, for example, the relation between the period and length of a pendulum, or the gravitational acceleration of differently-massed objects in a vacuum. Sometimes you conduct series of experiments that classical mechanics can't make sense of, where comparisons both with other experiments and with subsequent runs of the same experiment no longer add up, and you might be pushed to replace the theory entirely. You then think of the old theory as a more limited special case of the new one, or possibly just a limited theory, useful for a smaller set of cases. When you study modern physics you will be confronted with several seminal experiments which eventually forced significant paradigm shifts - the now somewhat out-of-date term for changing to an entirely new theory. Recent reflections on the development of theories suggest that the change was usually more gradual and piecemeal, with old concepts repurposed for new agendas.

An attitude I take from my academic background about theories is that they're not so much true or false, but rather more or less useful, given a certain situation. Classical mechanics is still very useful in a wide variety of fields, such as civil and mechanical engineering. Highly advanced quantum theories of particle interactions which ignore gravity - otherwise a very dominant force, requiring intense theoretical work in its own right - are cutting edge when it comes to understanding the limits of behavior in the highest-energy accelerators. Arguing "you shouldn't use classical mechanics because it's wrong" isn't going to get you far, even with broader theories available.

On to the topic of this post: system as theory. I suggest that the singular unit for a theory of role-playing games isn't a set of books from a certain edition of the product as sold, or a specific list of house-rules built upon such a set. The singular unit is the specific role-playing campaign, or session of play, or possibly even the individual act of play. Dungeons & Dragons is a theory of play that connects these activities, and compares and contrasts them. Call of Cthulhu is another. GNS is another, broader one. "Tabletop role-playing game" is yet another, possibly overly-broad one.

People will play D&D at different tables and make statements such as "that other dungeon master didn't know how to make the battles work, they need to get better at calculating challenge ratings and picking monster rosters for them", or "this other DM has this really interesting house-rule that makes exhaustion levels finally useful". They will sit at the same table and say "this session leaned more on combat, while last session was more about exploration. I miss social role-play!" All statements that suggest a theory of play that is highly informed by the 5th edition of D&D.

Players who have been playing the game in previous iterations might say similar statements, but also "this DM is too lenient. I miss when D&D was deadlier" or "all these characters having darkvision really ruins the dungeon crawl for me". Their theory is a wider D&D, of which play informed by the 5E books and play culture is a subset. People who have played a variety of games might say about a session of D&D "you know, this one looks like it might have worked better in RuneQuest" or "the DM is using something that reminds me of clocks from Blades in the Dark, but it's not having the same effect, because they keep them secret and aren't consistent with them." D&D is then a model of a subset of play, rather than the entirety of the theory.

Returning to the analogy with scientific theories, having people "try another game" is not just a matter of pushing against a resistance to learning new sets of rules, buying different books, or getting familiar with new settings. Instead, it requires a paradigm shift in their theory of play. They need to start placing play, their play, the games they have played and might play in future, in a broader context. And that's a very large hurdle, both for people not as invested in the whole thing, who might not want to go through the difficult mental transition, as well as for those highly invested in it, who have dedicated so much of their mental effort to improving and creating content that reflects their existing theoretical framework, playing D&D 5E well.

I do think, however, that it's an important hurdle for people to overcome. Because nobody owns the general theory of that thing we do as a tabletop role-playing game, or many of the more specific theories we could come up with. But an individual company owns D&D. And if your theory of play is D&D, everything that you do in this framework is always going to feed back into it. And you will always have that company and its commercial interests looming large in your thinking about play, and in the thinking other people bring to the table when they play with you.